John Sides, a political-science professor at George Washington University, thinks Mitt Romney’s embarrassing fund-raiser video is unlikely to affect the race much. …
But I’m not a political scientist, and I can’t help but think this is a somewhat bigger deal than Mr Sides thinks it is. Part of the reason I can’t help but think that is that I just spent a few weeks covering another election that also turned out to be a close contest between left and right: the Dutch elections last Wednesday. …
The key to this story is that it was basically a process of elite cathexis. The media and the relatively small group of high-interest voters who watched the first candidates’ debate decided that Mr Samsom was the clear winner. From there, Mr Samsom’s Cinderella-story rise became a story the media wanted to tell, as it sold newspapers and held eyeballs; more and more voters took the signal that Mr Samsom was a winner; and this created a bandwagon effect. …
By the time I interviewed voters on the morning of the elections, many of those who voted Labour could no more explain why they were choosing Labour over, say, the Socialists than they could explain why they were wearing Nike sneakers rather than Reeboks. Elite actors, high-information voters or “early adopters” if you prefer, had made decisions over the previous few weeks that filtered through to low-information voters as a sense of brand identity. [cont.]
Democracy in America, The Economist