“You have the vote of every thinking person,” a woman assured Adlai E. Stevenson during one of his presidential campaigns. To which Stevenson, so the story goes, replied skeptically: “That’s not enough madam — we need a majority!”
According to Philip E. Converse, Stevenson’s skepticism was well founded. In 1960, after Stevenson had been defeated twice by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Professor Converse, then a 32-year-old research scientist at the University of Michigan, concluded with three co-authors that most American voters were remarkably uninformed and nonideological, and that they based their preferences largely on party affiliation. CONT.
Sam Roberts, New York Times