We all need grace sometimes

We have all had times in our lives where things got away from us and we found ourselves unprepared for something. That happened to me this week. It got to be the absolute last minute and I was reminded that I wrote the wrong day on my calendar and forgot to write my column. That was pretty embarrassing and I will admit that, like many of you all in this situation, I was scrambling and in need for some grace. It then occurred to me that this was a situation that was not uncommon for many voters to find themselves in. What do I mean by that? Well let’s talk about it.

One of the foundational pieces of political science literature is a book called “The American Voter”. Prior to that book most scholars assumed that voters in a democracy behaved in an idealistic manner. They looked at the policy statements by the candidates, evaluated them based on their own preferences, and then they selected their preferred candidate. “The American Voter” which was based on a study of hundreds of voters in the 1952 and 1956 elections found that most people did no such thing. They mostly based their votes on partisan identity. The troubling thing for the researchers was that this partisan identity was very ill-defined.

People were Republicans and Democrats not because they believed in those platforms but because they inherited their partisan identity from their parents or other authority figures. That may have been 70 years ago but a lot of those trends are still true today. A lot of voters, in both political parties, struggle with explaining why they are a member of a particular political party. In essence when election time comes around, a lot of voters are unprepared.

It is easy to become cynical about this fact but I would encourage you to not do that. While I would love for everyone to be totally prepared on Election Day there is an argument that the average voter is more prepared than you would think. The economist Anthony Downs wrote that voters did not need much information to make an informed voting decision. According to Downs, all you need to know is what your opinion is on your most important issue.

An example might be abortion. If you base your vote on that issue then making an informed vote is simple. If you know where you feel on abortion and where the two main parties stand on an issue then you are going to vote correctly 90 percent of the time. So if you find yourself in that boat don’t let anyone make you feel bad about that. Anthony Downs had a PhD and he said you were behaving intelligently.

It is often easier to see the mote in someone else’s eye and disregard the log in our own. If we are honest with ourselves, we have all voted in races where we didn’t know much going in. My daughter went with me to vote on Election Day 2020 and she leaned over at one point and asked, “Dad. Who are these judges?” I told her I had no idea. Her response was, “Don’t you study this?!?”

Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican candidate for president, has advocated that voters under 25 should be forced to pass some kind of test in order to be able to vote. That may sound tempting but tears of political knowledge find that political ignorance is across the board regardless of age group.

Whose fault is this unpreparedness? Well… everyone’s I guess. Oklahoma educational policy is woefully inadequate on these fronts. If a student concurrently enrolls in a college American Government class while in high school, they can end up with a high school diploma AND a bachelor’s degree with only a single semester of government coursework.

Media research has found that most news coverage during a campaign focuses on horse race coverage, who is winning as opposed to what candidates stand for, which leaves voters unprepared on Election Day. We also tend to demonize the other side, which makes education on politics feel less important to most people. If the opposition is out to destroy America, then you don’t need to learn anything more than to just vote against that. There is some amount of personal responsibility to participate though. I know a lot about World War I because I sought information out on that topic. Not a lot of voters are interested in preparing themselves either.

We often feel unprepared. Sometimes things slip through the cracks and we mess up. Sometimes even the most educated amongst us write the wrong day on the calendar. Try not to beat yourself up too badly, and remember that it happens to all of us. Do remember that feeling though and remember to have grace for your neighbors too. It is tough out there, guys. If we are well-meaning and just forget sometimes, then the same might be true of people who disagree with us as well.

David Searcy holds a master’s degree from Oklahoma State University and a PhD in political science from Southern Illinois University.