In all the polls out since the presidential race began, John McCain gets more of the over 65 vote than Barack Obama and Obama gets a much larger share of the under 35 vote.
We can speculate all we want about why that is. Many pundits simply chalk it up to the age of the candidates. McCain is older and gets support from his contemporaries. Obama is younger and so picks up the youth vote. Or perhaps older voters are more conservative and feel McCain is the safe pick, while younger voters prefer change and are more willing to take a chance.
But we really don't know. It could be also that older voters tend to be more racist or simply less comfortable with diversity, while younger voters have grown up in an entirely different world from that of their grandparents, one more diverse in terms of race, nationality, gender and sexual orientation.
Or it could be something completely different. One relevent statistic is that McCain is heavily favored by non-college educated seniors and Obama picks up the support of those seniors who have gone to college. (Since most seniors are not college-educated, that favors McCain.) Education, and exposure to diversity in people as well as ideas seems to make a difference.
But we are only guessing. I would like to know exactly why people vote the way they do and I'm sure the candidates would too. For example, I have never seen a poll, but would like to see one, in which people are asked for the reasons they support or oppose a candidate. I'm not sure how that would be done without leading questions, but I would like to see a reputable polling company try. I think what would come out would surprise us. I believe a lot of people vote for trivial reasons, or are influenced by false information.
My parents offer one example. They are both 82, and both ill. Neither is college educated. My father served in the army during World War II, when the military was not integrated. He tells me his father, who lived all his life in Ohio, "hated blacks." My mother says her mother, a saintly woman by any measure, was afraid of blacks.
They always vote by absentee ballot. My mother still thinks clearly, but she tends to believe certain things she sees on the news or things she has heard some of her contemporaries say. She doesn't spend any time examing whether what she heard was true or false. For instance, she expressed concern that if Barack Obama is elected he might have an administration full of African Americans and exclude whites. She also thinks Russia is totally to blame for starting the recent problems in Georgia, because that is how it is characterized by the media and by McCain.
My father wants to vote for McCain because he thinks he will "win the war" and Barack won't. (He pronounces Barack "bearik.") Up until a few months ago, when I showed him a map of the Middle East, he supported the Iraq War because he thought Iraq and Afghanistan shared a border and we had to go into Iraq to stop the flow of terrorists from Afghanistan into Iraq. Now he thinks the war with Iraq was wrong, but he says we still have to "win" it. He has real cognitive deterioration and probably shouldn't be allowed to vote, but there is no law that I know of to stop him.
The more I think about it, the more I believe the biggest divide in this country, in terms of political knowledge and sophistication, as well as voting patterns, is between those who are college educated and those who aren't - with one caveat - those who majored in the liberal arts tend to be more liberal (and dare I say open minded) than those who majored in business. A liberal arts education makes you more open to new ideas, less fearful of challenging the status quo, more willing to adopt change. With the classes you take for a liberal arts major, you simply are exposed to more. Whether that makes college educated voters right or wrong is not for me to decide - conservatives, for instance, say change is bad and sticking with the past is good, while liberals are much more open to embracing that which is new, and much less fearful of diversity.
Unless a polling company conducts the kind of study I suggest, however, we will never know how much education vs. other factors decide the outcome of this race. I do believe, though, that as more and more Americans become comfortable with diversity, through education, we will become a more progressive and less conservative country.
