Issues and Emotions

Have you ever voted with conviction for some candidates and voted for others with relative indifference?  Have you ever voted for someone you’ve never heard of to fill a down-ticket office?

Have you ever carefully filled out the sample ballot at home to take it with you on election day?  Have you ever stepped into the voting booth and just picked one?  Have you ever voted a straight party ticket?

Of those five questions, only one or two suggest that issues are what drives the voter rather than emotion.

Filling out a sample ballot in advance of an election allows the opportunity to research the issues and whose positions are objectively more in line with your own.  Voters who vote a straight-party ticket often do so because that party reflects their views on key issues that are important to them.

Party loyalty might be an emotional issue.  Do we align ourselves with the Party that takes a stand on issues that resonate with the things we feel strongly about?  Is handing out tire gauges an emotional appeal or an objective one?

Regardless of the strong feelings we each may have on either side of a given issue, there are some things that we all have in common. 

We all want to have a better country, even when we’re happy with the way things are.  We all want to feel safe inside our homes.  We all want to feel safe outside our homes.

We all want to be able to feed and provide for our families.  We all want to be healthy and able-bodied but, when we do get sick, we want our health care providers to be able to focus only on helping us get well.

We all want the next generation to be able to live at least as good a life as we do but, preferably, we’d like them to be able to live happier lives in a better world.

Campaign ads often frame issues in an emotional context.  Much research goes into creating those ads, so it’s probably safe to assume that emotion plays a large role in how voters make their choices in the voting booth.

While it is natural to make our choices out of emotion, the ability to reason is what has allowed humankind to triumph over the harsh and often ruthless forces of nature.  The ability to reason requires information and no one has ALL the information.  That is why it is important to not only listen, but to hear and consider points of view that differ from our own.

Is that even possible?  Hard as I try, I’m just not sure.