EDMUND BURKEAmong endless material about the election, a piece particularly worth reading is Michael Tomasky’s review of Linda Killian’s book The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents, published by St. Martin’s Press. Tomasky’s article, titled Swingtime for Obama, appears in the June 21 issue of The New York Review of Books. You can access NYRB’s website here, but as of now it doesn't have the June 21 issue up on its site.
Tomasky notes that although as many as a third of all voters in eight battleground states will be registered independents this year, most independents lean decisively to one party or the other. The true swing vote is composed of about twenty percent of nominal independents – six to seven percent of the electorate – who truly vacillate. It is this group that is potentially winnable by either Obama or Romney and likely to determine the outcome of the election.
Who are they? In the main, they are white. They are diverse in educational backgrounds: some have only a high school degree, many have some college but did not earn a college degree, and some have college and even graduate degrees. They tend to lean Democratic on social and environmental issues but Republican on fiscal issues. However, they are an economically vulnerable group (or perceive themselves that way), and economic issues are their highest priority. They believe in fiscal prudence and are concerned about the deficit. They are widely dispersed geographically, but Tomasky believes that the most decisive of these voters live in exurban areas – that is, beyond the suburbs – that surround large cities in battlegrounds states. Obama carried some of these key areas by two to three points in 2008.
Who will win over swing voters this year? Probably the candidate who succeeds in persuading them that he is the most capable on economic matters. If neither candidate appears to these voters to be clearly preferable on economic and fiscal issues, then the president has the advantage because swing voters lean his way on social and environmental issues.
[A note on style: The observant reader will note that I have stopped italicizing names of books, magazines, and court cases and putting quotes around the titles of articles. Although, as an academic, it's somewhat difficult for me to adopt this convention (followed by most newspapers), I've decided that it results in a cleaner, easier-to-read look on a screen. Of course, I'll use italics and quotation marks whenever necessary for clarity.]