A Half a Million Votes...

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Behold the map of pointless futility, where the
votes that matter amount to a rounding error

Neither campaign gives a rats ass what I think.  To Obama, California is solidly in the win column, and there's nothing to be won or lost here except money.  To Romney, California is a lost cause, and there's no value to be accrued investing resources here.  In fact, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of American voters are not "in play", and are therefore not considered targets for persuasion by the campaigns.  The campaigns are interested in the so-called swing voters, those who have not made up their minds yet, or those whose minds might be changed by the right message.  But even that is too broadly simplistic.  Swing voters in states like California, New York and Texas - states where the electoral outcome is a foregone conclusion - have no value to a campaign - it is only those who might be drawn across the center in key battleground states like Ohio, Florida and North Carolina that are the targets of the frenetic campaign messaging.  So really, when you think about it, two billion dollars will be spent in an attempt to win over less than a million American voters.  When you find yourself wondering how our magnificent democracy became so undemocratic, you might find that to be a very good place to start.

Certainly, efforts will be made and resources expended to mobilize the base to actually vote on November sixth, but these efforts are to a large extent self-canceling and perfunctory.  The real fight is for a few mostly white rural and suburban voters who hold the future of this country in their hands.  If they had the capacity to self-identify and organize, they would be the single most powerful organization in the world, able to affect the future of international economics, war and peace and human sustainability.  But when you think about it, these as yet undecided or persuadable voters can only be in this position due to a very limited grasp of the key issues coupled with a virtually non-existent ideology.  In other words, these are, for the most part, poorly educated, low information, politically apathetic people who will most often latch onto one issue, whether it's driven by their own bigotry or fear or a deep misunderstanding of economics or foreign relations and make an impulsive and arbitrary decision based on slogans and sound bites.

That's it.  The next four years.  War and peace.  Thousands, perhaps millions of lives.  The security and future of millions of families.  Even the very sustainability of life on earth, decided in a few minutes in a voting booth in Springboro or Lynn Haven or High Point by a house painter or mechanic or nurse who doesn't read.  You don't matter.  I don't matter.  A few hundred thousand people, maybe even less, are the ones that provide the signal on top of all our background noise.  This is ultimately why all the coverage doesn't matter, the debates don't matter, informed voters make no difference and electoral outcomes can be so horrifically counterintuitive.  In an unnecessarily clumsy and utterly bizarre electoral system where the votes of the people determine the outcome only indirectly at best, the vast majority of the voters have no say in the outcome, and are of literally no interest to the campaigns.  After 99% of the American votes cancel each other out, it comes down to Joe Soptic against "you didn't build that...".  And all the rest of us will have to live with the outcome.
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