I’m an issue voter. I vote for the candidates and parties that I feel will promote the policies I favor. I don’t care about the race, religion, or social group of candidates; that is, the identity.
But based on news coverage and polling, it appears many people do vote based on identity. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Or, should voters use a balance of identity and issues when deciding? Which do you use?
I’d have to say that while I’d like to think that I’m primarily an issue voter, identity politics enters still plays a factor in my consideration. I think this is for three reasons, two legitimate, and the last less so:
First, I think it would be naive to base my decision only on the basis of the candidates’ stated positions. Politics plays a role in the formulation of those statements, and identity issues provide clues as to how important each is, and how likely they are to be honored. For instance, if two candidates both espoused the same pro-gay-marriage policy, I would suspect that the openly gay candidate would be more likely to honor and to emphasize that policy than his prominently religious, church-going opponent, come the day after the election. If this were an important issue to me, I’d be more likely to vote for the first candidate.
Second, during the course of a term, new issues are going to arise. Based on general agreement regarding other issues, but also to some degree on a sense of how likely we are to “think alike,” I’m going to want to try to predict which candidate is going to agree with me in the future on these unanticipated issues. In other words, I’m going to be more likely to vote for someone I identify with, but at the same time, I’m going to be more likely to identify with someone with whom I already agree on a lot of things, so there’s a real interplay of issue/identity going on there.
Finally, I confess to having been lazy from time to time. I have voted for the Democrat in local elections where I was largely unaware of specific issues, based only on party identity. That’s kind of the degenerate case of what the previous paragraph describes.