I hate stories about blocs of voters. Whether it is the Catholic Vote or the Black Vote or the Evangelical Vote or the Whatever Vote, most political journalism that attempts to force a unifying frame on large numbers of disparate people is, to me at least, unsatisfying. My skepticism about such efforts begins with me. If a journalist were writing about the political inclinations of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant born in the South in the era I was born, that journalist would assign me to a Republican category. But I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I have voted for candidates of both parties at different times for different reasons. Sometimes I have punched the ballot (at home in Tennessee) or pulled the lever (here in New York) out of intellectual conviction, sometimes because I just felt a certain way about the candidate in question. I suspect that many of you will recognize yourself in that pattern-which is to say, you do not fit neatly into any pattern.
展开▼
