My Opinion Counts

I have been entered on a new sucker list -- the telephone pollster. The other day I answered the phone, and it was the Washington Post pollster people, wanting to talk to me. They swore that they weren't trying to sell me anything, and could they ask me a few questions? As it was a Sunday afternoon, I was in a funk, and figured my thoughts are worth those of 1,000 people, I said why not?

The problem is that the main topic of the poll was the Virginia gubernatorial elections. Now they asked me if I was a registered voter, and was I planning to vote in the election? I've had it nailed into my head since I was small that the one thing this country asks you to do in order to be a good citizen is to show up once a year and vote. (Okay, there's pay taxes, but even many of the very civic minded people I know aren't adverse to using a few loopholes on THAT). So I will do so in the fall.

However, Virginia is no California -- state elections are some of the most mind-numbingly painful and pointless elections out there. One candidate is worse than the rest, with the overriding theme being "we're conservative in the ungood, socially limiting way and we're just looking for more ways to take the upstate money and put it into more projects around the state capital that YOU will never visit". Occasionally the Democrats run a flaming liberal in the hopes that the People's Republics of Alexandria, Fairfax and Arlington can override the rest of the state and pull one out, but it never happens. So my philosophy on statewide elections is one to two weeks before election day, I do some reading on the candidates, read their websites, laugh a lot, and hold my nose and vote for the least ridiculous one.

However, as it is more than two weeks from the election, the amount I know about the candidates is....next to nothing. They both begin with the letter "K", have scary smiles, both promise to build more roads in order to deal with the nightmare transportation problems up here (although that is NOT my preferred solution to the problem -- the promised Metro extensions, anyone?) and spend most of their time insulting the other guy. And here's the WP asking me questions about all this stuff. So I became that person I make fun of the rest of the time where I ask "I can't BELIEVE they let these people vote!" So I answered their questions, making things up as I went along. After the local elections, they asked some questions that were designed to trip me up on the subject of illegal immigration as well as the standard "so how badly does the President suck?" question.

I answered them all, although I must have looked completely odd to them, because once they got to the demographic questions, it was clear that I didn't trend anything -- I wasn't consistent to my age, gender, income, location or education. My answers were all over the place. That's because they didn't really get to the heart of how I vote. Here's the big secret -- in a flamingly liberal locale, I vote Republican. In a scarily conservative bible-belty place, I vote Democrat. All of this is done in the hopes that we can get an honest-to-God moderate in office. I guess it really means that I vote for the underdog (but not the third party spoiler).

However, it's been fun reading the Post in the last few days -- they've been writing stories about what the polls are saying, and I'm pointing to it and saying "hey, that's me!" One interesting thing is that the polls clearly said that most Virginia voters, particularly Northern Virginia ones don't give a rat's patootie about the gubernatorial elections, have no clear picture of the candidates and aren't going to make up their minds until right before the election. So I guess I am normal voter after all. As for illegal immigration, it looked like most respondents fell for the slanted question and came out against "those people taking our jobs" (convince me that the illegals are taking the kinds of jobs that tax-paying Americans want and are willing to take and you're all willing to pay more for, then I'll join the chorus of "send them back", but until then, I can't get overly exercised about it). And they just released the "Bush sucks" poll results. Quelle surprise.

This evening, another pollster called, wanting to know how I get my news. I'm on the sucker list folks. Let's see who else calls.