The American Electorate Deserves an A+

The real story of the 2000 campaign and election will, in the end, be the resilience and patience of the American people. Voters had a hard time choosing in this election, and the results were so painfully close because people (collectively and individually) liked some qualities of both Al Gore and George W. Bush, and they disliked some characteristics of both men.

But where we might have had a constitutional crisis, we have instead a curious but patient public that apparently is not interested in a rush to judgment over a fair resolution. More than two-thirds of the people believe that the delays are a sign of strength, not weakness.

It seems like only yesterday that the press and the politicians went in one direction while the public chose another. Within a few hours of the first Monica Lewinsky scandal revelations, the public reached a verdict: They disapproved of the president’s conduct, but they did not believe his behavior warranted the punishment of impeachment.

A year later--after the release of the Starr report, after Clinton admitted his culpability, after he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives--public opinion was almost exactly where it had been a year earlier and not where the political and media elites thought it should or would be.

The assumption is that American public opinion is erratic, but in fact it is remarkably stable. Although not widely recognized in the land of conventional wisdom, eminent scholars such as Doris Graber, Marion Just, W. Russell Neuman and Sam Popkin have explained how ordinary citizens, in the press of their busy lives, learn just what they need to know about the world. A forthcoming study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press will show that the vast majority of the electorate said they got enough information from the presidential campaign to make an “informed choice.”

The news media did a terrible job of covering Campaign 2000, and their coverage of election night was a complete disgrace. But the media are saved, as they often are, by the public itself for two reasons: First, the media’s mistakes have less impact than they might because they have so little influence on public opinion. Second, the public is wonderfully resourceful and efficient about gathering what it needs, from the little useful information it is offered, to make its decisions.