Voters care about issues, even lobstermen

Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean nobody does

Filing stories from Maine in late August is one of the greatest traditions in journalism, but I didn’t think I had much to say about after spending the last two weeks there.

Then I read the New York Times op-ed “What the Lobstermen of Maine Tell Us About the Election,” which focuses on (alleged) conversations with fishers in the exact coastal communities I was just in.

The weird thing about the piece is that it is extremely focused on things that New York Times opinion section readers are interested in — climate change, vibes, the idea that people vote badly due to bad information — while completely ignoring specific issues related to the Maine lobster industry. The most glaring omission, to me, is the longstanding dispute between lobstermen (and Maine elected officials) and the Biden administration over lobster regulations. But when I brought this up on Twitter, another DC-based journalist, Jael Holzman, pointed out the absence of any discussion of offshore wind, and Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News mentioned another issue.

The whole piece exemplifies just how far the conventional wisdom has swung against the idea that concrete policy issues are important in driving voting behavior.

The truth, as summarized by Alexander Kustov and James Dennison, is that “while most people don’t obsess over politics, many still care deeply about specific issues” and “when individuals consider a political issue ‘personally important,’ they engage with it more than other topics.” So rather than projecting mass media concerns about climate change onto a place like Maine’s second congressional district (a district Obama won twice and Trump also won twice), it’s worth considering that a lot of the people living there probably care a lot about small-time policy issues specifically relating to the fishing and lobster industries.

People care about things that impact them

It’s absolutely true that the average voter is not a policy wonk and that swing voters in particular tend to be less attentive to politics and less informed about specifics than the general public.