@blatham,
blatham wrote:
But on the other hand, what can appear initially as randomness appears so because causal factors are hidden from view
Or not so hidden - I suggested a number of additional or alternative causal factors to the ones you are mentioning again, in the very post you're responding to.
Not that I don't believe the failure to elect America's first woman president caused significant disappointment -- that's obviously true, though I'm not sure many of those feeling it would have voted for John McCain as response (not that this was your argument either, I don't think).
Not that I don't think campaign operatives and political elites with a strategic agenda were busily unfolding their the machinations, and those had a real impact. I'm sure they did.
I'm not sure I would accord them as dominant a determining influence as you do, however. For one, because I imagine that the additional explanations I suggested played their own roles. Both the ways in which broader demographic/regional/cultural political trends (admittedly themselves helped along by active, long-term political strategies, though ones that go well beyond the kind of ratfucking you focused on this time) intersected with the way the 2008 campaign was fought by its contenders (not least through its racial component); and the institutional features of the campaign season (eg closed primaries locking "red" Dems into the "wrong" primary).
But also, and this was only my second point, because I do believe that we, who follow politics closely, tend to over-determine causes and effects, and in unwarranted self-confidence underestimate the contradictory and random elements of average voters' outlooks, motivations and decisions. Those often tend to cancel each other out, so when you focus only on the net result they're easy to ignore, but there's a lot of churn underneath that shows up when a number like this 12% emerges. More particularly, I feel that those who are focused overly on -- to use some loaded shorthand -- Beltway and NYC punditry tend to over-estimate the role of top-down politicking and machinations, vs the underlying tectonics of cultural undercurrents.