MISSOURI WATCH: WHAT KIND OF VOTER ARE YOU?

The safest bet any of us could make today is that at the end of the current two-month fall election campaign, a majority of the voters of Missouri and the United States will be no more aware of the issues or the candidates' views on how they can be resolved than we are at this very moment.

Before voters return an indictment of the Missouri candidates seeking more than 200 state jobs and 10 federal offices on November 3, a little soul-searching is in order. This year's candidates, like their predecessors in previous elections, are merely following a script that has been found to be the most effective in gaining whatever public attention and interest exist out there, which by the way, isn't much.

Candidates have already started their attack messages, not because they enjoy the venality of attacking a candidate who may live just down the street or because they receive exhilaration from grinding out brutish perfectly innocent, well-meaning opponent.

Let's face it: candidates employ distortions, half truths and bald lies because this is generally the only message some voters will respond to, either negatively or positively.

A candidate for the Missouri Senate whose campaign is based on governmental reorganization, educational consolidation, tax-code revisions and cost-effective program reviews isn't going to have his or her message received with any enthusiasm by an electorate that is anxious for what seems to be an endless campaign to come to a speedy conclusion. Voters seldom respond to unfamiliar issues, shunning them because they appear to be overly complicated or because they seem to have little impact on citizens' daily lives.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everybody talks about better government, but few are prepared or willing to understand the details that would make it possible.

Candidates have observed, or at least have been told by those who do observe, that John and Jane Q. Public will usually respond only to matters they feel impact their everyday lives, to issues that are not overly complex and can ideally be summarized with the use of a few catch phrases, and which offer benefits that will not, either short- or long-range, call for painful sacrifices, which is a synonym for new taxes.

Polls, pollsters, campaign advisers and historians have all correctly noted that issues and proposals provide an impalpable challenge to voters by requiring them to think, study and carefully consider their merits. Whether one believes this is an unfair indictment is less important than whether it is an accurate one, and I am truthful when I say I have never heard an experienced politician contradict the premise.

Voters-who-prefer-not-to-think can, with considerable if not total conviction, excuse their lack of attention to the challenges they face in just getting through the day or week, and those challenges, to be perfectly fair, are both considerable and often times difficult, if not impossible to overcome. It would require endless ledgers to record all the personal problems being faced each day by 5.3 million Missourians, whose lives are far more complex than any common observer can detect.

A father who is barely eking out enough salary to feed his family cannot be expected to give 100 percent of his attention to a campaign issue dealing with reducing Missouri's estate tax. A mother who is raising three children by herself while working eight hours a day has neither the energy nor the luxury of learning details of privatizing some functions of government. Estate tax rates and governmental economies are not the first order of business for a vast majority of citizens, and such subjects are unlikely even to appear on the Top One Hundred lists of these citizens.

The Missourians most likely to cast what should be carefully studied and considered ballots are divided into three major categories:

Voter No. 1: The voters who have the time and have taken the trouble to study carefully the issues and will cast their ballots on the basis of their best analyses;

Voter No. 2: Those voters who react and respond to campaign commercials, advertisements and pamphlets that attract their attention, usually through sensationalized statements, charges or countercharges by the candidates themselves.

Voter No. 3: Those who go to the polls to cast votes for the candidates of their particular political party, often without regard to the merits of the party or its candidates.

Every political candidate with even minimal intelligence recognizes that Voters #1 and #3 are beyond his reach, even his best campaign manner with its broad smile and ready handshake. Voter #1 has studied the issues and is comfortable, even defensive, with his decision. He or she has performed the duties of citizenship and would be uncomfortable with any reversal of opinion. Voter #3 was lost years ago to the realm of irreversible franchise, and to reach and reverse such historic patterns is virtually impossible. Voters who toe the party line resist changing, with all the wrong reasons of geographical patriotism, generational wisdom and family tradition. Depending on the area in question, Yellow Dog voters exist is nearly equal political numbers.

This leaves candidates and their sponsoring political parties with the electoral segment we above labeled Voter No. 2, the ones who respond to the emotional or sensational, or both, components of a campaign. Unless the candidate has Voter No. 1 and Voter No. 3 in his pocket, he needs the voter in the middle to win on November 3.

So campaigns turn not on the majority but a minority within the majority, and this means that the strategies and methodology of past campaign tactics will become the order of the day before November 3. It's deja vu all over again.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.