Richard, given that the much too ubiquitous tracking polls usually don’t show a candidate exceeding 50 percent until the “undecideds” have dwindled after weeks/months/years of election information overload, I don’t see how to conclude anything but the median voter is a failing student . . .

Joe, I probably shouldn’t confess this on Peter’s blog, but, to my knowledge, I’ve missed exactly one election in which I’ve been eligible to vote (and that for a special election in which I correctly surmised the Democrat would win regardless of my vote in an overwhelmingly Democratic district while I was working an 80+-hour per week summer job a quarter-century ago). And, yeah, I probably will vote tomorrow in Illinois, at least to throw out all the judges, as I’ve voted to do for years.

That said, I confess I also see something in Tyler Cowen’s observation (quoted on Peter’s home page) about voting being done for “self-image.” (My wife might see even more truth to Cowen’s observation as she contemplates what she might fairly call my increasingly, um, erratic choices.) I love poring over local election returns at any level not for what they say about candidates but for what they say about how local communities may perceive themselves.

Just one example: some Illinois community blogs I peruse set up election discussions, and it was astonishing, at least to me, how quickly these devolved into all-McCain/Obama, all the time. Not only is there no chance anything anybody says on those blogs (or this one?) will affect the presidential outcome, but there is no discussion on things we have a remote chance of affecting, e.g., con-con. But then I guess an argument over con-con doesn’t compel us to defend our sense of self or society in a way an Obama/McCain argument might.

But, hey, if you’ve a recommendation on con-con, I really would love to hear it. That is, if Peter can tolerate the possibility his blog might have a one-in-three-million rather than a one-in-sixty-million chance of swaying an election!

BTW I’ve never argued that voting per se is “irrational,” only that voting because one believes his vote will affect the outcome is, well, misguided. Voting out of a sense of civic duty, for moral or social or spiritual reasons, or whatever, is perfectly rational, in the economist’s usual sense of satisfying one’s own (subjective) preferences. (In my less tactful moments I’ve referred to “warm fuzzies.”)