Will the threat of Ebola affect midterm election results??
This one is very interesting. Brought to you by Harry Enten of 538, this article is an argument against Politico's allegation earlier in the week that the threat of Ebola would cause more people to vote Republican in the coming weeks. It argues that just because people have less confidence in the government, it doesn't mean they will desert their party. (This reminds me of our Unit Two test.) Enten writes that whichever party isn't in "control" at the moment will automatically have distrust for the federal government-for example, when the presidency switched from Bush to Obama, the confidence switched from Republican to Democrat.
Also interestingly, he claims that people are concerned about Ebola about as much as people were concerned about the swine flu in 2009. And there have only been 3 cases in our country, think what the panic could be like in another few months!
I feel like Ebola wouldn't make much of a difference in mid-term elections. Many Republicans already distrust the government because of various other issues. I think people are so concerned about Ebola because of how much media coverage it gets. We hear about cases all the time in other countries, or how we are trying to stop it from spreading. Even though there aren't many cases in the United States right now, the "what if" is scaring everyone.
ReplyDeleteAn unfortunate fact of human nature is that the unknown is more terrifying than anything real. I feel that the reason we are reacting with such panic to Ebola is that so little information is widely broadcast about it. Pretty much all the general populus knows about Ebola without doing any personal research is that it is extremely deadly and killing people in Africa. I know this isn't strictly what the post was on, but frankly, if the news media explained Ebola better, like how it is transmitted and how it can be detected and treated, people would be substantially less freaked out.
ReplyDelete-Liam Brookhart
I agree. Humans are inherently afraid of the unknown, and the ignorant masses just take that to the extreme. We need a more well-informed society, and the overblown perspective we see from the media's side of every story really doesn't help us with that...
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