There are two components that, together, decide how a person votes: interest and imagination. The smaller the scope of the office being voted on, the larger the component of interest, and vice versa. When voting for a superintendent of highways, I want to know if my roads will be looked after, and very little else. As it happens, I know the name of my superintendent of highways here in Huntington, N.Y.—it is painted on all the sweeping trucks and snowplows—but I have no idea whether he is a Republican, a Democrat, or a member of the Nation of Islam. What does it matter, so long as he fills the potholes?
When voting for governor or president, however, imagination predominates. Interest is not absent; but even where it exists, it is colored by imagination, and imagination very often overrides it. If presidential candidate B offers an across-the-board tax cut, while candidate G favors a cut “targeted” at the lower-middle class, a rich person’s interest plainly lies with B. A lot of very rich people—great swaths of Beverly Hills and Manhattan’s Upper East Side, probably—will nonetheless vote for G. Their imaginations have swayed them, in defiance of their interests.
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