LRB essay compares American voters to cattle

David Runciman has an acid take on the U.S. presidential campaign for the London Review of Books. His argument is one that has been made by political scientists for years: All of the drama and analysis that takes place during election season is a farce, because electoral outcomes are largely predetermined by demographics.

But Runciman throws some dripping British condescension into the mix:

The salient fact about this campaign is that demography trumps everything: people have been voting in fixed patterns set by age, race, gender, income and educational level, and the winner in the different contests has been determined by the way these different groups are divided up within and between state boundaries. Anyone who knows how to read the census data (and that includes some of the smart, tech-savvy types around Obama) has had a good idea of how this was going to play from the outset. All the rest is noise. [...] [I]n an election like this one, the polls aren't there to tell the real story; they are there to support the various different stories that the commentators want to tell. The market is not for the hard truth, because the hard truth this time round is that most people are voting with the predictability of prodded animals. What the news organisations and blogs and roving pundits want are polls that suggest the voters are thinking hard about this election, arguing about it, making up their minds, talking it through, because that’s what all the commentators like to think they are doing themselves. [...] For all the elegance, intelligence and wit on display in the many tens of thousands of words I have read over the past few months, nothing that's been said appears to have made any real difference to how most people see the candidates.

I'm skeptical. If it were so easy to predict outcomes, why aren't more people making millions on the political betting markets? There are some thing you simply can't model, even though it often seems in retrospect that the winner was obvious from the start. How, for instance, would you quantify Obama's charisma, his ability to overcome longstanding white suspicions about black candidates? How could a political scientist predict that Hillary Clinton's campaign would be run so poorly?

Readers, what do you think?