I’ve had some experience in politics. Before I lost my stomach for it, I worked on 18 political campaigns. Of those, the candidates I was working for won nine of them and in eight of the remaining nine we came in second, mostly in runoffs. One candidate finished seventh out of seven, but that’s what we predicted before we started.

I lost my stomach for working political campaigns the day I went across a conference room table attempting to strangle a member of a candidate’s steering committee, turning over a cup of coffee and making a real mess in the process. I decided that anything that could turn me into the Incredible Hulk probably wasn’t good for my blood pressure.

But those campaigns do give me some insight into how campaigns make decisions and set positions. We like to believe that the candidate’s position is a reflection of that candidate’s thought and strongly held beliefs. It would be nice if that were true.

The truth is that the candidate is really a mirror, reflecting back to us what the polling has said we want to hear. In a very real sense, we create the politics we have to endure.

In the Georgia gubernatorial campaign, it’s easy to tell that the top issue for both Democrats and Republicans who are likely to vote is education. Both Democratic candidates and the top Republican candidate are leading with that. One of the Democrats offers a particularly compelling (to me, anyway) testimony about how the Hope scholarship changed her life. Her primary campaign promise is that she’ll restore the scholarship program to its previous levels.

But who doesn’t want good education, at least to the level of lip service. However, according to the U.S.News ranking, we rank 35^th out of 50 in education. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

The more interesting results are below the top spot. On the Republican side, the second most important issue is religious liberty and the third is illegal immigration, named as the most important issue by about 90% of the Republicans responding to the poll. It appears that religious liberty is too hot a potato to campaign on, so the top Republicans went straight to illegal immigration, how we’re being “terrorized” by illegal immigrants, and how “sanctuary cities” are protecting them. Cagle’s solution is to defund cities that don’t cooperate with ICE, and Kemp wants to create a database.

(Actual statistics on crime and undocumented aliens are extremely hard to come by, but the Cato Institute, not exactly a bastion of Liberal thought, has concluded that undocumented aliens are somewhat less than half as likely to commit a crime as a native-born citizen.)

The Republican candidate who is running a distant second in the primary race created a television spot that is simply a mashup of Republican talking points and delivered them in a room full of guns and a young actor who had been told to look scared.

Here, according to the polls, are things that we don’t seem to care about and will not hear candidates talk about:

Access to health care: we rank 41^st in the nation in terms of access to health care. However, expanding Medicaid, which would have saved a number of rural hospitals and provided needed health care to thousands of people, hardly made a ripple in the pool of concerns.

 Inequality: a part of that is what the U.S. News ranking calls opportunity. In that, Georgia ranks 33^rd. But another part of it is reflected in the fact that one out of five of Georgia’s children is “nutritionally insecure,” a bureaucratically sanitized phrase meaning that that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. In recent years, we’ve spent a lot more governmental energy on preventing the government from forcing pastors to perform same sex marriages (which it can’t do anyway) than we have to dealing with inequality.

 Corporate money in politics: The leading Republican candidate fought mightily for a tax exemption for Delta Airlines until Delta decided not to sell NRA members discounted tickets to the national convention. Some 13 members had taken advantage of the discount before Delta discontinued it. However, Casey Cagle considered the crime so heinous that he crusaded to kill the exemption for what he calls support of “Conservative Values.” It reminded me of the old saw that the only thing worse than a politician who can be bought is one who won’t stay bought.  For most of our citizens, the “politician as vending machine” doesn’t seem to be an important problem.

We complain about the state of politics in our country and our state. We elect people who are demonstrably not our best and brightest. We swallow outrageous statements without choking. That seems to be who we are.

It’s been said that every nation gets the government it deserves. It’s also said that we reap whatsoever we sow. I think both of these are true. We are what we vote for.