Carolyn Lewis joins the Watchdog Bloggers today.

I love it when conventional wisdom flies out the window, don’t you? I love it when the experts are confounded, especially when it’s ordinary folks like voters who are doing the confounding.

What I have been searching for in the wake of Super Tuesday is a sign that reporters in print, on radio and television, have seen the light: That is, a rueful admission that the way they measure the body politic is cockeyed.

But here is Adam Nagourney in the New York Times telling us that “demographics or voting blocks” are “the brick and mortar of the traditional American campaign.” David Ignatius in The Washington Post acknowledges the “cross-cutting issues of race and gender” but then proceeds to note a “demographic divide” among generations. Roger Cohen writes about “older white women” backing Clinton, and Obama being stronger with young people. On CNN it’s Leslie Sanchez and Carl Jeffers opining about black voters and Hispanic voters.

Other broadcasters and print pundits are doing the same, still categorizing voters by group, even though recent events have shown that members of groups can be as diverse in their choices as are the groups themselves. The labels are a convenient fiction employed by pollsters, political pundits and journalists as a way to simplify what can’t be simplified – the rounded, multifaceted individual who walks into the voting booth and makes his or her choice – what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls “a very PERSONAL vote.” The simplification allows the perpetrators to pretend, without malice, that they know more than they can ever know.

Within each group there is enough variation to make a mockery of the labels. You can stick a label on a can of peas and be fairly certain that you’ll find a round green vegetable inside of it. But human beings are too multifaceted, complicated, even ornery. to be so designated. The labels attempt to de-mystify what can’t in the end be de-mystified, although there are many in the politics and news business who make a living pretending that they can do it.

How the demographics are reported can make a difference because it can murder the unfathomable truth about voters. By trumpeting differences, the media confirm in the public mind that they exist and they are fixed, thus countering the free-floating openness that makes for more intelligent voting: Do you vote your group, your identity, or do you weigh the candidates on a different more objective scale?

Though I’m not sure how to get around these difficulties, I’m sure it would be helpful if journalists could find a better way to report the human parade. I suggest that a new kind of shorthand, a more accurate language for defining the people under the microscope is in order. Or at least a humble admission that the present system is deeply flawed and not particularly reliable.

The very thing that this season’s campaigns are attesting to is what needs to be addressed: that a lot of voters are willing to think outside the box, breaking free of the constraints of race, gender, age, or any other category that is supposed to imprison them.

And about time, too.