You are not normal
by David Atkins
I’ll be writing a number of posts over the next few days with thoughts and analysis from the June election. The first point I want to make won’t be new to many of you, but is often forgotten by even seasoned political professionals: you are not normal. That phrase is constantly repeated at election trainings put on by Democracy for America, Howard Dean’s spin-off organization now run by his brother Jim. You are not normal. What that means here is that activists often assume that the general electorate has something approaching their own level of awareness of campaign issues and news stories.
This happens a lot. Activists will make arguments about how the President’s approval numbers will go up or down based on his support or lack thereof for some specific policy, or because that activist’s own pet issue, when in reality it has much more to do with a voter’s overall sense of personal and national well-being, and their ability to see themselves hanging out with the politician. Or one might see activists insist that the polls are all wrong, because the GOTV ground game will overwhelm the opposition–after all, everyone they know is fired up and ready to go, so that enthusiasm must be everywhere. Confirmation bias plays a big role there, and it was quite prevalent among progressives leading up to the Wisconsin vote.
Then there’s the assumption that voters are deeply aware of the intricate arguments and fights leading up to a campaign. I’ve posted before about Linda Parks, the Republican-turned-independent Supervisor in Thousand Oaks who ran for Congress in the CA26 top-two primary against a field of four Democrats (including progressive Assemblymember Julia Brownley) and a very conservative Republican State Senator, Tony Strickland. Almost every organization on the left endorsed Brownley, and there was a massive outpouring of local Democratic activism on her behalf. The DCCC came in heavy for Brownley with a slew of mailers in the final three weeks, some of them a little over-the-top and cartoonish but none of them dishonest, tying Linda Parks’ deficit obsession, refusal to repeal the Bush tax cuts, and refusal to condemn the Paul Ryan budget to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and George Bush.
The entire local press establishment took umbrage against the DCCC’s mailers, decrying them as unfair attacks. Local papers were swarmed with letters to the editor, and the comments section of the local papers were filled with comments decrying the negative attacks. Two or three phone calls came ringing in every day to our local Democratic headquarters from people claiming to be disgusted Democrats who were planning to change parties. Everywhere you went in political circles, there was talk of the “backlash” that would almost certainly come from the attacks. I myself was somewhat worried about the effect it might have.
Nothing of the sort actually happened. But that didn’t stop Parks from believing it would even when the results were clear. As of late election night when it was readily apparent that she was losing big, she was still saying this:
Parks could not be reached late Tuesday night, but earlier in the evening after just the mail-in ballots had been counted she expressed hope that the later returns would swing in her favor.
“These are the first ones coming in and this is before the smear campaign really hit and Julia Brownley’s supporters changed their position,” she said.
But they didn’t, they weren’t, and nothing of the sort was actually happening in statistically meaningful numbers. That entire conversation was happening in the political activist bubble, divorced from any reality on the ground. Which, honestly, would have been clear to anyone actually talking to voters. I personally made over 700 phone calls and knocked on over 500 doors in advance of this election to likely June primary voting Democrats, and most of them were clueless–in spite of the daily barrage of mail–that there was a major contested congressional race happening. If they knew anything, it was that Brownley seemed to be competent and a good Democrat, and that they had heard some negative stuff about Parks. But most didn’t even have that level of awareness. I wasn’t normal. And neither were Linda Parks and the barrage of backlashers in the political bubble. In the real world where people actually vote, none of that mattered.
It was an important lesson in Wisconsin. A lot of progressives blame the amount of money spent by conservatives in the race, but it’s important to remember that Walker was ahead and ahead big for a long time. Most people’s minds had been made up already, and they weren’t changing them. The campaign such as it was appeared to be mostly noise.
And it was an important lesson in Ventura County, too. We’re not normal, and we need not to read too much into why election and poll results are the way they are. Usually, the simplest and dumbest explanations are the right ones.
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