Would they like you?
by Tom Sullivan
Compassion has been a dwindling resource for years in this country. Especially for the sort of people who would separate refugee parents from their small children and blame them for it. Especially especially when they claim the Jesus Christ Stamp of Approval for both the policy and its sponsor in the Oval Office.
I’ve argued since my earliest days on this blog that as much as we like to believe people’s voting choices are rational (and insist ours are), that’s not reality. There is a visceral component all our book-learning misses. Insisting people vote rationally is as nonsensical as establishing literacy or ideological requirements before granting citizenship rights to infants. It makes sense voters should make decisions more rationally, but they don’t.
Yascha Mounk examines in The Atlantic the notion people voted for George W. Bush because, as a poll question revealed, “most undecided voters would have preferred to drink a beer with Bush rather than his opponent, John Kerry.” What if the question gets it backwards? What if people actually preferred the candidate they felt “would rather have a beer with them.”
Mounk explains:
The original formulation of the beer question invites the question of why voters would care so much about something that is exceedingly unlikely to happen. If you invert it, however, voters start to look a lot less irrational. After all, they can’t foresee all the decisions politicians will need to make once in office, and have few ways of holding them accountable if they don’t follow through on their promises. So they need to estimate which politicians are most likely to understand and advance their interests.
A candidate’s attitudes toward “people like me” thus become a powerful heuristic. If a candidate generally likes people like me, then it seems plausible that he will look out for my interests in a wide range of scenarios. If he dislikes people like me—if he would hate sharing a beer with me, and secretly thinks I’m trash—then he is far more likely to sell me out.
That’s rational, but likely subconscious. It’s a gut-level measure of likedability, rather than likability, Mounk theorizes. It might explain Joe Biden’s stickiness at the top of Democratic presidential polls. His style suggests “he does not sit in judgment of either his would-be supporters or their loved ones. If there’s one thing that’s easy to believe about Biden, it is that he’d love to get a beer with you—and your dad, and your mother-in-law, and even your crazy uncle.”
Maybe it’s not just name recognition. Maybe it comes natural to Biden. Maybe it’s a degree of emotional intelligence.
Mounk adds:
Most Americans spend relatively little time thinking about public policy. Politicians who give the impression that they are quick to disparage any contrary opinions, or to dismiss voters who express the right values in the wrong ways, are likely to fail the real beer test.
This is a lesson Democrats should urgently take to heart. According to a recent poll, most Americans fear that the Democratic Party doesn’t really want them. Asked whether they feel that “people like me are welcome in the Democratic Party,” only 44 percent of all voters and 38 percent of independents agreed.
Uh-huh. Americans in general vote more with their guts than with their heads, agreed. But what makes columns warning Democrats to “change their ways” especially annoying is they guilt-trip the left for harboring feelings the right feels no shame in expressing openly. Hillary Clinton’s public “deplorables” comment was unwise and it was insensitive. But don’t expect conservative magazines to reprimand Republican voters for being insensitive. Or to remind millions of Trump fans to check their disdain for lefties at the coliseum door if they want to bridge the political divide. They don’t want to. The Republican Party’s internal 2012 “autopsy” advised them minority voters felt “Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” Rank-and-file Republicans ignored that advice and gave the world Donald Trump and their middle fingers. When was the last time public polling asked about that?
Even so, Democrats will be sending canvassers to knock doors across the country this year. If they’re smarter than the 2016 Clinton campaign, they won’t simply be working a base-turnout strategy. They’ll do some persuasion. And if they’re as smart as they think they are, they’ll check their condescension at the door.
I wrote in this space in September 2014 about a Georgia Republican state senator saying, “I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters.” It wasn’t even a proper dog whistle. Fran Millar was complaining about African Americans being allowed to vote on Sunday at South DeKalb Mall:
Yet, I sometimes hear the same from lefties about poor, white, Republican voters. Occasionally, they just blurt out that voters are stupid. More often it’s couched in a dog-whistle complaint about people voting against their best interests. Which, if you think about it, is just a more polite way of saying the same thing.
As a field organizer in the South, I remind canvassers that, no, those voters are not stupid. They’re busy. With jobs and kids and choir practice and soccer practice and church and PTA and Friday night football and more. Unlike political junkies, they don’t keep up with issues. They don’t have time for the issues. When they go to the polls they are voting to hire someone to keep up with the issues for them. And when they look at a candidate — your candidate — what they are really asking themselves is simple: “Is this someone I can trust?”
One of my favorite southernisms is, “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like.” That, I caution canvassers, is how most Americans really vote, like it or not. And if you don’t purge the thought, those “low information” voters? They will know you think they’re stupid before you do. Right before you ask for their votes.