If you read on thing about this “popularism” debate (which I glancingly addressed earlier this week) read this from Brian Beutler:
It took my old pal Ezra Klein and his fancy New York Times column to drag the topic into the mainstream, and he did a good, evenhanded job adjudicating between David Shor, the high priest of popularism, and several of Shor’s critics (though not me, his most articulate and handsome critic).
The one nit I would pick with the piece is that it largely centers the debate around a single, poorly understood historical fact, rather than interrogating the prescriptive power of the popularist theory of politics.
Here’s the fact in question: In 2020, non-college voters of color broke in larger-than-expected numbers for Trump, exacerbating a decades-long shift of all non-college voters from the Democratic coalition into the Republican coalition, exemplified by the fabled working-class white Trump voter. Popularists stipulate that this happened because Democratic Party aides, activists, and donors have become trapped in a bubble of over-educated progressives who communicate in the idioms of woke Twitter and thus increase the salience of unpopular ideas.
But, as the piece shows, the causal evidence for this theory is highly disputed. So is the baseline assumption that the shift (as pertains to voters of color) will endure beyond Trump himself—an exceptionally strange politician, running with the benefits of incumbency and hyper-celebrity at a historically pitched moment, in an election that generated extraordinary turnout, which by definition included a bunch of new voters we can’t possibly understand. And because a debate like this won’t be resolvable for months or years, the essay ends on a kind of shruggy-emoticon note: Everyone agrees Democrats face structural disadvantages in elections, and that they need to change something about how they do politics to pad their margins so the country doesn’t slip into oblivion. What that something is remains elusive.
But the thing is, popularism offers an answer, and we can examine how the formula performs in both real-world and hypothetical settings. And what shoots out the other end of the algorithm is bad.
② THE GOLDEN WAGE
Irrespective of why non-college voters of color swung a bit toward Trump in 2020, or who’s to blame for it, the popularist prescription for arresting the swing is that Democrats should do and talk about things that poll well. More precisely, they should actually do very little, because the public is change averse, but the things they choose to do (particularly when they act in high-profile ways) should all be super-popular, and they should moor their rhetoric in kitchen-table policy appeals that poll well. A kind of Clintonism for the Trump era.
One valid, but somewhat narrow response to this advice, articulated here by David Dayen, is that if Democrats talk a big game about popular stuff, but then don’t do much of it when they have power, they will eventually brand themselves as frauds and promise breakers, which is politically toxic in and of itself.
From where I sit, though, that facet of the debate highly overweights the extent to which voters are attuned to policy promises and whether politicians keep them, and underweights bigger questions like whether focus-grouped, policy-drenched appeals are responsive to what voters are looking for from their leaders.
I think Shor and the popularists would be infinitely more credible if they adopted Obama’s foreign-policy lodestar—“don’t do stupid shit”—and applied it to Democratic rhetoric and agenda setting: Whatever you do, stay away from truly toxic issues. Good advice! But instead they invert the formula: Do and say popular things. And that prescribes a kind of antipolitics—it’s a recipe for turning politicians into automatons who constantly and evasively pivot to their safe issues, because they don’t know how to respond when new issues arise unexpectedly and capture people in real time.
One canonical popular issue is the minimum wage. Another one (of much lower salience, but that Shor has highlighted repeatedly) is the Loan Shark Prevention Act, which would fight predatory lending. Democrats (because they’re already much more popularist than the popularists care to admit) love pivoting to health care. These are fine issues. But a politics assembled around relentlessly invoking them is only going to hit the mark of addressing what most animates people in a stopped-clock kind of way.
Talking about health care a lot in 2018 made some sense because Republicans had just tried to take health care away from tens of millions of people. You could go back several election cycles before you find one where relentless minimum-wage message discipline would have been responsive to the driving passions of the moment. Almost nobody in the whole world knows what the Loan Shark Prevention Act is or does, and using it as a rhetorical or substantive crutch in an election, now or at any point in the past, would be downright bizarre.
Even today, in a climate dominated (for good reasons) by angst about the coronavirus pandemic and (for bad reasons) by “critical race theory,” the directive to talk about drug prices or the minimum wage isn’t savvy; it’s uncanny. At worst it’s gonna demoralize many people who’ve placed their real, deeply-held hopes for the future in the party. At best it’s gonna leave them puzzled over why the soundbites are all nonsequiturs.
③ POLL NO PUNCHES
A better alternative, consistent with the “don’t do or say extremely unpopular things” mantra, would be for Democrats to speak to the biggest and most pressing needs the country faces (your mileage may vary on what those needs are, but they’re all gonna be familiar, mainstream, sometimes even popularist issues), to not make obvious errors, and to try to keep promises—but also to realize that the coming election is more likely to be decided by propaganda about a far off Ebola outbreak than about any real issue. And that means, in addition to doing the kinds of popular things that are in the Build Back Better agenda, Democrats should be nimble enough to do battle on that kind of us vs. them terrain, in defiance of the temptation to just recapitulate all the things they did for people’s kitchen tables.
NBC’s Benjy Sarlin recalled a good example of how this works in the 2009 auto bailout. That policy polled quite poorly at the time, and while popularists might aver that things are different when the fate of the American economy is on the line and there are no popular ways to save it, a political party steeped in their philosophy might have been too timid or hidebound to do what had to be done. Or perhaps they would’ve been inclined to do it, but then swept the whole episode under the rug.
Instead what happened is Barack Obama saved the American auto industry and embedded his success in a patriotic, culture-drenched campaign appeal: GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead. Read: The other guys let bin Laden get away, and would’ve let GM die.
Right now in Virginia, where the gubernatorial election is just a couple weeks away, Democrats have given everything over to reminding voters that Republican Glenn Youngkin is a stalking horse for Trumpism, and now, as the New York Times reports, “In interviews outside Fairfax’s early-voting site, every McAuliffe voter cited Mr. Trump as a reason for supporting the Democrat. Transportation, education and taxes—longtime core issues of Virginia governor’s races—were scarcely mentioned.”
On the flipside, we have issue polling to thank for the early aversion among elected Democrats to imposing uncompromised vaccine requirements. We see now why flouting the polls and taking more assertive steps several months ago would’ve been wise, even if they would’ve been less popular in survey data than the hodgepodge we got: You can actually crush COVID-19 and brag about it, or you can chase polls into a muddle that leaves everyone unhappy.
We can similarly draw a pretty straight line from popularism to President Biden embracing Trump’s migrant-expulsion policy over the objections of lawyers, experts, and activists to no apparent political avail and at the cost of needless cruelty. All because polls suggest that key sub-sub-sub groups of voters prefer ‘be a bit of a dick to would-be immigrants for show’ to more humane policy.
And as I laid out a couple weeks ago popularism will sometimes point to absolutely wild conclusions, like that raising taxes on middle-income parents (to finance a permanent entitlement for poor parents) is sound political advice, maybe better even than the alternative of leaving the existing child tax credit program that benefits both classes of parents in place. It’ll warn Democrats to tread very lightly when Republicans throw around the words “law and order,” but it can’t begin to fathom ways Democrats might actually hold their ground in the culture war.
That isn’t a record that inspires me to think popularists know what Democrats need to do to win by wider margins in Wisconsin. I’ll reiterate what I wrote in that above-linked article, that we have better barometers for how Democrats can succeed politically in tough states in the form of over-performing senators like John Tester, Sherrod Brown, and Wisconsin’s own Tammy Baldwin. These politicians test their intuitions against issue polls like any other, but none of them behaves as if they think politics has an autopilot setting that’ll get them from one election through the next by never running afoul of survey data.
If they did that, I don’t think they’d be senators anymore. Because in practice it turns out campaigns are more like driving than flying. You shouldn’t go too fast or too slow; you need to keep your eyes on the road, but also check your mirrors. And you really ought to know what to do in the event that you hit a patch of ice or one of your tires explodes or someone else wrecks their car 50 feet ahead. We can all fantasize about a future in which computers do all the work, but until we get there, we have to accept that driving is just way riskier and more prone to human error than flying. That means the best drivers are ones with skill and practice; the worst ones hit cruise control at the speed limit and take a nap behind the wheel.
I still can’t get over the fact that people are touting “poll everything and pick the most popular ideas to run on” as some kind of revolutionary strategy that has never been tried. My God, poll-tested politics has been done since the advent of polling. The idea that this is a major insight just astounds me. And by the way, it’s a terrible way to do politics.
Sure, you need to poll, but to think that’s the key to success is ridiculous. If it was, no candidate could ever lose. They all poll.
Beutler’s critique is right on the money in my opinion. The public doesn’t understand the implications of most issues and they often tell pollsters what they want to hear. They very often have contradictory views and spout conventional wisdom. Good analysts can sort that out to some degree and professionals who conduct focus groups are able to see through some of the subjects’ attitudes to get to what they really think. But none of that is static. People change their minds, they waffle they go with the crowd or take contrarian stances for all kinds of reasons. Events can change everything.
Mostly people just vote with their tribe because it’s easier. And in this polarized political environment the real task for the parties is to find a way to get people to identify with yours and/or reject the other guy’s. There are ways to do this. As Beutler points out, Democrats have examples like Tester, Brown and Baldwin to prove that.