Unaffiliated voters are a growing segment of the electorate. What to do with that?
Matt Yglesias, Hullabaloo alum David Atkins, and others got into a Twitter debate about median voters on Sunday keying off Ron Brownstein’s The Atlantic column keying off Michael Podhorzer’s analysis that Red and Bue America misconstrues what we really are. Adam Davidson was on thst topic earlier.
The Twitter debate wound up being about median voters, whether they exist, and whether (Atkins) Democrats should “pander,” policy-wise, to persuadables who are “abortion rights supporters who want to eliminate climate regulation or lgbt people.” Besides, why “people vote for candidates and parties is far more emotional, vibes and media driven …” Maybe there should be as much attention spent on finding nonaligned voters who lean left and turning them out to vote.
Getting back to Podhorzer, he says in his newsletter, “We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
Brownstein writes:
Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”
All of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support. As measured on fronts including the January 6 insurrection, the procession of Republican 2020 election deniers running for offices that would provide them with control over the 2024 electoral machinery, and the systematic advance of a Republican agenda by the Supreme Court, the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.
Fine. Problem identified. What to do about it?
Nominally unaffiliated voters now make up pluralities in at least a dozen states and in recent national polling. How they lean D or R toggles from year to year. Getting a read on how they vote is for most campaigns, I imagine, rocket science. It’s not.
The best fishing holes
Local candidates regularly ask me how I think UNAffiliated voters will “break” (D or R) in November. I can’t say. But with their increasing importance in elections, it might be useful to get a clue. And while I can’t predict how UNA voters will break in the fall, I can estimate —with data — how they did break in the last election.
North Carolina has unusually open access to free, downloadable election data at the state level. Using that plentiful data, I am, with a couple of simplifying assumptions, generating estimates, by precinct, of what percent of UNAs voted for Joe Biden in 2020 (for specific targeted state races). Knowing that in this precinct, in this county, 80 percent of UNAs voted for Biden and in that one, in another county, only 15 percent did, is useful targeting information for deciding where to not waste a lot of volunteer effort. In precincts where UNAs voted, say, 40-60 percent for Biden, those are where to look to ID persuadable voters.
Think of this as knowing where to find the best fishing holes.
Overall in North Carolina, only 42 percent of UNAs voted for Biden. It varies a lot by county and precinct. Much below 100,000 in population (here anyway), the UNAs break red fast. Even then, many redder counties can contain precincts where UNAs are blue-voting or blue-leaning.
One county chair wrote back:
Prior to the 2020 election, my sense was that a significant # of U’s were with us, but I had no data to support that. After looking at the election results, I realized the U’s couldn’t have been with us, but again, I had no data to support my feeling. Now I do.
I had not sent good news.
Estimating this in other, less data-friendly states might be more trouble. But Democratic campaigns need every edge they can get.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com