(And yes, the stupid voters)
Michael Cohen (not that one) takes on the notion that if Democrats lose it’s because they are all inept and have no idea what they are doing. And he homes in on the real issue. There’s a reason so many voters are subject to demagoguery (and, in fairness, super-charged charisma.)
I’m not saying the American electorate is dumb because that’s simplistic and masks that most Americans are indifferent, at best, to national politics. But let’s be clear: average political discourse in this country is not an Algonquin Fucking Round Table.
I’ll grant you the sample size is not huge, but in my experience talking to voters, their understanding of American politics is maybe a foot wide and half an inch deep (and these are the people who show up to campaign rallies and events). More often than not, they parrot the talking points they hear from politicians or whatever media source they last read.
Guess how many Americans, in a recent survey, could name the three branches of government? 47 percent. (For the record, it’s the executive, judicial and legislative branches). The same survey found that 55 percent knew who controlled the House of Representatives, and 61 percent agreed knew who controlled the Senate.
Ninety-one percent of Americans say the Supreme Court impacts their daily lives as citizens. But guess how many Americans can’t name a single Supreme Court justice? More than half.
Few Americans know what the Federal Reserve does or the role it plays in limiting inflation.
How about understanding fundamental constitutional rights? These results are from a recent survey by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
“When asked unprompted to name the protections specified in the First Amendment:”
-Freedom of speech was cited by 63%, down from 74% in 2021 and 73% in 2020.
-Freedom of religion was named by 24%, down from 56% in 2021 and 47% in 2020.
-Freedom of the press was named by 20%, down from 50% in 2021 and 42% in 2020.
-Right of assembly was named by 16%, down from 30% in 2021 and 34% in 2020.
-Right to petition the government was named by 6%, down from 20% in 2021 and 14% in 2020.
I’m cherry-picking here, but the data is clear: Americans are, by and large, woefully ill-informed about how their government works.
I get it; Americans hate politics. They are not much interested in the policy issues that most of us obsess over. Nonetheless, I can assure you if the news media explained over and over again that inflation is a global phenomenon, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Democrats could talk about the threats to American democracy until they are blue in the face. Reporters could write one story after another about GOP efforts to undermine democracy — and, by and large, they have done just that. There’s little evidence that it would motivate voters outside of pure partisans (and they are already motivated).
And if you don’t believe me, watch this simply amazing video of Republican voters whatabout-ing January 6:
Identity Is Everything
The other day, I looked at my various retirement holdings and almost cried at how much money I’d lost in the past year. Still, that decline in my financial fortunes will play no role in my voting decision this Fall. This would make me an unusual swing voter but a normal regular voter — because most voters make choices based not on particular policies or ideologies (most of which they don’t fully understand) but rather on their partisan and social identities. If you’re a Democrat, you vote for a Democratic candidate. Same if you’re a Republican. Voting identities, however, are not just about partisan affiliation. If you’re Black or White; a gun owner, a college-education woman, a non-college-educated man, an evangelical Christian, or an America Jew, etc., you’re personal identity is conflated with your political identity — and, in turn, that drives your decision-making on voting.
As a result, the vast majority of the electorate is immune to media reporting and political messaging because they already know who they are supporting before they know who is on the ballot. That is why political parties and candidates place such a significant emphasis on motivating their most loyal supporters. They know those people are almost certainly going to cast a vote for them.
What about swing voters? These ever-shrinking slice of the electorate, whose votes are most up for grabs, tend to be the least informed Americans. As the legendary political scientist Philip Converse wrote 60 years ago, in words that continue to resonate today, “Not only is the electorate as a whole quite uninformed, but it is the least informed members within the electorate who seem to hold the critical balance of power, in the sense that alternations in governing party depend disproportionately on shifts in their sentiment.”
Part of the reason is that, like most Americans, swing voters rarely see the connection between government action and their own lives (that’s partly why politicians rarely get credit for their legislative accomplishments). As the political scientists Larry Bartels and Christopher Aachen wrote a few years ago in their fantastic book “Democracy For Realists,” “voters are much more apt to punish their leaders than they are to reward them.” Bartels and Aachen also show that voters do a very poor job assigning responsibility for changes in their economic welfare. Their views on the economy are primarily based on what’s happening in the lead-up to Election Day — not the relative change over the entirety of a politician’s term. So, in other words, voters are more focused on what you’ve done for them lately — not what came before.
So Democrats can come up with the best messaging in the world, and they will still run into a brick wall on voters who a) always vote Republican, b) pay so little attention to politics that they don’t even hear it, c) lack the analytical skills to appreciate and understand the arguments Democrats are making d) base their voting decision on whims and their current sentiment when they cast a ballot.
Where political media has failed is in leading so many of us to believe that voting represents a rational decision-making process informed by careful consideration of the policy issues at hand.
Then again, maybe it’s a quasi-rational decision to vote on high gas prices because that’s something tangible that genuinely affects one’s life. Threats to democracy are largely speculative. Yes, January 6 happened, but Biden still became president, and the country didn’t collapse. I get why many politically-engaged Democrats think it’s a big deal (and I share that sentiment), but for swing voters, who already hate politics, think all politicians are corrupt and don’t see the connection between their own lives and political decisions made in Washington, all of this democracy talk likely seems like an abstraction.
But It Works On Me …
There’s another element to this fetishization of messaging that is always the most indirectly telling — the assumption that the best messaging is what appeals best to my biases. You see this in all three examples above: “I think this issue is important. Surely others feel the same.”
But here’s an unintentionally fantastic example from a recent newsletter post by Matt Yglesias. He notes that more than a few liberal commentators have complained that voters are willing to accept “literal fascism” and “female serfdom.” And he asks:
So to tempt voters away from literal fascism, have they been given candidates in the purple districts (D+4/R+4) who disagree with progressives about gun control? Who support banning late-term abortions? Who have qualms about trans women competing against cis women in college sports? Who favor changing asylum law to try to cut off the flow of migrants arriving at the southern border? Who think it’s a problem that college admissions offices discriminate against Asian applicants and low-income whites? I’m not saying every candidate in every swing district should dissent from party leaders on all those subjects, but how many dissent on any of them? For that matter, given that everyone agrees gasoline prices are politically significant, how much effort did Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden put into thinking about how how to spur an oil production recovery back when they were planning the transition?
You don’t need to like or approve of the fact that some voters are more fearful of the mainstream Democratic Party policy agenda than they are of GOP kooks. But factually, it is true. And the mainstream party leaders have repositioned themselves to the left of where they were 10 years ago based on the incorrect idea that persuasion no longer mattered and you could win elections purely by amping up the base.
Here’s a funny thing about all these examples cited by Yglesias — they neatly align with his political biases. Go figure!
Maybe Democratic candidates should target voters “who disagree with progressives about gun control,” but is there any reason to believe that the most effective Democratic politicians are the ones who piss all over their party? Maybe that works for a Democratic candidate running in red state Ohio, like Tim Ryan, but it hardly seems optimal for a House Democratic candidate running in a suburban district where voters are particularly concerned about gun violence and are less likely to be gun owners. Maybe a Democrat could win some support by expressing “qualms about trans women competing against cis women in college sports.” But it seems more likely that the people who truly care about that issue lean toward voting Republican. Moreover, why would that issue be decisive for voters who, as poll after poll indicates, are more concerned about the economy, abortion, and guns?
One thing that constantly amazes me about so much of what masquerades as political analysis is that people who have no experience running campaigns, working on campaigns, talking to voters, and understanding the idiosyncracies of 435 individual districts or 50 American states have absolute certainty about what political messaging works in each of them — and what doesn’t. More often than not, their messaging critiques are heavily influenced by their personal biases and ideological priors and not a sophisticated understanding of voter preferences.
Moreover, none of us — even the most intrepid political reporters — knows the messaging in 35 Senate races and 435 House campaigns. Every House district and every state is unique. There is a reason campaigns pay good money for pollsters and set up focus groups — to understand what messages will appeal to persuadable voters. As a result, they know better than any of us what is likely to work and what isn’t — and to be clear, since every district and state is different, what works for them may not work in other places.
And, yet, at the end of the day, it still might not matter because partisanship is a helluva thing, there are a shrinking number of swing voters, and sometimes there are races that simply aren’t winnable. In fact, the overwhelming majority of elections this year will not be competitive at all. And in the handful of competitive races, there are a host of other factors that could influence voter choice: for example, whether a candidate is well-known, likable, or an effective politician.
I know it’s depressing to hell to hear that so many of our obsessions about national politics fall on deaf ears and that the billions spent on political advertising and outreach influence only a small segment of the electorate (and, generally speaking, the least informed among us). But there’s a reason I call this newsletter “Truth and Consequences.”
Of course, I do this too. I’m always criticizing the Democrats for failing and it always reflects my biases. It’s human. And I don’t necessarily think that anyone should defer to their judgment because “they are the experts” because really political strategy is more of a tea leaf reading and artistic endeavor than any kind of quantifiable science. So let a thousand opinions flourish.
For instance, I think that people who observed the events of January 6th (really, the entire Trump presidency with the GOP’s servile acquiescence) and came out of it believing that everyone’s corrupt and anyway it all worked out ok are either dumb or willfully obtuse. But that’s just me.
But I’m entirely in agreement that much of the voting public is ignorant, misinformed, often lazy, myopic and yes, stupid. They mostly see politics as a team sport, a fan club, a reality show or something else equally shallow. A lot of it is informed by their families, friends and community and isn’t very specific beyond that. And yes their political and social “identity,” however that’s defined, will lead most people to one of the two parties and because the two parties have less in common than any time in modern memory, it’s not a tough choice. It so happens that the public is pretty evenly divided and we are very dependent on those weird swing voters who are among the least informed and most idiosyncratic of all.
I don’t know that to do about it. But always blaming the Democrats for failing to have “the right message” really misses the point. They certainly need to do better. But I defy anyone to say definitively what that might mean other than fielding wealthy geniuses with the charisma of movie stars and the common touch of Real Americans in every single race. And even that would only take us part way.