When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives
Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable.
“By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’”
Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’”
Shephard explains:
Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University. “That is actually especially true of leaners, that they don’t have a strong positive feeling about the party that they lean toward; they just have a negative feeling about the party that they lean against.”
Indeed, more than 60 percent of independents who lean Republican or lean Democrat have “very” or “somewhat” cold opinions of the other party, according to a 2017 Pew Research poll. These voters typically end up voting for Democrats and Republicans simply to ensure the party they detest more isn’t in power. “You might have many people who are willing to show up and vote, but they’re not going to encourage others to do so,” Krupnikov said. “They’re doing it in a way where they’re trying to avoid seeing the lesser of two evils, which in some sense is a sad choice to have: You’re dissatisfied with everything.”
In other words, it’s negative partisanship, an increasingly powerful part of American politics over the last 40 years. In 1980, the average Democrat and Republican thought that the other party was basically fine; in the four decades since, those feelings have evaporated.
But Shepard concludes, as others have before him, that “the idea that these voters are a secret army of moderates waiting to be unlocked by a centrist party is likely a myth.” They are not really “shopping around.”
Fine. Old news. But what are Democrats supposed to do with that information? Because their primary voter targeting tool for getting people out to vote (VAN/VoteBuilder) is premised on microtargeting individual voters, on assigning them support scores based on a variety of best guesses. Outside of registered Democrats, their strategy is based on identifying Democrat-leaners when Democrat-leaning independents stubbornly don’t want to be identified.
Chatter about how independents are not really independent does not address this practical problem.
I wrote recently:
This is my focus right now. Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as [David] Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.
In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them. Republicans do the same.
Why? They fear that if volunteers knock the wrong door or call the wrong phone and get their heads bitten off a few times, campaigns will lose volunteers. That’s a real and valid concern. But that’s not an election-winning strategy. It’s risk-mitigation, and a strategy with real opportunity costs associated.
If Democrats focus their voter contact efforts on the bluest 30% of UNAffiliateds, and the GOP focuses theirs on the reddest 30%, who’s inviting the middle 40% to participate in our elections? 40% of 2.6 million voters is a lot of voters to ignore.
But that’s just what a microtargeting strategy does. Instead, what Democrats should do (where past precinct turnout data is available) is identify blue-leaning neighborhoods “where the fishing is good” and adopt an alternate voter contact approach geared toward activating reluctant voters who, let’s admit, don’t like them even if they vote with them. There Democrats need an approach less about selling candidates or platforms and more about selling the idea of voters having their voices hear. By voting. Done right, we already in aggregate know how they’ll vote.
In North Carolina, for example, independent voters typically turn out 8-10 points or more below Democrats in their neighborhoods. And in the bluest counties in the bluest precincts it is 12 percent. Is that because these registrants are not engaged or because Democrats are not engaging them?
There I see schools of fish to catch, potentially tens of thousands. Standard practice is to drop individual hooks. In these blue-leaning precincts, I say cast a net. But that requires thinking outside the box.
The biggest obstacle is that when it comes to policy, Democrats are liberals. But when it comes to campaigning, where every damned election is “the most important election of our lifetime,” Democrats are conservatives.