Policy doesn’t drive voting behavior
There are many changes Democrats might and should undertake going forward. Not because of Donald Trump. Because of Democrats. Among them, replacing their gerontocracy with younger leaders with 21st-century media skills. But we’ve been over that. Another is finding a work-around for conservative media dominance. While Democrats’ branding and message discipline is slowly improving, no amount of narrative brilliance will penetrate the public mind until they’ve addressed their “when a tree falls in the forest” problem.
It is an idée fixe on the left that politics is about kitchen-table issues and policies. So many post-mortem criticisms explain Donald Trump’s November win as Kamala Harris focusing too little on this or too much on that. Focusing too much on this group and not enough on another, as though minor tweaks (more attention to the critic’s complaint) might have changed the outcome.
Typical is a Jacobin article floated yesterday on a lefty listserv: “No, Economic Populism Did Not Lose This Election.” Economic populism works, the authors argue. Populism is popular. Polls show it. Studies show it across “a variety of statistical specifications, and accounting for an array of district characteristics,” etc.
So why did Harris lose? Because her campaign was insufficiently populist. Because she was insufficiently populist. And Joe Biden too. While his Build Back Better plans started out that way, “the policies that ultimately passed — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — while steps in the right direction, were simply not ambitious enough to demonstrate that the party is serious about delivering for the working class.” Etc. And “Biden was simply not capable of connecting with the people to convey his economic vision.”
The critique triggered a memory of something Rick Perlstein observed about conservatives almost 20 years ago while presenting at a Princeton University conference, “The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present, and Future.” The event featured a roster of conservative luminaries and one liberal turd in their punchbowl: Perlstein. Conservatives, he argued, debate whether this or that figure claiming the mantle is or is not a “real” conservative. He later wrote (emphasis mine):
In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.
It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula–well, maybe he’s a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He’s certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it’s William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.
Or a critic at Jacobin or The New Republic or The Nation calling out Harris and Biden for not being a real populist or a real progressive. As Digby once observed, “‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.” Per the horseshoe theory of politics, the same dynamic explains how the left accounts for its own failures and defends its political dogmas.
Read the room, people. Look who a majority of Americans just elected president again knowing all they know about him. Yet it is an idée fixe on the left that politics is about kitchen-table issues and pet policies. On TikTok, @legaldad confronted the notion directly: All the policy stances MAGA says it cares about, it doesn’t really care about. They’re not what drives voting behavior. Deeper urges do. Yes, some of them are economically tinged.
The same day, the Washington Post ran a story that Latino men flocked to Trump’s puffed-up image of success driven by the prosperity gospel:
“Kamala said, ‘Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”
[…]
In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being poor and disenfranchised people, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.
Policies that deliver tangible results matter. They instill confidence that government can be a force for good in people’s lives. But these days, policies don’t drive voter behavior as liberal intellectuals think they should. When Covid relief checks landed in people’s mailboxes with Trump’s name on them, voters credited Trump with delivering money that Congress appropriated. It wasn’t the policy that won him support so much as the marketing.
Do Democrats need to win back more of the working class? Sure. But in an identitarian era more than ever, nobody wants to be seen as poor. Populism may be popular in polling, but voting behavior is not economic policy-driven, if ever it was. So long as the left fails to question its political dogmas and address grittier structural issues and voters’ psychological drives, we’ll be seeing the same critiques Perlstein saw again and again, only on the left.