I find the bias arguments uncompelling, maybe even disingenuous. If we want to win the senate, adopt more popular positions to win the senate. I feel like the left became obsessed with the Overton Window. Adopted radical positions to pull centrists over (e.g., Medicare for All, critical gender theory, student loan debt forgiveness, green new deal). Ignores the branding spill over effects. Acts surprised Trump carries Iowa by 8%p.p..
I have to confess a bit of skepticism about these very specific explanations for the swing of Hispanic voters to Trump. I wonder if the Hispanic swing toward Trump and the Black swing toward Trump could instead be seen as a single phenomenon with a unified explanation: Hispanic and Black people who otherwise liked Trump's ideas were worried in 2016 that Trump might govern as a hardcore racist. Instead he governed as a plausible-deniability racial dog whistler. So by 2020, a bunch of these people weren't afraid of him anymore, and decided to vote for him on the issues.
This is a great piece, but I do have one bone to pick around the idea that the "game isn't fair". I see this idea being kicked around quite often - in more than one country. To me, it's a lazy excuse. It's like saying that while yes you may have lost the basketball game you were the fastest person on the court. It may be true, but it has no bearing on the outcome of the actual game being played.
It seems that the strategies that Democrats use rely on the assumption that "more votes == more winning" and when that doesn't end up being true they say that the game isn't fair.
Democrats have a similar problem as the Conservative Party of Canada - different political systems, yes, but the point stands. In the 2019 Canadian election, the Conservatives won the popular vote with 34.34% to the Liberals 33.12%. In spite of this, the Liberals won more seats with 157 to the Conservatives 121. This is because in the places where the Conservatives were popular they were really popular which resulted in them running up the score. Predictably Conservative messaging after the election focused on how the "game was unfair" because they won the popular vote, but lost the election.
This is all to say that there should be a focus on winning the game as it exists, not the game that people may want to exist.
This is a great article and really speaks to a path forward. One area I would like to see explored more is if there is a fundamental psychology difference that makes this sort of relational persuasion a harder lift for the current Democratic coalition, and much more organic for the modern Republican/Conservative coalition. Here's why: It's been kind of conventional wisdom / "good manners" that we shouldn't "talk politics" in polite society in precisely the way this piece is describing: to people that might be disagreeable to it. Democrats being the coalition of colege-educated professionals now, take to heart a lot more of this "good manners" cannon. Meanwhile, both because of the coalition being working class and fundamentally anti-politically correct folks, combined with the fact that Trump specifically as a candidate exuded having no shame, it's a heck of a lot easier for his followers to bulldoze their relations in the name of spreading the gospel of Trump.
I saw that a lot in my neck of the woods. In local democratic groups, we emailed people asking them to share as much as they could posts by local candidates and Biden. Virtually no one seemed to do that among the Democratic groups. They were much more comfortable sharing random Vox articles about the news, if about politics at all. Hardly something that will really convince the marginal low-information voter. Wheras, if you looked at their opponents, their posts seemed to get ten to 100 times the shares and likes! And our neighbors that are very Trumpy share posts directly from Biden or Republicans all the time.
So I guess my questions are:
1. Does this liberal / conservative psychology idea have any empirical underpinnings?
2. What do we do to combat it besides sharing this article and yelling at others FOR REALS SHARE BIDEN MEMES!
3. Is there a playbook on how to create these groups and make sure people aren't immediately pissed off, burning relations that I think liberals worry about a lot more.
And not run on unpopular ideas like say increasing immigration, forgiving student loans or defunding the police. Or if you want to run on those ideas you need to rebrand them. Think estate tax vs. death tax. Say for example police accountability rather than defund the police as an example.
Gerrymandering isn't the only problem in the house. We also have to deal with the fact that the house is capped at a level that doesn't allow for proper representation. The house is supposed to reflect the popular will of the people, but at its current number of reps it's unable to do so. It is also tilted toward geography.
Good stuff for the electoral strategy. As Keith Ellison observed 4 years ago, Ds need to campaign 365 days a year, every year, for offices at every level of government.
D's need to work on their "workers first" and "middle class first" messaging. Merkel's speech at the 2018 Petersberg Climate Dialog in which she assured workers they would not be left behind in Germany’s climate policies: “Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first, and not of the CO2 emissions first" is a good example.
Ds would also do well to figure out how to get bipartisan support for raising and allocating capital to projects on the energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, housing, education and health care fronts that are innovative, have significant potential to become popular and persuasive, and which the private sector is unable or unwilling to finance. David Roberts' 10/21/20 story about the potential of geothermal energy to "solve energy" is one example. Surely an important lesson from the pandemic is that the private sector can do amazing things when governments provide some of the capital. Demonstration projects, like vaccine trials, are key. Nothing is more persuasive than success. Ask Elon.
This is a good piece, but one thing that's missing is addressing the point Matt sometimes makes about why Democrats haven't been able to make lefty policies popular by effectively implementing them in a blue state, and some of the bluest states (VT, MA, MD) often elect moderate Republican governors.
Why doesn't Westley immediately reveal himself after rescuing Buttercup from Vizzini? Instead, he complains about women until she pushes him off a cliff. Only then does he reveal himself. It's kind of weird.
Are there any political reforms that Republicans would support that would have the added benefit of addressing disproportion? I have seen person-in-the-street interviews at Trump "stop the steal" rallies with Trump supporters saying that electoral reforms should be a priority in 2021. The reforms they seek are usually not clear, but I wonder whether there are any that could have bipartisan support and/or benefit.
@Aaron - on the whole, do you think the AI project has been / continues to be a success? Feels like there was so much momentum around it 10 years ago but fear that the research has settled into a finding of 'campaign tactics don't actually move the needle that much when facing off against another active/sentient campaign organization' that makes the project not super relevant, particularly when the top campaigns have essentially unlimited resources now, so there's no sense of trade offs in priorities (see M.Y.'s other article on higher interest rates!). Feels a bit like we (n.b.: I was very lightly involved w/ the AI project in 2011/12) spent 12 years discovering that the old way of organizing (talking to friends & neighbors, letting TV reach strangers w/ middling turnout scores) kinda works pretty well.
Not that any of this defeats the basic point of this post - rigorous causal evidence is good and we should use more of it! - but I would love to know if anyone here is aware of any academic papers around the Vote Forward campaigns. I say this as someone who wrote a bunch of letters this year (because why not give it a try, but then got curious about the evidence base and all I could find was their report on Virginia in 2019: https://votefwd.org/posts/Virginia-2019
What weirded me out is they do a very non-standard thing of showing error bars of 1 standard error in each direction (so basically a 67% confidence interval) which struck me as odd. I couldn't find any academic papers about it via the other routes like Google Scholar. So I'm just left wondering if there's something fishy here. But would love to be disabused of that worry.
Hey Aaron! Thanks for writing this, and specifically mentioning how important unions are to long-term success. I think a "what if" scenario that doesn't get discussed enough is "What if Democrats had gone all-in on EFCA/card check in 2009 instead of health care?" Obamacare has certainly been a boon to Democrats over the past couple of cycles (which I think progressives should bring up more as an example of how going out on a limb for big policies that benefit lots of people in a concrete way is a good thing in the long run, even if it's unpopular in the short run). At the same time, though, I feel like Democrats underestimate the difference between a growing union movement and a shrinking one, or assume that we're on a permanent slide away from unionization and can't turn things around. There's no messaging or organizing silver bullet that can keep culturally conservative voters in a liberal party, but unions give people both clear financial incentives to support the Democratic Party, and an identity + a social network that ties them to the party.
I'm in Madison, WI, wondering the best way to implement these ideas to win back more share of power for the Democrats. From the top level, you have Dane and Milwaukee County that skew heavily blue and contribute a huge share of the vote count for Democrats. Dane participation levels are very high, I believe in 2020 84% of registered voters in Madison participated. There's only so much you can juice out of that before you get diminishing returns. Dave Weigel noted the importance of Waukesha county and that county was critical for Biden winning. Dane and Waukesha are inherently different though; Dane hosts the largest university in the state while Waukesha is part of the former WOW Republican stronghold.
The state is gerrymandered to hell, and my hope is that the governor can force some fairer maps by veto, but it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon (especially because SCOTUS refused to step in to blatant gerrymandering). How do you get progressives and activists that are heavily concentrated in 2 areas of the state to mobilize that can get areas like Waukesha to switch over, slowly but surely? Ben Winkler is doing something right I'm just curious if there are specific examples that can be applied to Wisconsin. Do we have any studies as to how the state supreme court "Democrat" candidate was able to win her race this spring?
Technically, Im not a "we" ... Im a bonafide swing voter.
The number 1 thing that Democrats should do is not turn off voters.
Middle voters like myself like all the core policies that you mention, but then we have to weigh that against... well, it might not happen, so is it worth "defund the police" and "give money to middle class students" policies? Its perception.
The whole article sort of comes across as a paid advertisement.
I find the bias arguments uncompelling, maybe even disingenuous. If we want to win the senate, adopt more popular positions to win the senate. I feel like the left became obsessed with the Overton Window. Adopted radical positions to pull centrists over (e.g., Medicare for All, critical gender theory, student loan debt forgiveness, green new deal). Ignores the branding spill over effects. Acts surprised Trump carries Iowa by 8%p.p..
Agree with every point -- that's my comment. Thx!
I have to confess a bit of skepticism about these very specific explanations for the swing of Hispanic voters to Trump. I wonder if the Hispanic swing toward Trump and the Black swing toward Trump could instead be seen as a single phenomenon with a unified explanation: Hispanic and Black people who otherwise liked Trump's ideas were worried in 2016 that Trump might govern as a hardcore racist. Instead he governed as a plausible-deniability racial dog whistler. So by 2020, a bunch of these people weren't afraid of him anymore, and decided to vote for him on the issues.
This is a great piece, but I do have one bone to pick around the idea that the "game isn't fair". I see this idea being kicked around quite often - in more than one country. To me, it's a lazy excuse. It's like saying that while yes you may have lost the basketball game you were the fastest person on the court. It may be true, but it has no bearing on the outcome of the actual game being played.
It seems that the strategies that Democrats use rely on the assumption that "more votes == more winning" and when that doesn't end up being true they say that the game isn't fair.
Democrats have a similar problem as the Conservative Party of Canada - different political systems, yes, but the point stands. In the 2019 Canadian election, the Conservatives won the popular vote with 34.34% to the Liberals 33.12%. In spite of this, the Liberals won more seats with 157 to the Conservatives 121. This is because in the places where the Conservatives were popular they were really popular which resulted in them running up the score. Predictably Conservative messaging after the election focused on how the "game was unfair" because they won the popular vote, but lost the election.
This is all to say that there should be a focus on winning the game as it exists, not the game that people may want to exist.
This is a great article and really speaks to a path forward. One area I would like to see explored more is if there is a fundamental psychology difference that makes this sort of relational persuasion a harder lift for the current Democratic coalition, and much more organic for the modern Republican/Conservative coalition. Here's why: It's been kind of conventional wisdom / "good manners" that we shouldn't "talk politics" in polite society in precisely the way this piece is describing: to people that might be disagreeable to it. Democrats being the coalition of colege-educated professionals now, take to heart a lot more of this "good manners" cannon. Meanwhile, both because of the coalition being working class and fundamentally anti-politically correct folks, combined with the fact that Trump specifically as a candidate exuded having no shame, it's a heck of a lot easier for his followers to bulldoze their relations in the name of spreading the gospel of Trump.
I saw that a lot in my neck of the woods. In local democratic groups, we emailed people asking them to share as much as they could posts by local candidates and Biden. Virtually no one seemed to do that among the Democratic groups. They were much more comfortable sharing random Vox articles about the news, if about politics at all. Hardly something that will really convince the marginal low-information voter. Wheras, if you looked at their opponents, their posts seemed to get ten to 100 times the shares and likes! And our neighbors that are very Trumpy share posts directly from Biden or Republicans all the time.
So I guess my questions are:
1. Does this liberal / conservative psychology idea have any empirical underpinnings?
2. What do we do to combat it besides sharing this article and yelling at others FOR REALS SHARE BIDEN MEMES!
3. Is there a playbook on how to create these groups and make sure people aren't immediately pissed off, burning relations that I think liberals worry about a lot more.
"Democrats should run on popular ideas."
And not run on unpopular ideas like say increasing immigration, forgiving student loans or defunding the police. Or if you want to run on those ideas you need to rebrand them. Think estate tax vs. death tax. Say for example police accountability rather than defund the police as an example.
Gerrymandering isn't the only problem in the house. We also have to deal with the fact that the house is capped at a level that doesn't allow for proper representation. The house is supposed to reflect the popular will of the people, but at its current number of reps it's unable to do so. It is also tilted toward geography.
Good stuff for the electoral strategy. As Keith Ellison observed 4 years ago, Ds need to campaign 365 days a year, every year, for offices at every level of government.
D's need to work on their "workers first" and "middle class first" messaging. Merkel's speech at the 2018 Petersberg Climate Dialog in which she assured workers they would not be left behind in Germany’s climate policies: “Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first, and not of the CO2 emissions first" is a good example.
Ds would also do well to figure out how to get bipartisan support for raising and allocating capital to projects on the energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, housing, education and health care fronts that are innovative, have significant potential to become popular and persuasive, and which the private sector is unable or unwilling to finance. David Roberts' 10/21/20 story about the potential of geothermal energy to "solve energy" is one example. Surely an important lesson from the pandemic is that the private sector can do amazing things when governments provide some of the capital. Demonstration projects, like vaccine trials, are key. Nothing is more persuasive than success. Ask Elon.
This is a good piece, but one thing that's missing is addressing the point Matt sometimes makes about why Democrats haven't been able to make lefty policies popular by effectively implementing them in a blue state, and some of the bluest states (VT, MA, MD) often elect moderate Republican governors.
Why doesn't Westley immediately reveal himself after rescuing Buttercup from Vizzini? Instead, he complains about women until she pushes him off a cliff. Only then does he reveal himself. It's kind of weird.
Are there any political reforms that Republicans would support that would have the added benefit of addressing disproportion? I have seen person-in-the-street interviews at Trump "stop the steal" rallies with Trump supporters saying that electoral reforms should be a priority in 2021. The reforms they seek are usually not clear, but I wonder whether there are any that could have bipartisan support and/or benefit.
@Aaron - on the whole, do you think the AI project has been / continues to be a success? Feels like there was so much momentum around it 10 years ago but fear that the research has settled into a finding of 'campaign tactics don't actually move the needle that much when facing off against another active/sentient campaign organization' that makes the project not super relevant, particularly when the top campaigns have essentially unlimited resources now, so there's no sense of trade offs in priorities (see M.Y.'s other article on higher interest rates!). Feels a bit like we (n.b.: I was very lightly involved w/ the AI project in 2011/12) spent 12 years discovering that the old way of organizing (talking to friends & neighbors, letting TV reach strangers w/ middling turnout scores) kinda works pretty well.
Not that any of this defeats the basic point of this post - rigorous causal evidence is good and we should use more of it! - but I would love to know if anyone here is aware of any academic papers around the Vote Forward campaigns. I say this as someone who wrote a bunch of letters this year (because why not give it a try, but then got curious about the evidence base and all I could find was their report on Virginia in 2019: https://votefwd.org/posts/Virginia-2019
What weirded me out is they do a very non-standard thing of showing error bars of 1 standard error in each direction (so basically a 67% confidence interval) which struck me as odd. I couldn't find any academic papers about it via the other routes like Google Scholar. So I'm just left wondering if there's something fishy here. But would love to be disabused of that worry.
Hey Aaron! Thanks for writing this, and specifically mentioning how important unions are to long-term success. I think a "what if" scenario that doesn't get discussed enough is "What if Democrats had gone all-in on EFCA/card check in 2009 instead of health care?" Obamacare has certainly been a boon to Democrats over the past couple of cycles (which I think progressives should bring up more as an example of how going out on a limb for big policies that benefit lots of people in a concrete way is a good thing in the long run, even if it's unpopular in the short run). At the same time, though, I feel like Democrats underestimate the difference between a growing union movement and a shrinking one, or assume that we're on a permanent slide away from unionization and can't turn things around. There's no messaging or organizing silver bullet that can keep culturally conservative voters in a liberal party, but unions give people both clear financial incentives to support the Democratic Party, and an identity + a social network that ties them to the party.
I'm in Madison, WI, wondering the best way to implement these ideas to win back more share of power for the Democrats. From the top level, you have Dane and Milwaukee County that skew heavily blue and contribute a huge share of the vote count for Democrats. Dane participation levels are very high, I believe in 2020 84% of registered voters in Madison participated. There's only so much you can juice out of that before you get diminishing returns. Dave Weigel noted the importance of Waukesha county and that county was critical for Biden winning. Dane and Waukesha are inherently different though; Dane hosts the largest university in the state while Waukesha is part of the former WOW Republican stronghold.
The state is gerrymandered to hell, and my hope is that the governor can force some fairer maps by veto, but it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon (especially because SCOTUS refused to step in to blatant gerrymandering). How do you get progressives and activists that are heavily concentrated in 2 areas of the state to mobilize that can get areas like Waukesha to switch over, slowly but surely? Ben Winkler is doing something right I'm just curious if there are specific examples that can be applied to Wisconsin. Do we have any studies as to how the state supreme court "Democrat" candidate was able to win her race this spring?
Technically, Im not a "we" ... Im a bonafide swing voter.
The number 1 thing that Democrats should do is not turn off voters.
Middle voters like myself like all the core policies that you mention, but then we have to weigh that against... well, it might not happen, so is it worth "defund the police" and "give money to middle class students" policies? Its perception.
The whole article sort of comes across as a paid advertisement.