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 think Biden and Teresa Greenfield would be surprised to hear they supported MFA! And there's the rub -- how much can our candidates control the insincere branding Fox News places on them? That's worth a whole other think piece. The idea here is to stipulate a world where there will be progressive activists agitating for more radical change (after all, that's how it's always been!). If that's the landscape, how can we win the most votes in red-tinted states/districts?
That said, I would welcome someone to write the companion piece -- how can we get the entire left to sing from the same song sheet? No easy task there either.
Seems wrong to put this on branding from Fox News - for 14 months voters watched a primary process where people openly talked about unpopular things like banning private health insurance, raising taxes on the middle class, etc. As an Alexander Agadjanian study showed, even brief neutral coverage of the primary had significant negative impact on independents' likelihood to support a generic Democrat.
The companion piece could focus on how to elevate a mainstream Democratic brand that is distinct from what you (correctly) see as the inevitable reality - the far-left and the right will collaborate to elevate the far-left.
Less inevitable is how the presidential primary was conducted & discussed, with such a misreading of the primary electorate (and by extension the general).
I didn't say Biden or Greenfield supported MFA (but both got crushed) and I don't think contentious debates in the primaries are insincere branding. That's accurate branding. What's more interesting is the progressive strategy worked. Biden is far more progressive than Obama. The windows have shifted but as a result he lost Iowa by 8%p.p. so what a 20% swing vs. Obama. Seems like a simple tradeoff. Although I think a poor one.
Whether or not Democrats should move to the right in order to do better in the midwest (I think yes!) is a separate question from whether or not it is fair that the electoral college gives more power to those who live in swing states than those who live in safe states or that the senate makes rural areas much more important than urban areas despite their similar populations.
I agree. Definitely two separate issues. I'm sympathetic to popular vote for president argument. I can see that working. I just think the bias / power concerns of the senate ignore the circularity of the argument - in that the bias has been amplified by the current positions. I mean ... we had 57 seats in the 111th!! Do we just ignore that? That was just 10 years ago.
I this the piece here is great and I learned a lot from it, but I think David here makes a great point that’s been kind of ignored in the replies. Why is the motivation and introduction always about the unfair geography?
I worry a lot about polarization and the declining trust in “the system”. Saying “The only reason we lose is the game is rigged against us” seems like a really aggressive way of ramping up polarization and eroding trust in the political system. And I think that only helps Trump-like politicians, in the end.
It’s ok to want to persuade people regardless of whether the geographic distribution of power is fair or not.
Here’s the thing: its not like the GOP & Trump don’t adopt unpopular positions. Repealing Obamacare, refusing to extend the $600 a week unemployment benefit, even leaving the Paris Accords & building The Border Wall were hugely unpopular. So what would explain Democrats getting penalized for debating contentious issues in the primaries (which the nominee did not end up adopting) but GOP not facing the same kind of penalty?
The issue is that adopting popular ideas doesn’t really do the trick when you’re working in an anti-democratic (small d) system. Democratic senators (the minority) represent 20 million more Americans than Republican senators (the majority) - clearly the Democrats’ ideas are pretty popular with a majority of Americans! Those Americans’ opinions should matter just as much as Iowans, but they don’t because they live in more populous states.
I'm trying to think where we disagree here. I think it's more that I like the structure of the Senate. I think it's good that it exists. I'm fine with the inequity of each vote. I don't think a national direct democracy would be better system. I'm also skeptical of this bias / power argument of the Senate in only that we had 57 seats in the 111th. I don't think that can be discounted.
“I’m fine with the inequity of each seat” is a acknowledging that the bias/power imbalance does exist. And I think that exactly where we disagree - I’m not fine with it. It’s not about the parties and whether they have/had the most seats. It’s about the voters and the fact that some votes matter more than others. I don’t think that Americans living in very populated states (and that includes some red states) should have their interests massively underrepresented in one of the most powerful institutions in our government.
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.
Part of it I think is just that racial depolarization means that working class Black and Latino voters will start to vote more like white working class voters. Because these groups are so overwhelmingly democratic, the median Black or Latino voter is likely MUCH more culturally conservative than the median white voter. And since Black and Latinos voters are disproportionately lower income, the very real wage gains un 2017-19 disproportionately benefited them. Matt has already written about this in the context of Trump making a explicit appeal to Black voters in the GOP convention (and you can probably also throw in the Trump campaigns more or less abandoning immigration as a campaign platform in 2020).
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.
Obviously I agree that we should "focus on winning the game as it exists" -- that's the whole point of this piece. At the same time, I don't think we should lose sight of the normative goal of "one person, one vote" and that those votes are of equal worth. I will always at least mention this power disparity in my pieces because I look forward to the day when everyone in America, regardless of political disposition, has equal political power.
I have a separate comment on this, but I think it's important to note that even if the party took all your advice it would still not even be trying to "win the game as it exists." As far as I can see it still writes off WWC voters and tries to maintain the college educated + minorities coalition. Democratic economic policies are overwhelmingly popular when polled, but the party's cultural positions are rejected. Because of the way the party apparatus is set up (dominated by graduates of elite institutions and funded by them as well) it is unwilling to let go of cultural signaling. An analysis of how to exit out of the current paradigm is sorely needed.
But, wasn't the constitution specifically designed to ensure a federal structure (rights of the states, which is why each state has two senators), and avoid tyranny of the majority? And this system worked for is for over 230 years, so what if changing to a system that favors popular vote not work out? I worry that democrats, especially the more left wing, has forgotten the art of persuasion; they come across as morally superior who are sure of the efficacy of their policy prescriptions, and folks who don't agree are racists or foolish or both. If Dems' ideas are unpopular in rural America, maybe we ought to go there and convince people why these ideas are good for them and good for America. If we think we can't, them perhaps we should abandon those policies given the political strength rural America enjoys at the moment.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think arguing that we should make the game more fair is a good thing. Unfair systems are bad and we shouldn’t be scared to say so! To go back to your basketball example, if “the game” of basketball were such that one team ALWAYS had a 10 point advantage, wouldn’t there be calls to change it to a more fair system? And wouldn’t the people arguing for that be correct to do so?
That doesn’t mean we don’t also try to win the game as it exists; obviously that’s the only choice that exists when it comes to politics. (As opposed to basketball where, if it were as unfair as politics was, people would just not play the game and it would die out.) But just saying we should forever accept a system that doesn’t let the majority win and govern seems really, really bad to me.
While I would prefer the system show less current bias, I think complaining about that structure is a loser's game. Can Democrats compete? Sure they can! I seem to recall that the Democrats held SIXTY Senate seats as recently as 2008. I don't recall the Republicans ever getting that close.
Democrats have proved they can win. They just need to keep fighting and use good strategies, like the ones in this Yglesias post.
But that's not the case. Both parties are starting with equal opportunity. They could both choose to change their policies and messaging to attract different voters. The Republicans did it when they selected Trump. The political map is not fixed.
Just because Democrats have chosen to pursue a strategy that is efficient at getting them votes, but inefficient at getting them power doesn't mean that the system is inherently unfair. It may just mean that the Democrats need to pursue a more optimal strategy that has a more even distribution of votes across geographic divides.
I just profoundly disagree with this on a fundamental level. A system where getting votes does not translate into getting power is, by definition, unfair. I completely agree that a very different version of the Democratic Party could win power. But it would have to do so by abandoning popular ideas supported by a majority of people, which in turn would make them holding power just as unfair as it currently is when Republicans hold power.
I think the tell here is you said “Both parties are starting with equal opportunity.” Sure, I’ll grant you that, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying it’s unfair for the parties. I’m saying it’s unfair for the people who deserve to have their votes and their policy preferences matter.
Maybe the ideas they would have to abandon aren't popular? Maybe those unpopular ideas are what prohibits them from winning elections and enacting their agendas? $15 minimum wage just passed in Florida.
Maybe what's unfair is that the majority of people are represented by a party who despite having the advantage of holding popular ideas are unable to get things done. I don't think it's the electoral system that's unfair. I think the Democrats are bad at winning.
Yeah, but what you're saying is that the popular party with the popular ideas that a majority of people want to enact the program of should change some of their popular program, because, while it's popular, it's unpopular with the minority of people who hold unpopular opinions but have the electoral system biased towards them.
That's probably a smart tactical move, but the fact that it's a smart tactical move speaks to how the system is unfair towards the majority who support the popular party that can't win despite their popular ideas.
First, the disproportion problem is a serious one and should not be ignored. The mechanisms that take advantage of it (partisan gerrymandering and the Electoral College in particular) should continue to be opposed. Second, the suggestion that Democrats would win with more popular positions (or by jettisoning unpopular ones) is incompatible with the observation that the rural vote is a largely cultural one. In other words, Democrats could abandon the whole progressive agenda and still not attract the Trump voter because they don't vote according to policy. It was observed that rural WWC conservatives favor many progressive policies when polled about them separately but then do not vote for the party that advocates for them. Thus, abandoning the policies that the Democratic coalition favors would lose Democratic votes while gaining no Republican votes. A dumb strategy if you ask me.
Putting aside whether or not Democrats could change their coalition into one that is more electorally efficient (I think that there are things they could do on the margin on that front, but the fact that urban rural polarization is going up throughout the developed world makes me think that it would be swimming against the tide, but reasonable people can disagree. ), it is still a bad thing that the citizens of those electorally inefficient areas have their interests systematically underrepresented, and if we can we should try and do something about that. For instance, the country as a whole is 13.5% black but the median state is 8.5% black. Because of the Senate, this means that the views of black people are significantly less influential than they should be based on their share of the population.
Spot on. We point to the popular vote as some consolidation prize. Obama wins Iowa by 10 and 6 %p.p. and we just lost by 8%p.p. to Trump. If we don't have COVID - I really Trump wins this walking away. I don't get it.
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.
Dems, particularly the more lefty ones, would benefit enormously from a basic understanding of sales and marketing. One thing the GOP are masters of is controlling the branding of an idea. "Fair Tax" sounds so good for people that don't understand tax brackets. The whole death panels thing. The banned cheeseburgers from the GND document.
It’s not just the rebranding. Republicans have an entire media apparatus that is very disciplined into using those phrases. And they don’t delve into egghead arguments about whether or not the policy is popular or not publicly which dilutes the brand.
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.
Matt, do you have good stats on how much the cap at 435 skews representation? It's bad for Democrats that Wyoming (pop 578k) has one house member, but also good for Democrats that Montana (pop >1M) also only has a single rep.
Under the wyoming rule california would have 15 more members, just as an example for one of the bigger states. How this would break down exactly between Dems and Republicans I'm not sure, but I have to imagine that it would favor the Dems. If you instead went with the cube root of population rule it would bring things even more in line - it would add 158 seats to house. Offhand I don't have any info on how much the current cap skews representation but I'm sure it's out there.
Fixing the house would have the additional benefit of making the electoral college a bit more same as well.
Now, I don't comment on what this would do to the actual house make-up, because adding a hundred-and-change new Reps would depend heavily on redrawn maps, but
Actually if Montana had two districts one would probably be D or swing unless there was a very effective gerrymander. That doesn't necessarily mean doubling the size of the House would benefit Ds, but the results would be mixed state-by-state.
Possibly, though if Boise weren't split in Idaho, we might have a Democratic representative there (some years at least). MT has a redistricting commission, so you may very well be right, but with an R trifecta there now, I fear what will happen to that commission. MT is in line for second seat in 2022 I believe, so perhaps we will find out soon enough!
MT used to have two seats (until 1992) and one was D for a long time. Because MT has a bunch of mid-size cities rather than one larger one (like Boise) a gerrymander might be harder. I guess we'll see what they do. If you just split the state in half the western part should be D or swing. Splitting Idaho in half naturally splits Boise too. It would also be nice if there was a way to force UT to have an actual SLC district.
H.R.1 should include proportional representation at the state level, and take the gerrymandering away entirely. With more seats and a reasonable vote threshold for the smallest states (say, 30% for a 2-seat Wyoming), problem solved.
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.
It's extremely clear in the text that he's jealous of her betrothal to the prince and wants to test her. She (understandably given she thinks he killed her great love) pushes him off the cliff before he can reveal himself after her answer.
This is obviously not, you know, *good*. But the narrative is understandable.
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.
See "The Year of Relational" for how AI can help activate a host of innovative activity. While the "old way of organizing" may have have been based on social networks, the standard operating procedure of campaigns from at least 1992 to 2016 was "recruit volunteers; give them a list". That desperately needed to change, and it is.
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..
I think Biden and Teresa Greenfield would be surprised to hear they supported MFA! And there's the rub -- how much can our candidates control the insincere branding Fox News places on them? That's worth a whole other think piece. The idea here is to stipulate a world where there will be progressive activists agitating for more radical change (after all, that's how it's always been!). If that's the landscape, how can we win the most votes in red-tinted states/districts?
That said, I would welcome someone to write the companion piece -- how can we get the entire left to sing from the same song sheet? No easy task there either.
Seems wrong to put this on branding from Fox News - for 14 months voters watched a primary process where people openly talked about unpopular things like banning private health insurance, raising taxes on the middle class, etc. As an Alexander Agadjanian study showed, even brief neutral coverage of the primary had significant negative impact on independents' likelihood to support a generic Democrat.
The companion piece could focus on how to elevate a mainstream Democratic brand that is distinct from what you (correctly) see as the inevitable reality - the far-left and the right will collaborate to elevate the far-left.
Less inevitable is how the presidential primary was conducted & discussed, with such a misreading of the primary electorate (and by extension the general).
I didn't say Biden or Greenfield supported MFA (but both got crushed) and I don't think contentious debates in the primaries are insincere branding. That's accurate branding. What's more interesting is the progressive strategy worked. Biden is far more progressive than Obama. The windows have shifted but as a result he lost Iowa by 8%p.p. so what a 20% swing vs. Obama. Seems like a simple tradeoff. Although I think a poor one.
Whether or not Democrats should move to the right in order to do better in the midwest (I think yes!) is a separate question from whether or not it is fair that the electoral college gives more power to those who live in swing states than those who live in safe states or that the senate makes rural areas much more important than urban areas despite their similar populations.
I agree. Definitely two separate issues. I'm sympathetic to popular vote for president argument. I can see that working. I just think the bias / power concerns of the senate ignore the circularity of the argument - in that the bias has been amplified by the current positions. I mean ... we had 57 seats in the 111th!! Do we just ignore that? That was just 10 years ago.
What position did Biden take that put him far to left of the median voter?
I this the piece here is great and I learned a lot from it, but I think David here makes a great point that’s been kind of ignored in the replies. Why is the motivation and introduction always about the unfair geography?
I worry a lot about polarization and the declining trust in “the system”. Saying “The only reason we lose is the game is rigged against us” seems like a really aggressive way of ramping up polarization and eroding trust in the political system. And I think that only helps Trump-like politicians, in the end.
It’s ok to want to persuade people regardless of whether the geographic distribution of power is fair or not.
Here’s the thing: its not like the GOP & Trump don’t adopt unpopular positions. Repealing Obamacare, refusing to extend the $600 a week unemployment benefit, even leaving the Paris Accords & building The Border Wall were hugely unpopular. So what would explain Democrats getting penalized for debating contentious issues in the primaries (which the nominee did not end up adopting) but GOP not facing the same kind of penalty?
The issue is that adopting popular ideas doesn’t really do the trick when you’re working in an anti-democratic (small d) system. Democratic senators (the minority) represent 20 million more Americans than Republican senators (the majority) - clearly the Democrats’ ideas are pretty popular with a majority of Americans! Those Americans’ opinions should matter just as much as Iowans, but they don’t because they live in more populous states.
I'm trying to think where we disagree here. I think it's more that I like the structure of the Senate. I think it's good that it exists. I'm fine with the inequity of each vote. I don't think a national direct democracy would be better system. I'm also skeptical of this bias / power argument of the Senate in only that we had 57 seats in the 111th. I don't think that can be discounted.
“I’m fine with the inequity of each seat” is a acknowledging that the bias/power imbalance does exist. And I think that exactly where we disagree - I’m not fine with it. It’s not about the parties and whether they have/had the most seats. It’s about the voters and the fact that some votes matter more than others. I don’t think that Americans living in very populated states (and that includes some red states) should have their interests massively underrepresented in one of the most powerful institutions in our government.
Agree with every point -- that's my comment. Thx!
Thanks for reading every point :)
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.
Part of it I think is just that racial depolarization means that working class Black and Latino voters will start to vote more like white working class voters. Because these groups are so overwhelmingly democratic, the median Black or Latino voter is likely MUCH more culturally conservative than the median white voter. And since Black and Latinos voters are disproportionately lower income, the very real wage gains un 2017-19 disproportionately benefited them. Matt has already written about this in the context of Trump making a explicit appeal to Black voters in the GOP convention (and you can probably also throw in the Trump campaigns more or less abandoning immigration as a campaign platform in 2020).
The bit that really gets missed is that he governed as a plausible-deniability racial dog whistler *while the job market finally started heating up*.
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.
Obviously I agree that we should "focus on winning the game as it exists" -- that's the whole point of this piece. At the same time, I don't think we should lose sight of the normative goal of "one person, one vote" and that those votes are of equal worth. I will always at least mention this power disparity in my pieces because I look forward to the day when everyone in America, regardless of political disposition, has equal political power.
I have a separate comment on this, but I think it's important to note that even if the party took all your advice it would still not even be trying to "win the game as it exists." As far as I can see it still writes off WWC voters and tries to maintain the college educated + minorities coalition. Democratic economic policies are overwhelmingly popular when polled, but the party's cultural positions are rejected. Because of the way the party apparatus is set up (dominated by graduates of elite institutions and funded by them as well) it is unwilling to let go of cultural signaling. An analysis of how to exit out of the current paradigm is sorely needed.
But, wasn't the constitution specifically designed to ensure a federal structure (rights of the states, which is why each state has two senators), and avoid tyranny of the majority? And this system worked for is for over 230 years, so what if changing to a system that favors popular vote not work out? I worry that democrats, especially the more left wing, has forgotten the art of persuasion; they come across as morally superior who are sure of the efficacy of their policy prescriptions, and folks who don't agree are racists or foolish or both. If Dems' ideas are unpopular in rural America, maybe we ought to go there and convince people why these ideas are good for them and good for America. If we think we can't, them perhaps we should abandon those policies given the political strength rural America enjoys at the moment.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think arguing that we should make the game more fair is a good thing. Unfair systems are bad and we shouldn’t be scared to say so! To go back to your basketball example, if “the game” of basketball were such that one team ALWAYS had a 10 point advantage, wouldn’t there be calls to change it to a more fair system? And wouldn’t the people arguing for that be correct to do so?
That doesn’t mean we don’t also try to win the game as it exists; obviously that’s the only choice that exists when it comes to politics. (As opposed to basketball where, if it were as unfair as politics was, people would just not play the game and it would die out.) But just saying we should forever accept a system that doesn’t let the majority win and govern seems really, really bad to me.
While I would prefer the system show less current bias, I think complaining about that structure is a loser's game. Can Democrats compete? Sure they can! I seem to recall that the Democrats held SIXTY Senate seats as recently as 2008. I don't recall the Republicans ever getting that close.
Democrats have proved they can win. They just need to keep fighting and use good strategies, like the ones in this Yglesias post.
But that's not the case. Both parties are starting with equal opportunity. They could both choose to change their policies and messaging to attract different voters. The Republicans did it when they selected Trump. The political map is not fixed.
Just because Democrats have chosen to pursue a strategy that is efficient at getting them votes, but inefficient at getting them power doesn't mean that the system is inherently unfair. It may just mean that the Democrats need to pursue a more optimal strategy that has a more even distribution of votes across geographic divides.
I just profoundly disagree with this on a fundamental level. A system where getting votes does not translate into getting power is, by definition, unfair. I completely agree that a very different version of the Democratic Party could win power. But it would have to do so by abandoning popular ideas supported by a majority of people, which in turn would make them holding power just as unfair as it currently is when Republicans hold power.
I think the tell here is you said “Both parties are starting with equal opportunity.” Sure, I’ll grant you that, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying it’s unfair for the parties. I’m saying it’s unfair for the people who deserve to have their votes and their policy preferences matter.
Maybe the ideas they would have to abandon aren't popular? Maybe those unpopular ideas are what prohibits them from winning elections and enacting their agendas? $15 minimum wage just passed in Florida.
Maybe what's unfair is that the majority of people are represented by a party who despite having the advantage of holding popular ideas are unable to get things done. I don't think it's the electoral system that's unfair. I think the Democrats are bad at winning.
Yeah, but what you're saying is that the popular party with the popular ideas that a majority of people want to enact the program of should change some of their popular program, because, while it's popular, it's unpopular with the minority of people who hold unpopular opinions but have the electoral system biased towards them.
That's probably a smart tactical move, but the fact that it's a smart tactical move speaks to how the system is unfair towards the majority who support the popular party that can't win despite their popular ideas.
First, the disproportion problem is a serious one and should not be ignored. The mechanisms that take advantage of it (partisan gerrymandering and the Electoral College in particular) should continue to be opposed. Second, the suggestion that Democrats would win with more popular positions (or by jettisoning unpopular ones) is incompatible with the observation that the rural vote is a largely cultural one. In other words, Democrats could abandon the whole progressive agenda and still not attract the Trump voter because they don't vote according to policy. It was observed that rural WWC conservatives favor many progressive policies when polled about them separately but then do not vote for the party that advocates for them. Thus, abandoning the policies that the Democratic coalition favors would lose Democratic votes while gaining no Republican votes. A dumb strategy if you ask me.
Putting aside whether or not Democrats could change their coalition into one that is more electorally efficient (I think that there are things they could do on the margin on that front, but the fact that urban rural polarization is going up throughout the developed world makes me think that it would be swimming against the tide, but reasonable people can disagree. ), it is still a bad thing that the citizens of those electorally inefficient areas have their interests systematically underrepresented, and if we can we should try and do something about that. For instance, the country as a whole is 13.5% black but the median state is 8.5% black. Because of the Senate, this means that the views of black people are significantly less influential than they should be based on their share of the population.
Spot on. We point to the popular vote as some consolidation prize. Obama wins Iowa by 10 and 6 %p.p. and we just lost by 8%p.p. to Trump. If we don't have COVID - I really Trump wins this walking away. I don't get it.
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.
Dems, particularly the more lefty ones, would benefit enormously from a basic understanding of sales and marketing. One thing the GOP are masters of is controlling the branding of an idea. "Fair Tax" sounds so good for people that don't understand tax brackets. The whole death panels thing. The banned cheeseburgers from the GND document.
Agree 100%. Republicans focus group everything. That's how we got phrases like:
Death tax
Partial birth abortion
Death panels
...and many more, all thanks to Frank Luntz
Andrew Yang's branding of UBI as "freedom dividend" was brilliant. Put him in charge!
It’s not just the rebranding. Republicans have an entire media apparatus that is very disciplined into using those phrases. And they don’t delve into egghead arguments about whether or not the policy is popular or not publicly which dilutes the brand.
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.
Matt, do you have good stats on how much the cap at 435 skews representation? It's bad for Democrats that Wyoming (pop 578k) has one house member, but also good for Democrats that Montana (pop >1M) also only has a single rep.
Under the wyoming rule california would have 15 more members, just as an example for one of the bigger states. How this would break down exactly between Dems and Republicans I'm not sure, but I have to imagine that it would favor the Dems. If you instead went with the cube root of population rule it would bring things even more in line - it would add 158 seats to house. Offhand I don't have any info on how much the current cap skews representation but I'm sure it's out there.
Fixing the house would have the additional benefit of making the electoral college a bit more same as well.
I actually ran these numbers on the assumption that we peg the population of a district to Wyoming. Here are the results
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FvjuOJ1qxhWfjX8QSfg-Tt_vM4KFNgRS4rkRaBVi-9Y/edit?usp=drivesdk
Now, I don't comment on what this would do to the actual house make-up, because adding a hundred-and-change new Reps would depend heavily on redrawn maps, but
Actually if Montana had two districts one would probably be D or swing unless there was a very effective gerrymander. That doesn't necessarily mean doubling the size of the House would benefit Ds, but the results would be mixed state-by-state.
Possibly, though if Boise weren't split in Idaho, we might have a Democratic representative there (some years at least). MT has a redistricting commission, so you may very well be right, but with an R trifecta there now, I fear what will happen to that commission. MT is in line for second seat in 2022 I believe, so perhaps we will find out soon enough!
MT used to have two seats (until 1992) and one was D for a long time. Because MT has a bunch of mid-size cities rather than one larger one (like Boise) a gerrymander might be harder. I guess we'll see what they do. If you just split the state in half the western part should be D or swing. Splitting Idaho in half naturally splits Boise too. It would also be nice if there was a way to force UT to have an actual SLC district.
H.R.1 should include proportional representation at the state level, and take the gerrymandering away entirely. With more seats and a reasonable vote threshold for the smallest states (say, 30% for a 2-seat Wyoming), problem solved.
ID is also about 7 points more Republican than MT.
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.
Cinema Sins agrees with you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkhwhxj4RDE
It's extremely clear in the text that he's jealous of her betrothal to the prince and wants to test her. She (understandably given she thinks he killed her great love) pushes him off the cliff before he can reveal himself after her answer.
This is obviously not, you know, *good*. But the narrative is understandable.
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.
See "The Year of Relational" for how AI can help activate a host of innovative activity. While the "old way of organizing" may have have been based on social networks, the standard operating procedure of campaigns from at least 1992 to 2016 was "recruit volunteers; give them a list". That desperately needed to change, and it is.
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.