Absolutely right! We need to persuade people, mainly swing voters. The Trump haters don’t need much more motivation to mobilize. Trump does that for us. And, by the way, the biggest bloc of swing voters are the Nikki Haley voters who are grossed out by Trump but hate left-wing crap. Take advantage of Liz Cheney, who probably appeals to this group more than Nikki Haley does anyway. Stick with values and nudge people on how their values align with the vision for a Harris-Walz administration. Good vibes, patriotism, and “those guys are weird” is the way to go.
Personally I’m almost as much opposed to Bernie S. as I am to FT. For my husband and me,he is too far left especially now. I hope Kamala can project herself as a Strong leader who can lead the USA in both war and peace. Although I’m a registered Democrat, I hope Kamala demonstrates her Prosecutor side and demonstrates her belief in law and Justice. Hooray for a goal of building many more homes. Two-family homes can also work well. Proclaim the lower price for insulin and certain drugs and the agreement for Medicare to cap Seniors’ prescriptions at $2,000. However, when our USA Debt is so high, I don’t think proclaiming giveaways of $25,000 each 1st house or $50,000 to an aspiring Entrepreneur is going to grab Center-Right voters in a positive way. If asked again what she would do the first day in office, Kamala could explain she will read the Briefs on her desk, take necessary action and meet with her White House Team.
Re Sherrod Brown and the Biden admin's combination of actions and (intended to be symbolic and expected to be overturned? Hell if I know) gestures toward cancellation of various tranches of student debt:
"Now, his 2024 re-election campaign is in full swing and he hasn’t mentioned that victory in any of his television ads."
I assume you mean "victory" in the sense that Biden and his admin took an action (set of actions if you dig deep, but digging deep is an unlikely action on behalf of many truly marginal or swing voters) that Brown had publicly pushed for and presumably considered to be good policy and/or politics.
I will be interested to see if Moreno has or will have ads up _specifically_ targeting Brown (versus just targeting the eeevilll(tm) Democrats more generally) over Brown's role there. My first order guess is that raising the salience of the student debt cancellation might net Moreno a few votes, but I certainly don't have any particular insight into the preferences or thought processes of a voter who is potentially persuadable, between those two candidates in particular.
Notable that she's correctly leading on how housing policy is driving up costs for average hard-working Americans. It's the only issue on her website with a dedicated page to it.
I have persuaded people to listen by highlighting the things we agree on first. Most of us want healthcare, education, affordable, security, housing, and groceries. But we begin to part ways when we start talking about how/whether-or-not the government is responsible for providing these things. It disarms some of the rhetoric about our differences and creates common ground. Imagine swing voters hearing Sister Harris say something like “you would be surprised how many things Donald Trump and I agree on in regards to the wellness of this country.” Then you’re better able to highlight his unhinged and incomprehensible “solutions” and her proposals for collaboration and compromise, which stand the chance of leading to more reasonable solutions Works for me in mixed groups anyway. A shift away from the them-versus-us energy makes room for better listening and consideration of pathways forward.
A poll this week showed Larry Hogan running even with Angela Alsobrooks. Hogan will probably lose in the end, but, contra Bernie, if Maryland voters aren't that enthused about Alsobrooks that means they aren't enthused about the Far Left agenda. And if Maryland doesn't want the Far Left agenda, less progressive states definitely don't.
If Democrats don't control Congress they can't unilaterally pass their agenda.
I don't live in Maryland, so I don't know if Hogan is super popular despite being a Reagan Republican, or if Alsobrooks is super unpopular. But in previous senate elections Maryland Democrats have dominated. Something seems different with this one.
I would love to know (a) if campaigns are still sending people out door knocking and (b) if so whether they are still exclusively focused on turnout or if they have started to target persuasion voters and say persuasion-focused messages.
In the past, presidential campaigns at least, exclusively focused door knocking efforts on turnout targets—ie sporadic voters who were likely to be supporters. The thinking was that it’s easier to remind a supporter to vote than it is to change someone’s mind about who to vote for.
I have always been skeptical of both the value of door knocking for any reason and the exclusive focus on turnout targets rather than persuasion targets.
I've been confused about why commentators talk about a tension between persuasion and turnout strategies because it seems to me you can do both. And it always seemed logical to me that you want to motivate people who tend to vote D but don't always vote. As framed here I see that "turnout" means an issue-based campaign. In my experience, the work done to mobilize unreliable voters has nothing to do with messaging and is about reaching them by door knocking, phone calls etc. My guess is that this kind of work is just not on the radar screen for people engaged in online debates about campaign theory.
Billionaires and corporations are the boogeyman that Jews used to play in some societies* - they are the reason the virtuous people cannot get what they "deserve"
This is an easier narrative than explaining that most member of the middle class and upper middle class and even the working class don't want social democracy.
*I don't mean to accuse any populists of anti-Semitism. It's a parallel is all
I mean I can't think of a whole lot of human organizing that's done completely altruistically... when done best it's a win-win. So now it's not like they are like let's form an organization so we can create jobs. But that is exactly what municipalities that provide tax breaks try to buy the companies to come to their place to create jobs. or what Europeans do to get Airbus to build in a million different countries all over the place
One point of clarification, MGP's district is more suburban than rural, about 500,000 live in Clark County, which is Portland suburbia. I'm sure it's more rural than the average district, but it probably wouldn't be competitive if not for the suburban part. Sorry I gotta point that out every time.
Anyways, as for running on economics, this is going to be tough for Democrats. They can run on specific proposals to lower costs, like the insulin price cap (I personally would like to see a little more on how to ensure we don't have supply issues, but voters probably don't), but their big problem is that inflation happened on Biden's watch and that's what voters are reacting to. That's baked in to the cake and there's not much they can do about it. This is part of why I think the popularism formula needs to account for deliverables. Because voters aren't policy wonks, they just blame whoever happens to be in office for whatever's going on (not always unfairly).
I don't think those who prefer the "Mobilization" strategy (i.e. present a bold policy reform agenda) actually take that stand because they think that doing so will mobilize new voters into their coalition. The vast majority just want political leaders to present their preferred policy reform agenda regardless of the electoral consequences. In other words, they prefer to be Right more than they want to win elections. Evidence for the "Persuasion" strategy will not change their minds, because it forces them to support candidates with more moderate strategies.
I think a lot of them have either motivated reasoned themselves into believing in mobilization or live in such a blue enclave that they can't conceive of swing voters as an actual thing.
I was in Montana recently. Tester was courting split ticket voters. The ad featured a proclaimed Trump voter saying why he likes Tester and why he's a true Montanan.
In my deep blue part of California, I see mainly ads about our ballot propositions. It's a very different world.
Strong agreement (I have lived continuously in CA since 1973/age 15, and most of the time before then too).
But I suspect that for the forseeable future we are stuck with the low de facto threshold to qualify either via initiative or via the legislature (yes, I do know the basic history). It's hard to see the ballot prop needed to amend the constitution passing, although it could easily enough qualify :)
I'd be happy to just fix the effin recall process (meaning both recall qualification and the jungle election to select the successor), but even that is too much to ask I think.
One more time: we have a vast amount of empirical research that demonstrates that swing voters are nothing like doctrinaire centrists. It's just a myth.
Are you saying this article IS describing swing voters as "doctrinaire centrists"? That wasn't my takeaway, but in what ways is a "doctrinaire centrist" different from what is described here? I found a previous mention in one of your peices of this phrase where you linked to this 538 article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-a-myth/
My takeaway from the 538 piece (which I only skimmed TBF) is that ~no swing voters are pro-immigration/pro-market-oriented, but otherwise all over the map.
I probably got my wires crossed on who is/is not saying swing voters are doctrinaire centrists, and what critique you are leveling. Just asking you to expand (or link to) what it is you're trying to convey in more detail. What is your critique, that this article is saying swing voters are a down-the-middle average of policy preferences? (ie that swing voters want "moderate" levels of immigration, with "moderate" levels of social support, etc.). Not my takeaway from this, but curious to read more as well, thanka
I believe you, who are some of the researchers and their papers that you find most salient on this topic? Like do we have a taxonomy of different flavors of swing voters?
Nice experiment, Ben, eager to see what the GOP version is like next week. The main limitation that I can think of is potential groupthink. These politicians obviously know what they're doing, but if all of their knowledge is running on assumptions of each other without verifying whether that knowledge is truly accurate, they could run a risk.
Aren’t a lot of the messaging decisions based on A/B testing and empirical research conducted by David Shor types? The research could be wrong, but the approach doesn’t strike me as epistemically closed.
I think his point is that it may be (probably is) based on the research of a small group of the same David Shor types upstream at the DCCC or similar orgs. So if those folks are making some faulty assumptions, everyone could be exposed.
Let's talk about Virginia. Let me inform you of what swingy women voters are talking about in Virginia, where soccer moms fell for the Youngkin "parent choice" line a couple of years ago.
Women's' reproductive health choice.
These women are angry, they are registering in record numbers and they are going to vote in record numbers. Remember how Youngkin's 16-week abortion restriction proposal worked out for Republicans in Virginia last year? They lost everything.
The guys I talk to are largely ignorant of this dynamic. Some say "oh, yeah, there's that." My gut sensing is that many of them feel threatened by a strong woman like Harris and I also sense a slight male voter shift toward Trump more for emotional reasons than any specific policy logic.
But the women are REALLY fired up. My prediction is that Democrats will outperform polls and that the highly motivated woman and minority voter turnout will carry the Presidency, Congress and maybe even yield a surprise in the Senate.
Let me finish by saying I have not met a woman under the age of 45 who says they will vote for or are even considering voting for Trump.
Oh yeah, I should mention that I man a booth soliciting people to register to vote, so not scientific but highly informed.
Okay, so due to military service my bubble is 62 years old and has moved all over America and the world. Not too small of a bubble. Amd I did write "so not scientific but highly informed."
Democrats moderately under-performed the polls in the first post Dobbs national election, 2022. I have zero doubt you're right that the overwhelming majority of Democratic-leaning woman voters are angry and motivated about abortion rights. But Democrats are increasingly a party that reliably turns out to vote in elections, which implies there's not likely to be a huge pool of Democratic-friendly voters who frequently don't vote—but who can be induced to do so provided the message is sufficiently compelling.
"You're killing me Smalls." I'm going to ask for evidence here. Please cite the polls and the under-performing results. This was a mid-term that ALWAYS breaks against incumbent party and Democrats did very well. My data says we outperformed most credible polling, especially where abortion was an issue in the race.
>This was a mid-term that ALWAYS breaks against incumbent<
Midterms don't always break against the incumbency party. The GOP made House gains in 2002. Democrats made House gains in 1998.
>Democrats did very well<
By historical standards, Dems had a good midterm in 2022, indeed. Nowhere did I state to the contrary. Nonetheless, Democrats did suffer losses in 2022: they lost the House of Representatives. Losing a chamber of Congress is fairly significant!
>My data says we outperformed most credible polling, especially where abortion was an issue in the race.<
Well "your" data appears to depart from Nate Silver's. As I wrote at the outset, it was very modest (polls were pretty accurate that cycle), but nonetheless Democrats performed slightly worse in House races than the polls predicted. Money quote from Nate: "...the results were reasonably well-predicted by polls and forecast models, which had Republicans favored in the House, and the Senate as being close. Technically, in fact, Democrats were very slightly overestimated by the polls..."
"Admittedly, my methodology probably wouldn’t qualify this article for a top-tier political science journal"
So much the worse for the journal, then.
Absolutely right! We need to persuade people, mainly swing voters. The Trump haters don’t need much more motivation to mobilize. Trump does that for us. And, by the way, the biggest bloc of swing voters are the Nikki Haley voters who are grossed out by Trump but hate left-wing crap. Take advantage of Liz Cheney, who probably appeals to this group more than Nikki Haley does anyway. Stick with values and nudge people on how their values align with the vision for a Harris-Walz administration. Good vibes, patriotism, and “those guys are weird” is the way to go.
Personally I’m almost as much opposed to Bernie S. as I am to FT. For my husband and me,he is too far left especially now. I hope Kamala can project herself as a Strong leader who can lead the USA in both war and peace. Although I’m a registered Democrat, I hope Kamala demonstrates her Prosecutor side and demonstrates her belief in law and Justice. Hooray for a goal of building many more homes. Two-family homes can also work well. Proclaim the lower price for insulin and certain drugs and the agreement for Medicare to cap Seniors’ prescriptions at $2,000. However, when our USA Debt is so high, I don’t think proclaiming giveaways of $25,000 each 1st house or $50,000 to an aspiring Entrepreneur is going to grab Center-Right voters in a positive way. If asked again what she would do the first day in office, Kamala could explain she will read the Briefs on her desk, take necessary action and meet with her White House Team.
Re Sherrod Brown and the Biden admin's combination of actions and (intended to be symbolic and expected to be overturned? Hell if I know) gestures toward cancellation of various tranches of student debt:
"Now, his 2024 re-election campaign is in full swing and he hasn’t mentioned that victory in any of his television ads."
I assume you mean "victory" in the sense that Biden and his admin took an action (set of actions if you dig deep, but digging deep is an unlikely action on behalf of many truly marginal or swing voters) that Brown had publicly pushed for and presumably considered to be good policy and/or politics.
I will be interested to see if Moreno has or will have ads up _specifically_ targeting Brown (versus just targeting the eeevilll(tm) Democrats more generally) over Brown's role there. My first order guess is that raising the salience of the student debt cancellation might net Moreno a few votes, but I certainly don't have any particular insight into the preferences or thought processes of a voter who is potentially persuadable, between those two candidates in particular.
Monica Tranel's ad in Montana, attacking her opponent for owning a $16,000/month AirBnB, is a banger. https://x.com/MonicaTranel/status/1828426369535242259
Notable that she's correctly leading on how housing policy is driving up costs for average hard-working Americans. It's the only issue on her website with a dedicated page to it.
"...housing policy is driving up costs for average hard-working Americans"
Oddly enough, housing policy is also driving up costs for below-average, shiftless Americans. Why do you want to help them?
I have persuaded people to listen by highlighting the things we agree on first. Most of us want healthcare, education, affordable, security, housing, and groceries. But we begin to part ways when we start talking about how/whether-or-not the government is responsible for providing these things. It disarms some of the rhetoric about our differences and creates common ground. Imagine swing voters hearing Sister Harris say something like “you would be surprised how many things Donald Trump and I agree on in regards to the wellness of this country.” Then you’re better able to highlight his unhinged and incomprehensible “solutions” and her proposals for collaboration and compromise, which stand the chance of leading to more reasonable solutions Works for me in mixed groups anyway. A shift away from the them-versus-us energy makes room for better listening and consideration of pathways forward.
(ed changed “swinging voters” to intended “swing voters”… 🙄)
A poll this week showed Larry Hogan running even with Angela Alsobrooks. Hogan will probably lose in the end, but, contra Bernie, if Maryland voters aren't that enthused about Alsobrooks that means they aren't enthused about the Far Left agenda. And if Maryland doesn't want the Far Left agenda, less progressive states definitely don't.
Is Alsobrooks far left? I thought she was the relatively moderate candidate?
If Democrats don't control Congress they can't unilaterally pass their agenda.
I don't live in Maryland, so I don't know if Hogan is super popular despite being a Reagan Republican, or if Alsobrooks is super unpopular. But in previous senate elections Maryland Democrats have dominated. Something seems different with this one.
Hogan is extremely popular, like 70%
I would love to know (a) if campaigns are still sending people out door knocking and (b) if so whether they are still exclusively focused on turnout or if they have started to target persuasion voters and say persuasion-focused messages.
In the past, presidential campaigns at least, exclusively focused door knocking efforts on turnout targets—ie sporadic voters who were likely to be supporters. The thinking was that it’s easier to remind a supporter to vote than it is to change someone’s mind about who to vote for.
I have always been skeptical of both the value of door knocking for any reason and the exclusive focus on turnout targets rather than persuasion targets.
I've been confused about why commentators talk about a tension between persuasion and turnout strategies because it seems to me you can do both. And it always seemed logical to me that you want to motivate people who tend to vote D but don't always vote. As framed here I see that "turnout" means an issue-based campaign. In my experience, the work done to mobilize unreliable voters has nothing to do with messaging and is about reaching them by door knocking, phone calls etc. My guess is that this kind of work is just not on the radar screen for people engaged in online debates about campaign theory.
I’m like kind of a left leaning person and I don’t quite understand the bogeyman that corporations play in the broader left coalition.
Like nothing in my life is not happening because Apple and Citibank and Pfizer are out wrecking shit.
Billionaires and corporations are the boogeyman that Jews used to play in some societies* - they are the reason the virtuous people cannot get what they "deserve"
This is an easier narrative than explaining that most member of the middle class and upper middle class and even the working class don't want social democracy.
*I don't mean to accuse any populists of anti-Semitism. It's a parallel is all
It's the oppressor-victim framework at large scale.
For real... Who wants to get in bed with a team that craps on people that give and provide people jobs which is a goal of the left
Corporations aren’t some altruistic entities that “give and provide people jobs”, they are structures that exist so that people can make money.
It’s fine to think that they get uselessly scapegoated, but it’s weird to act like they are anything other than pure self-interest.
I mean I can't think of a whole lot of human organizing that's done completely altruistically... when done best it's a win-win. So now it's not like they are like let's form an organization so we can create jobs. But that is exactly what municipalities that provide tax breaks try to buy the companies to come to their place to create jobs. or what Europeans do to get Airbus to build in a million different countries all over the place
One point of clarification, MGP's district is more suburban than rural, about 500,000 live in Clark County, which is Portland suburbia. I'm sure it's more rural than the average district, but it probably wouldn't be competitive if not for the suburban part. Sorry I gotta point that out every time.
Anyways, as for running on economics, this is going to be tough for Democrats. They can run on specific proposals to lower costs, like the insulin price cap (I personally would like to see a little more on how to ensure we don't have supply issues, but voters probably don't), but their big problem is that inflation happened on Biden's watch and that's what voters are reacting to. That's baked in to the cake and there's not much they can do about it. This is part of why I think the popularism formula needs to account for deliverables. Because voters aren't policy wonks, they just blame whoever happens to be in office for whatever's going on (not always unfairly).
I don't think those who prefer the "Mobilization" strategy (i.e. present a bold policy reform agenda) actually take that stand because they think that doing so will mobilize new voters into their coalition. The vast majority just want political leaders to present their preferred policy reform agenda regardless of the electoral consequences. In other words, they prefer to be Right more than they want to win elections. Evidence for the "Persuasion" strategy will not change their minds, because it forces them to support candidates with more moderate strategies.
I think a lot of them have either motivated reasoned themselves into believing in mobilization or live in such a blue enclave that they can't conceive of swing voters as an actual thing.
I was in Montana recently. Tester was courting split ticket voters. The ad featured a proclaimed Trump voter saying why he likes Tester and why he's a true Montanan.
In my deep blue part of California, I see mainly ads about our ballot propositions. It's a very different world.
California has too many ballot props.
Strong agreement (I have lived continuously in CA since 1973/age 15, and most of the time before then too).
But I suspect that for the forseeable future we are stuck with the low de facto threshold to qualify either via initiative or via the legislature (yes, I do know the basic history). It's hard to see the ballot prop needed to amend the constitution passing, although it could easily enough qualify :)
I'd be happy to just fix the effin recall process (meaning both recall qualification and the jungle election to select the successor), but even that is too much to ask I think.
One more time: we have a vast amount of empirical research that demonstrates that swing voters are nothing like doctrinaire centrists. It's just a myth.
If you read the piece you will note that “swing voters are doctrinaire centrists” isn’t the thesis
"...you will note that 'swing voters are doctrinaire centrists' isn’t the thesis"
I dunno: Do you have empirical research that demonstrates that?
Are you saying this article IS describing swing voters as "doctrinaire centrists"? That wasn't my takeaway, but in what ways is a "doctrinaire centrist" different from what is described here? I found a previous mention in one of your peices of this phrase where you linked to this 538 article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-a-myth/
My takeaway from the 538 piece (which I only skimmed TBF) is that ~no swing voters are pro-immigration/pro-market-oriented, but otherwise all over the map.
I probably got my wires crossed on who is/is not saying swing voters are doctrinaire centrists, and what critique you are leveling. Just asking you to expand (or link to) what it is you're trying to convey in more detail. What is your critique, that this article is saying swing voters are a down-the-middle average of policy preferences? (ie that swing voters want "moderate" levels of immigration, with "moderate" levels of social support, etc.). Not my takeaway from this, but curious to read more as well, thanka
I believe you, who are some of the researchers and their papers that you find most salient on this topic? Like do we have a taxonomy of different flavors of swing voters?
Nice experiment, Ben, eager to see what the GOP version is like next week. The main limitation that I can think of is potential groupthink. These politicians obviously know what they're doing, but if all of their knowledge is running on assumptions of each other without verifying whether that knowledge is truly accurate, they could run a risk.
Aren’t a lot of the messaging decisions based on A/B testing and empirical research conducted by David Shor types? The research could be wrong, but the approach doesn’t strike me as epistemically closed.
I think his point is that it may be (probably is) based on the research of a small group of the same David Shor types upstream at the DCCC or similar orgs. So if those folks are making some faulty assumptions, everyone could be exposed.
Let's talk about Virginia. Let me inform you of what swingy women voters are talking about in Virginia, where soccer moms fell for the Youngkin "parent choice" line a couple of years ago.
Women's' reproductive health choice.
These women are angry, they are registering in record numbers and they are going to vote in record numbers. Remember how Youngkin's 16-week abortion restriction proposal worked out for Republicans in Virginia last year? They lost everything.
The guys I talk to are largely ignorant of this dynamic. Some say "oh, yeah, there's that." My gut sensing is that many of them feel threatened by a strong woman like Harris and I also sense a slight male voter shift toward Trump more for emotional reasons than any specific policy logic.
But the women are REALLY fired up. My prediction is that Democrats will outperform polls and that the highly motivated woman and minority voter turnout will carry the Presidency, Congress and maybe even yield a surprise in the Senate.
Let me finish by saying I have not met a woman under the age of 45 who says they will vote for or are even considering voting for Trump.
Oh yeah, I should mention that I man a booth soliciting people to register to vote, so not scientific but highly informed.
"Let me finish by saying I have not met a woman under the age of 45 who says they will vote for or are even considering voting for Trump."
May I suggest that you are in a bubble and should not draw conclusions from that bubble and apply them to the larger world...
...and I would be more interested in pushback from a woman under 45...to my point.
Okay, so due to military service my bubble is 62 years old and has moved all over America and the world. Not too small of a bubble. Amd I did write "so not scientific but highly informed."
Democrats moderately under-performed the polls in the first post Dobbs national election, 2022. I have zero doubt you're right that the overwhelming majority of Democratic-leaning woman voters are angry and motivated about abortion rights. But Democrats are increasingly a party that reliably turns out to vote in elections, which implies there's not likely to be a huge pool of Democratic-friendly voters who frequently don't vote—but who can be induced to do so provided the message is sufficiently compelling.
"You're killing me Smalls." I'm going to ask for evidence here. Please cite the polls and the under-performing results. This was a mid-term that ALWAYS breaks against incumbent party and Democrats did very well. My data says we outperformed most credible polling, especially where abortion was an issue in the race.
>This was a mid-term that ALWAYS breaks against incumbent<
Midterms don't always break against the incumbency party. The GOP made House gains in 2002. Democrats made House gains in 1998.
>Democrats did very well<
By historical standards, Dems had a good midterm in 2022, indeed. Nowhere did I state to the contrary. Nonetheless, Democrats did suffer losses in 2022: they lost the House of Representatives. Losing a chamber of Congress is fairly significant!
>My data says we outperformed most credible polling, especially where abortion was an issue in the race.<
Well "your" data appears to depart from Nate Silver's. As I wrote at the outset, it was very modest (polls were pretty accurate that cycle), but nonetheless Democrats performed slightly worse in House races than the polls predicted. Money quote from Nate: "...the results were reasonably well-predicted by polls and forecast models, which had Republicans favored in the House, and the Senate as being close. Technically, in fact, Democrats were very slightly overestimated by the polls..."
He provides reams of data to support this claim.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-white-house-is-betting-the-election?r=7j7hw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web