Likely Story

RKO, 1947.

I've got what may be one of those big ideas, that I've been nursing since Election Night and the Red Wave that never broke in spite of the handicappers, which is that there's something defective about the pollsters' traditional collection of data for adults, registered voters, and likely voters—they really need to be collecting data for unlikely voters, because they're the ones who make the difference.

This is just another way of putting a claim I've made before. What I normally say is that the normal pollsters' picture, where the electorate is made up of partisan voters who know what they want and swing voters who have trouble making up their minds whom to vote for, is wrong; the unpredictable part is really the people who have trouble making up their minds whether to vote at all.  

Those who get engaged enough to do it can be the ones, in principle, who decide the winner, if there are enough of them, as just happened on November 8, when the officially likely voters seemed to be red-waving as predicted, but the winning edge came from younger women fired up by the Dobbs decision, actually the most committed to voting, but counted as unlikely because they hadn't voted that regularly (or ever) before. Then again there was Florida, where the opposite happened, and unlikely Democratic voters disappeared altogether, in terrible turnout:

Campaign For Nonvoters

 

GDP growth January 2019 to January 2022

Commenter Cheez wrote in re Saturday's post:

That "majority" must be based on the third of eligible voters who so far can't be bothered. Is there any evidence that these groundhogs can be relied on to choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy? I wonder how much is known about these people, what they care about, what sort of threat would finally make them pay attention to their civic duty, as voting (and serving on a jury) used to be referred to as.

And a majority can be ignored if they do not contest being ignored. It's going to take an existential threat to get people's attention. For the Democratic Party, it should be the outright theft of a presidential election: 2000 didn't do it but Republicans had a veneer of sanity then. It's going to take some unholy blend of Gilead and Idiocracy to get apathetic non-voters to ask "wha happened?" .

My response:

choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy?

I don't think you can build a bigger majority than we had in 2018 on fear of dictatorship, if that's what you mean. We did do pretty well out of sheer negative partisanship in 2020--more people thinking Republicans are bad than thinking Democrats are bad--but that was a presidential year, with Trump personally embodying the bad. The majority I have in mind is the one that favors minimum wage hikes, family leave and subsidized day care, electric cars, and taxing the rich.

Demographics

Something I've been saying for quite a while now about the 2016 presidential election: that the Trump "base" isn't exactly like that pathetic picture of the bewildered "white working class" left behind by globalization. Yes, they're white and don't have college degrees, but the real core are financially pretty comfortable, typically owners of small businesses, with sufficient leisure to eat breakfast out every morning and give interviews to The New York Times pretending to represent the working class, while their abject and underpaid employees (who rarely vote at all) open the shops. That's who made the party what it is today, which is strangely similar to what it used to be, back when it was the party of the wealthy.

So now there's some relevant information, surfacing in the column of the Times opinionist nobody ever notices because he's too interested in reality, Thomas B. Edsall ("We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is"), reporting research by Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, and I can report that the numbers don't exactly support a strong version of the theory, but they do confirm that there's something there:

Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

And in Red Wave news

Red Wave. Photo by Cadouri Si Perle, via Wide Open Spaces. Roger Stone used the same shot at his blog a month ago, not about politics but, oddly enough, a standard Republican propaganda account of how Florida's red tides are perfectly natural and nothing to be concerned about, cropped so as to cut out the shore, presumably to make it look less malignant.

This guy caught in Springfield, Missouri, by NPR's Don Gonyea:

GONYEA: Though Trump's prediction of a big red wave is an unusual way to ward off the kind of complacency many GOP leaders are worried about this year as they try to avoid the kind of midterm losses Democrats suffered during the Obama administration. Twenty-three-year-old Ben Lewis stops by the booth in search of buttons and a new Trump flag. At first, his enthusiasm also appears to be through the roof.

BEN LEWIS: I'm definitely a hundred percent more fired up now because I am really excited to have someone that's going to piss a bunch of people off because it's the truth and that's what they need to hear.

GONYEA: But when I ask him about November, he has little to say. He's not even sure who's running. Turns out he's fired up about Trump and re-electing him in 2020, but he has no plans to vote this year. He's just not interested.

But the 2018 election - don't really care?

LEWIS: It's not really my thing. I'm sorry. I just don't really care.

He's not a sample, just one guy, and not even demographically typical, being so young, but to me he's key, bringing together what we know most about the Trump voter, that owning the libs, pissing a specific bunch of people off, is the overwhelming central issue, with what I've been sure of, that they're really not voters.

And nonvoters (yes, I'm riding on my same hobby-horse here of denying the significant existence of Obama-to-Trump voters) were a key part of the Obama electorate too, but not the same ones: less homogeneous ethnically, of course, and skewing younger and poorer, but in particular inspired by hope, not spite.

"Stormy news won't move the needle on Trump". And you're surprised?

Oxford-Cambridge goat race, 24 March 2018, via londontown.com.

This sequence goes from dismal to somewhere productive:

Democratic pollster on why Stormy news won’t move the needle on Trump: “people have concluded he’s a liar. he lies every day. people know it. the world hasn’t come to an end” https://t.co/ClKEujrm3t

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) May 4, 2018

This is true and has wide political implications. Because knowledge of Trump's dishonesty is baked in, there's no more marginal votes to be gained from emphasizing it. His lies should be corrected but Democrats need to focus on issues. https://t.co/ESQGr01jt4

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 4, 2018

The composition of the electorate is not baked in. Attacks on Trump are less about getting people to go from Trump in 2016 to Dem in 2018 than:
Trump->Don't vote
Third Party->Dem
Clinton+R Sen/Cong->Dem
Clinton+Dem->turnout higher than normal in midterm elections https://t.co/yWlWz8c7wv

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) May 4, 2018

I've never understood arguments in the form "People shouldn't talk about how X is a bad person, they should focus on the issues" or the other way around. Obviously candidates and editorialists and partisans of all varieties should talk about the issues as much as they think their audience can stand, and they can probably stand more than your average campaign manager thinks they can, but if your opponent is a genuinely bad person and you can make some use of that, you might as well.

But in the present situation, I really can't understand why anybody should think it's a problem, as if laying off Trump might get Democrats some of those votes from people who've decided they don't care if Trump is a liar or a fornicator or criminal or traitor as long as that wall gets built or Trump is on the air demanding that the wall get built. There is nothing that is going to change their minds. You can talk about the issues until you faint. You will not get that vote by insulting Trump and you will not get it by not insulting him. It really doesn't matter either way.

Multiracial working class

This is completely irrelevant to the following post, but I couldn't resist:

Does @realDonaldTrump realize that now TWICE on this disastrous trip, they’ve just straight up trolled him with vintage @HillaryClinton suits? #LikeThePresidencyHeCantQuiteMakeItWork pic.twitter.com/i2BDvjp7gH

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) November 12, 2017

It's always exciting when the Real World of Journamalism catches up with something a blogger has been doing for a couple of months, especially when it's me. Here's Lee Drutman of the New America think tank, writing about the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group study I was telling you about in July, in which he was a participant, and coming to something the same conclusion in The New York Times, sort of, about where the Democratic Party needs to go shopping for voters.

That piece was about the different categories of Republicans as classed by their various attitudes and aspirations into Staunch Conservatives, Free Marketeers, American Preservationists, Anti-Elites, and the Disengaged, and I was arguing that if you wanted to increase the Democratic vote from 2016 from the Republican pool, you would want to go not to the American Preservationists, those rustic white patriots The New York Times writers want us to be exclusively concerned with, but the Anti-Elites, who are more multiracial than other Republican voters, and more interested in government largesse; but that it would be best to forget about Republican voters altogether and recruit nonvoters.

Drutman is working from a different breakdown, according to who voted for whom in the 2012 and 2016 elections, with a focus on those who changed parties in 2016, and asks the questions:

Turnout troofing

Yesterday the Times Upshot ran a piece by Nate Cohn analyzing the 2016 presidential election in terms of what looks to me like another take in the Legendary White Working Class family of takes, identifying the crucial factor in Trump's victory as that particular set of white-no-college voters who voted for Obama in 2008 and/or 2012 but for Trump in 2016, and who are said to have made this remarkable switch mostly out of racial resentment (I actually don't think that's as bizarre as it sounds, but the obvious question it raises, of why a white person who voted for Obama one year would turn around against Clinton out of racial resentment the next time, is one Cohn doesn't even discuss) and then out of disappointment with Obama and then lastly because they agree with Trump's policy prescriptions as they understand them.

Which Cohn does not take to mean that Democrats need to appeal more to racists, even though that's what his data makes it sound like, but that we should take positions more like those of imaginary Trump, in favor of lots of infrastructure spending, and trade protectionism, and relatively relaxed sexual views. The great Zandar of Kentucky, though, hears Cohn thinking it, and he doesn't like it:

What that means is that Cohn is strongly suggesting that in order to be competitive, Democrats have to make a sea change to attract voters that harbor no small amount of racial resentment. Trump was able to leverage that resentment into massive distrust of the Obama administration and Democrats in general.

The problem is that this will come at a cost, and the cost will be borne by black, Latinx, and Asian voters and candidates [and female candidates too, I'd add].  I've said before that this path is suicidal for the Dems and so far Trump is making it incredibly easy to make the Democrats be the party of inclusiveness in comparison by simple dint of Trump's overwhelmingly awful racism, if not open support of white supremacists.

Nor do I.

Nonvoters

Via.

BooMan was saying the other day,

I think the election of Donald Trump proves that substance is overrated as a political tool.

How depressing is that, if you believe in "liberal democracy" and the whole idea that the members of a community ought to choose its government on the basis of what they think the government should do?

In terms of presidential elections especially, where we always make fun of the people who voted for TV presidents like Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump, do we want to acknowledge that the same thing happened with Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Obama? That they may have been smarter, kinder, and more skillful than their opponents, but the reason they kept winning was just their camera work?

And how can liberalism survive if we start believing that voters are stupid?

I have that same question with regard to the White Working Class theory of how the Democratic Party needs to cater to the idea of a discrete set of disappointed, ill-educated white dudes, whose prejudices and misconceptions mustn't be mocked, and hope our brothers and sisters of color don't take it too ill. That's a very elitist assumption, indeed, that there's a majority out there that is none too bright and needs to be deceived into supporting a progressive agenda, or simply a charismatic Progressive Guy, because they're not prepared to even deal with something as complex as an agenda, some Howard Beale figure who will directly express their inarticulate irritation as Trump does but in favor of the policy ideas we like.

If that's true, it's not just insulting the voters we're looking for, as the conservatives always do, it's a rejection of the whole idea of American liberalism as I understand it, which is that everybody, no matter how low in status and wealth, has a voice and a valuable role to play in the polity, and that the broadest of political goals is that of bringing all of them into the process and a share of the power. So anyway I have this alternative idea, that we need to start thinking of ourselves as going after, in addition to the rest of the traditional Democratic family, the smart white people.