To pursue a progressive political agenda, we need to elect representatives (and presidents and governors) who will enact legislation, and implement policies, that further progressive goals. To elect more progressive representatives (in both senses— greater in number, and reflecting attitudes and values that are progressive to a greater degree), we need to recruit more voters who will choose progressive candidates.
Learning from the last election, which brought GOP hegemony to Washington, and solidified the GOP hold in a majority of states, is essential if we are to create effective strategies to win future elections. Seven months have passed, and some things have been learned.
First, we need to be clear about who did, and who did not, vote for Mr. Trump:
Many political observers thought a significant number of Republicans would either vote for Clinton, one of the third party candidates, or stay home rather than casting their votes for Trump. According to the exit polls, Republicans stayed loyal to their presidential candidate. Some 89 percent of self-described Republicans voted for Trump; 91 percent of white Republicans did.
With groups of traditional GOP voters, he actually did better than previous GOP candidates:
While earlier in the campaign some pundits and others questioned whether the thrice-married Trump would earn the bulk of white evangelical support, fully eight-in-ten self-identified white, born-again/evangelical Christians say they voted for Trump, while just 16% voted for Clinton. Trump’s 65-percentage-point margin of victory among voters in this group – which includes self-described Protestants, as well as Catholics, Mormons and others – matched or exceeded the victory margins of George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
Third party voting clearly had a greater effect on Secretary Clinton’s vote totals than on Mr. Trump’s:
Contrary to early reports, Trump ended up receiving two million more votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Meanwhile, Clinton fell short of Obama’s 2012 popular vote totals by about 70,000. Third party candidates surged from 2.2 million votes in 2012 to just over 7.8 million in 2016.
Stated briefly— Trump voters to great extent do not represent a departure from prior elections, there was not some new, mysterious movement to Mr. Trump— Republicans voted for the GOP candidate, in numbers not especially different from prior elections (except for the greater skewing in terms of whiteness— more on that later).
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Knowing who voted for Mr. Trump is useful information only if we get a better sense of why they voted for him. Since the elections, many people (including many here) have posited that a key group of Trump voters were from the white working class, who voted because of Trump’s supposed economic populist message, and therefore, Democrats need to focus on this group, with a predominantly economic message, to recruit them as future Democratic voters. The problem is, this narrative, while repeated endlessly in the media, is simply false. The evidence about who voted for Mr. Trump, and why, is clear, and it has little or nothing to do with class or economics, and everything to do with race:
The graph compares the relationship between racial resentful beliefs, such as blaming racial inequality on black culture, and whites’ support for the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, 2012, and 2016. Support for Trump was more tightly linked to racial resentment than support for John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012, respectively — even after controlling for party and ideology.
Drawing on data from the Public Religion Research Institute’s (PPRI) 2012 Race, Class and Culture and 2016 American Values Surveys, the next graph also shows that in 2016 whites were more divided based on their perceptions of discrimination against whites than they were in 2012. As in the primaries, perceptions that whites are currently treated unfairly relative to minorities appeared to be an unusually strong predictor of support for Donald Trump in the general election.
Perhaps most importantly, this same pattern emerges among the exact same 825 white Americans who were first surveyed by RAND in 2012 for their American Life Panel (ALP) and then again for the Presidential Election Panel Survey (PEPS). The graphs below show that both racial resentment and ethnocentrism — rating whites more favorably than other racial and ethnic minorities — were more closely linked to support for Donald Trump in 2016 than support for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Faulty diagnoses lead to faulty, even destructive, strategies in pursuit of votes.
If someone voted because of social and cultural attitudes (i.e., racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and homophobia), appealing to them with a message that ignores these issues will not persuade them to vote Democratic, because the social and cultural attitudes were determinative in their decision making. To express it the way my father might have: ‘There ain’t enough money in the world to get that one to vote for a Democrat’.
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Similarly, appealing to ‘shared beliefs, common values’, focusing on ‘what unites us, not what divides us’ won’t work, because what divides us from Trump voters is our understanding of what America is supposed to be; these differences in understanding are fundamental, not just in terms of philosophical principles, but also in terms of basic identity and understanding of the world.
The following research, all from within the last five years, the most recent completed last year, demonstrate why ‘common ground’ approaches for appealing to Trump voters, and conservatives more generally, are misguided, and wasted efforts, especially those based on purportedly economic messages (I say purportedly economic messages, because any economic justice program that ignores discrimination— which is always economic in nature— that is, ignores that African-Americans, women, the LGBT community, the disabled and religious minorities, are the most economically disadvantaged, and their economic hardships are the greatest, is an economic justice for white heterosexuals, mostly males, program).
Vote Intent and Beliefs about Democracy in the United States (2016), Kris Dunn, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds; Judd R. Thornton, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University; White Rose University Consortium.
End-of-ideology theses suggest that we largely agree on both the means and ends of society and governance. While there is widespread agreement that democracy is the ideal form of regime(Norris 1999b), there remains a fair amount of diversity in belief regarding what democracy itself requires. For those who intend to vote for one of the two dominant American political parties, there appear to be relatively distinct beliefs about what democracy is. Though some of these beliefs overlap, they also diverge to a substantial degree. (pg. 18)
Partisan Moods: Polarization and the Dynamics of Mass Party Preferences (2012), Joseph Daniel Ura Texas A&M University; Christopher R. Ellis Bucknell University; The Journal of Politics.
...because of its enormous importance in shaping how individuals perceive and respond to the political world, party identification is a line of political cleavage where we might expect differential responsiveness to the political and economic context. Partisanship is the crux of micro-level political cognition in American politics, the prism through which political information passes before emerging as observable behavior. Moreover, citizens typically connect their political identities, economic self-interest, and other salient attachments and considerations to applied political problems through partisanship (e.g., Campbell et al. 1960).In addition, Republican and Democratic identities generally correspond to core sets of values and attitudes toward government that are central to understanding American politics (Franklin and Jackson 1983). Although there is substantial heterogeneity among individual partisans, Republicans and Democrats generally hold distinct sets of core political values.2 Though the space of contemporary American political values, ideologies, and belief systems is undoubtedly complex—embracing ‘‘freedom, equality,individualism, democracy, capitalism, and several others’’(Feldman and Zaller 1992, 271)—for many Americans,the competing values of individualism and egalitarianism dominate their engagement with the political world(Feldman and Zaller 1992). Individualism connotes support for personal liberty and laissez-faire economic principles while egalitarianism includes equality and social welfare. Within this framework, Republicans predominantly hold the core value of individualism. In contrast, Democrats generally evidence commitments to both individualism and egalitarianism, creating ambivalence in their political cognition that is not present to the same extent among Republicans (Goren 2001). (pp. 279-80, emphasis added)
Using independents as a proxy for the political center, we find evidence of asymmetry in the dynamics of partisan moods. Independent mood is more strongly associated with Democratic mood than Republican mood. (Indeed, the simple bivariate correlation between independent mood and Democratic mood is 0.92.Republican mood correlates with both the Democratic and independent mood series at 0.73.) This result suggests that convergence or divergence between the preferences of Republicans and Democrats is not the result of a symmetric change in partisan policy sentiment relative to a dynamic neutral point. Rather, this analysis indicates that Republican mood exhibits idiosyncratic behavior and, as a result, that partisan polarization may be thought of as an asymmetrical process. (pg. 284, emphasis added)
… our analysis emphasizes that the same degree of change in partisan polarization may be observationally equivalent with a variety of changes in the structure of inter-party opinion differences. By focusing on the dynamics of Republican and Democratic preferences rather than the dynamics of the difference between them, this work offers a novel analytical perspective on the problem of mass partisan polarization that may provide a useful starting point for future extensions of theories of mass partisan divergence and convergence.Second, though partisan moods exhibit distinguishable patterns of responsiveness to domestic spending,differences in average responses to changing economic conditions are substantively small and statistically insignificant.This suggests that the current period of partisan polarization has principally proceeded from differential partisan responses to policy choices rather than diverging responses to policy problems.Third, it is important to keep in mind that polarization in partisan moods has occurred amidst substantial parallelism in the parties’ responses to the macro-political context. Indeed, more than half of the variance in the partisan mood series is shared. This indicates that partisan polarization may more generally emerge from one party’s more rapid adjustment to an emerging state of the world or a new issue, rather than a more fundamental divergence in political worldviews.This pattern is evident in our data and conforms to patterns observed in particular issue domains. For example, Republicans and Democrats in the mass public have polarized over issues of gay rights since the 1970s; however, growing divergence in the mass parties’ levels of expressed support for gay rights masks substantial increases in support for gay rights that have occurred in both parties (Lindaman and HaiderMarkel2002). Partisan polarization is merely an artifact of a more rapid increase in pro-gay rights sentiment among Democrats than Republicans. (pg. 289)
Ideology and identity.
I’ve written before about the particular personality features consistently displayed by conservatives, including authoritarian attitudes and preference for social dominance hierarchies, tendency to evaluate situations and people according to the emotions fear and disgust (which in turn correlates with a high degree of xenophobia), and compared to progressives, show low propensity for Openness to Experience, a specific psychological trait identified in the Five Factor Model of personality, which is characterized by active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity (these are personality features progressive tend to exhibit more of, and conservatives considerably less, which is reflected in progressives’ acceptance of, and conservatives aversion to, cultural diversity). Some of my previous diaries about these personality features, and other psychological characteristics of conservatives, can be found here, here and here.
These personality features not only help us more clearly identify who is a conservative, and who is likely to vote for someone like Mr. Trump, but why they made that choice. Briefly— everything he said, and everything he proposed, during the campaign, aligned with their sense of themselves and how they see themselves fitting into the world:
Ideological Social Identity: Psychological Attachment to Ideological In-Groups as a Political Phenomenon and a Behavioral Influence (2015), Christopher J. Devine University of Dayton
Symbolic ideology research helps to clarify the apparent contradiction between evidence showing that the American public is lacking in ideological sophistication yet influenced in its political attitudes and behaviors by ideological identification. Contrary to the traditional conceptualization of ideology as, in its meaningful form, an internal application of abstract principles (see Campbell et al. 1960; Converse 1964), symbolic ideology embraces the notion that ideology derives much of its explanatory power from the influence of social factors giving meaning to ideological labels and direction to ideological group members. In short, it is an interaction of internal categorization and external cues that makes ideology relevant to the political behavior of the mass public.Moreover, symbolic ideology does not require a high level of political sophistication; attitudes toward, and applications of, ideological labels primarily are based upon symbolic evaluations, not elaborated policy orientations. (pg. 4)
Henri Tajfel and colleagues developed Social Identity Theory in order to better understand the nature and causes of inter-group relations. Through a series of experimental studies, they demonstrated that mere categorization within a social group, once internalized, induces high levels of in-group identification, inter-group differentiation, and in-group bias – even if the group is an arbitrary one and participants have no basis for perceiving common in-group interests (Billig and Tajfel 1973; Tajfel, Flament, Billig, and Bundy 1971; see also Allen andWilder 1975; Brewer and Silver 1978; Doise and Sinclair 1973). Experimental participants, in effect, were adoptinga social identity, defined by Tajfel (1978, 63) as “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership.”Foundational to SIT are two assumptions: first, individuals define themselves in large part by the groups to which they belong; second, individuals strive for positive self-evaluation and enhanced self-esteem (Tajfel et al.1971; see also Brewer 1991; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, and Wetherell 1987). In order to positively evaluate oneself, then, individuals must also positively evaluate the in-group that in part defines the self. Thus, social identity will motivate an individual toward attitudes and behaviors that promote the in-group, perhaps but not necessarily at the expense of the out-group (Brewer 2002), and maintain in-group membership through compliance with in-group norms. In essence, social identity represents a process of depersonalization, “whereby people come to perceive themselves more as the interchangeable exemplars of a social category than as unique personalities”(Roccas and Brewer 2002, 50). (pg. 6)
This analysis also identifies who is most likely to hold a strong ideological social identity [ISI] , and when those identities are strengthened by environmental stimuli. Comparing across ideological groups, ISI is strongest among conservatives and weakest among moderates. Feelings of psychological attachment to an ideological in-group are not, however, exclusive to conservatives; liberals and conservatives, on average, score significantly higher than the neutral point on the ISI scale. ISI also is not exclusive to sophisticates; education does not significantly predict the strength of ideological social identity, in general, although it is significantly and positively related to liberal social identity. (pg. 23, emphasis added)
To summarize— conservatives really aren’t like progressives, in fundamental, and fundamentally important ways. Polarization (greater extremes in attitudes and beliefs) is asymmetric, conservatives more strongly tie their ideology to their personal and social identity, and are much less likely to entertain ideas and information that originate from outside their familiar social environment.
To suggest they might abandon the ideology and the party that are manifestations of their core identity, is akin to suggesting they will amputate their own arms and legs, and would be received about as warmly.
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Conservatives understand that progressives, through and with the Democratic party, support social justice, and oppose discrimination based on racial category, gender, religion, disability, or sexual identity. These core features of the progressive worldview are known to conservatives, and it is just these issues that drive them away from Democratic candidates. Trump was successful with his appeal to rank and file GOP members and typical conservatives, because his views of culture and society aligned with theirs. When he spoke of building a wall to keep out rapists and criminals, when he mocked a disabled reporter, and when he brags of his abuse of women, he is speaking out loud how they perceive the world, and how they believe it should be, because these are elements of a broader social identity that is tightly bound to the conservative ideology and allegiance to the GOP. Wrapping progressive social justice goals in a message of economic populism won’t induce amnesia in conservatives— they’ll remember who the base of the Democratic party is, and what we have fought for (and against) for decades. At the end of the day, they’ll still vote against us for these reasons.
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Who should we target?
First and foremost, the 40% of eligible voters who didn’t vote:
Who comprises the Nonvoters Party? They are mostly young people, poor people, and people of color. Data for the 2016 presidential contest is still being compiled, but figures for the 2012 race shows that 31 percent of nonvoters were 18- to 29-years-old; 61 percent of nonvoters earned less than $50,000 a year, and roughly 22 percent of nonvoters were people of color. The nonvoters work at Walmart, fast-food restaurants, hotels, and poultry factories. A significant number of them don’t have health insurance. Many attend community colleges and universities. Most of them rent their apartments and some lost their homes to foreclosure.
This cohort overlaps considerably with the Democratic party’s natural base, and they all share one crucial characteristic— they didn’t show they were willing to vote for Trump.
Many of these face barriers to voting, as opposed to disinterest in voting. Devoting time, attention, energy and resources to helping this group exercise their franchise has a much greater potential return on investment than efforts to change the social identity of those who aligned themselves with the party of bigoted autocracy.
Second, we can look at third party voters, those that voted for Jill Stein in particular (and her vote totals exceeded the margin between Trump and Secretary Clinton in WI, MI and PA— that was the election right there). I’m more sanguine about Gary Johnson voters; self-identified libertarians might not be enthusiastic about raising the minimum wage and universal health care, and some ‘never Trump’ GOP who voted for Johnson will likely revert to whatever GOP candidates are on the ballot in 2018 and beyond.
And of course, continuing out-reach to new voters (those that turned 18, or became citizens, after 2016).
The eligible non-voters and new voters, we know, are already much more receptive to progressive social justice and economic messages than Trump voters, and so represent more fertile ground for reliable Democratic voters. They’re our natural constituency, and the people who most need what progressive programs and legislation try to accomplish.