During her ruminations on the launch of Jeb!’s campaign, Marquette University political scientist, Julia Azari says, in passing, that “it’s not really clear that campaigns or campaign rhetoric matter much beyond the margins.” This is an important insight that political scientists keep trying to hammer into the national political dialogue about elections. A variant of this wisdom is the “demography is destiny” apothegm.
Way to take the blood and the fun out of politics, right?
We need to keep making this point because most political analysis that you’ll see, particularly in the syndicated column format, completely ignores the fact that it hardly matters what the candidates say or where they campaign or what messages they choose for their ad campaigns. Far more important than these tactical decisions, and even outweighing most strategic decisions, is simply which party has a bigger base of supporters.
But, yeah, where’s the fun in that?
The thing is, even though political scientists are justified in repeatedly making this point, it’s not really true. A better way to understand our present political situation is that if everything remains equal then nothing will change. Translated into practical analysis, so long as Democrats and Republicans continue to behave like Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats will win presidential elections and lose midterms, the Republicans will retain control of the House of Representatives, and control of the Senate will continue to flip back and forth. The only exceptions to this will be when the party in the White House really screws up or is victimized by bad timing, say a military setback or a downturn in the economy. But, again, if everything remains equal, nothing will change.
For Jeb! and the rest of the Republican field, what this means is that if they run conventionally conservative campaigns in the rough mold of the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, they will be overwhelmed at the polls for the simple reason that there are more Democrats than Republicans, and presidential elections have high enough turnout to assure that the Democrat won’t lose through lack of voter mobilization. For Hillary, it means that she doesn’t really need to do anything but show up and she’ll be the next president, but she won’t have a friendly Congress unless she somehow defies people’s expectations.
Recently, we’ve seen criticism of Hillary for acting like a typical liberal Democrat. If she goes that route, we’re told, nothing will change. Yes, she will probably win, but she’ll have no more ability to influence Congress than the present occupant of the Oval Office.
I have disputed this. But my argument, which has two parts, is not that she’s making a mistake by pursuing a classic liberal stance. My argument is that Hillary, specifically, and House Clinton, more generally, have a broader potential base of support than your classic liberal candidate for office. For this reason, she begins the race ahead of where Barack Obama ended his, and this gives her the ability to test the political scientists’ theory that campaigns and campaign rhetoric don’t matter much. My advice is that she should campaign for counties and districts that she doesn’t need in an Electoral College sense but does need if she hopes to provide enough coattails to have a Congress she can work with.
Clinton’s broader base of support doesn’t come from her ideological positioning. It comes from a combination of factors that include being the first serious female presidential frontrunner, being of a generation that can identify with her but would normally skew Republican, having a husband whose economic record as president is remembered fondly by people all across the political spectrum, and having millions of people still voting in this country who voted for her husband but haven’t voted for a Democrat since that time. She doesn’t need to break Democratic orthodoxies to expand her support because her support is expanded to begin with. And we might as well acknowledge that race play a part in this, too. Any white Democratic nominee would get a slight boost simply by getting a portion of the racist vote that would never consider supporting the Kenyan usurper. All Democrats will also benefit from the relentless drive of demographic change, which continues to push down the percentage of the electorate that is white.
For Jeb! and the other Republicans, however, the country’s recent experience with a Republican president is beyond negative. They cannot rely on even the same base of support that Romney had four years ago. If they’re going to get any bump, it will be through fortuitous events, like the aforementioned poorly timed foreign policy setback or economic downturn. Perhaps, they may benefit from some appetite for change after eight years of a Democrat in the White House. Overall, however, they enter this contest in a state of demographic doom. If things remain the same then that change will not be coming. And, because campaigns and campaign rhetoric are overrated, they can’t expect to win simply by being more clever.
If the Republicans want to win, they really have only two options. They could hope to get very lucky, which really amounts to rooting for some disaster to befall the country, or they can break everyone’s expectations of what a Republican and the Republican Party stands for. The most glaring example of someone doing this is Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, becoming the champion of Civil Rights and Voting Rights for black people. In doing so, he completely changed the electoral map both in the immediate term and in the long term. He changed the very nature of the Democratic Party which slowly changed the nature of the Republican Party as well.
Jeb! does seem to understand that he’s got to roll the dice a bit. He’s breaking ranks on immigration policy, for example, which could conceivably change how Latinos perceive the Republicans. I think he’s trying to be cheerful rather than apocalyptic, which does separate him a bit from trolls like Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, and grumpy old John McCain. But I don’t think he’s going far enough. He’s on the right track, enough to arouse a mild amount of concern in your humble author, but he’s still too orthodox and unwilling to break with the record of his brother.
If everything remains equal, nothing will change, which is both good and bad. It’s good that the Republicans don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning so long as they keep behaving like conservative Republicans. It’s bad that we aren’t likely to do much better than we’re doing now.
[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]
Looking at his polling numbers, Jeb really should have nothing left to lose by veering towards the center now.
Except, if he’s insufficiently rabid, he’ll lose the primaries.
You don’t give a rabid pack of sociopathic wolves who demand red meat, centrist tofu.
So, Jeb’s damned if he don’t, and damned if he do.
Damned Jeb!
As far as House campaigns go, Democrats have to pick better candidates and at least try to win elections. There are plenty of districts that Obama won that have teabillie congress people. The consultants and their enablers should be fed to the gators.
It’s almost like they’re scared of the liberal success of the mid 2000s.
Nothing almost about it. They are Corporocrats.
…or republicans can do what they normally do when faced with the reality that their policies and candidates are unacceptable to the country. They can change the rules.
I’m still curious when the movement to change the electoral vote allocation in key bluish swing states under republican control is going to start to pop back up myself.
They have the usual vote suppression angles covered, and I give them creativity points for the current supreme Court case to redefine equal represenation so house districts can be based on voter registration rather than population, but the bug gun for them if they’re convinced that they can’t win the presidency is to break the electoral college in a way that favors them.
Let’s break this sentence in two:
-having a husband whose economic record as president is remembered fondly by people all across the political spectrum,
This really is her greatest strength – without that link that she a female Al Gore.
and having millions of people still voting in this country who voted for her husband but haven’t voted for a Democrat since that time
This I dispute. I don’t actually believe that very many people who voted for Clinton voted for McCain or Romney. Clinton never got more than 50% of the vote. If you look at exit polling, the number of people who switch parties from one election to another is pretty limited – no more than 7 – 9%.
In larger terms though, its not demography that defines elections, it is events generally outside of the control of the candidates.
There are millions of Americans who voted for Dubya in 2000 and will never vote for a Republican president again. People react to what happens. Clinton lost voters through his bad behavior that Gore needed. Some Clinton voters didn’t respond well to Al Gore or John Kerry. Many Clinton voters didn’t respond well to Barack Obama.
There’s a big universe of people out there who voted for Clinton in the 1990’s and then moved away from the Democrats. Some came back after Schiavo, or Katrina, or Iraq, or the recession. But many are still out there, much more willing to roll the dice on a Clinton than a Bush and not much concerned about party labels or political rhetoric.
Didn’t more people vote for George W. the second time around than the first? So who are all those people who will never vote for a Republican again? I’d say there are many wishing to vote for a Republican again but not the kind that’s on offer.
Clinton lost Gore voters? No Gore lost them by running away from Clinton because of his prissiness. The man turned out to be a real bedwetter in that respect and that of the Supreme Court election coup.
John Kerry just didn’t have it and still doesn’t. So we have millions who voted for George W. and will never vote for a Republican again and maybe just as many who voted for Clinton then moved away from the Democrats. The numbers don’t seem to add up.
Put more simply: Hillary Clinton would do herself and the country a tremendous favor by getting ‘real’. If she has the guts to claim the mantle of FDR, then let her live up to it. First by speaking in clear, direct, tactile language that sinks in. In fact, a bit like Bernie Sanders. Then from there she can shed the abstractions and say directly what she’s planning. Everything is too contrived and fussy. This might be asking too much of her. The mood of the country is such that anyone with a convincing voice, determined and unambiguous view of the future could take the White House and Congress. That’s what people are starved for. But there is no one in sight. It may well be that I’m envisaging a dictator, poor little me.
She’s not real. She’s a plastic candidate, created by spin doctors. I doubt if an honest conviction exists in her.
Considering that 51 million voted for Gore in 2000 and only 47 million voted for Clinton in 1996, find this secret stash of millions of loyal Clinton voters that shifted to Bush and the GOP and will come home for Hillary not credible.
So where did even more millions that declined Bob Dole but accepted GW Bush come from? The total electorate must have grown, either by demographics or increase in participation.
Voter participation rates in 1996 and 2000 were comparatively low, 49% and 50.3% respectively.
The US electorate is always growing.
Home or in the Perot camp where they’d been since 1992.
I think turnout is always key. Some people don’t believe it because expanded turnout doesn’t always favor Democrats. The elections where something is happening, which could be stupid (2004) or real (2008), bring out more voters. Obama’s votes came from home too.
Man, Bill Clinton must be relieved that the recession was timed so that it happened at the start of the Bush Presidency rather than in 2000, huh?
Hillary Clinton is really fucking lucky that the country, including most liberal Democrats, blames the 2000-2001 recession on something as truthy and nonfalsifiable as the dotcom bubble bursting rather than something with some empirical backing to it like the Clinton surpluses. Otherwise her name probably wouldn’t even be considered in 2008, let alone 2016.
For the few that can remember, al Qaeda and 9/11 is blamed for the 2001 recession. So, both the Bush and Clinton families lucked out.
2% change can and does still matter for a lot reasons like say down ticket. But you run campaigns because the other guy is running them. If you did nothing while the other person campaigned it would have an impact.
Uh-oh.
What, no apologies to Led Zeppelin?
Excellent analysis.
The part about campaigning in districts, counties, precinct that she does not need for electoral vote in order to create coattails that allow her to govern in particularly on target.
Demography is destiny makes as little sense to me as geography (red-state/blue-state) is destiny. There are factors that tend to result in demography becoming destiny, just as one of the factors tending to make geography destiny is demography. Keeping the analysis that that high a level of resolution results in campaigns not having asked the question of how to make demography less destinal. That sort of additional analysis is particularly needed for a party that has decided to coast until demography remakes election geography.
But if campaigning doesn’t matter, why campaign? The argument, which I don’t buy, is that all one needs is a good voter registration drive and a good get-out-the-vote effort.
Since you’ve tried to get progressive candidates elected in Republican country as I have, you know that’s not true.
It’s not that campaigning doesn’t matter, it’s that campaigning is subject to a Red Queen’s race in which the marginal utility of each new innovation or rhetorical technique or mini-campaign keeps going down and down. Part of it is because both sides quickly adapt to others’ techniques, part of it is because campaigns are getting more and more nationalized and scrutinized, and another part of it is just political polarization.
A bad campaign can certainly hurt you, but a good campaign will hardly help you at all. Sort of like how a well-conducted war or economy quickly gets taken for granted but voters won’t allow you to forget a foreign policy scandal or economic misstep.
In recent memory, Republican Senatorial candidates in Missouri and Indiana were well ahead until they made dumb comments about rape. It DOES matter what candidates say.
Also consider Quinn’s loss to Rauner in Illinois. Campaigns matter. It’s just stupid to say that only registration and turnout count. They are important, but that’s not the whole story.
Above-average campaigns don’t help. Great campaigns hardly move the needle. 1996 Clinton versus Dole was like the Globetrotters versus the Generals but even then Clinton performed only 1-1.5% above base demography, assuming that you think that in 1996 60% of Perot voters would’ve been Dole voters, 20% Clinton, and 20% non-voters. Even 2012 Obama, who’s used as the gold standard for smooth campaigners, barely performed above the extra 2% baked-in advantage Democrats have been getting (what with urbanization and increase in racial minorities) for each successive cycle since 1984. Granted, Obama was also struggling with an economic downturn…
It’s sort of like modern job interviews. Being extremely sharply dressed and having a great resume and crushing the interview won’t help you much as it used to (because a lot of candidates these days are getting the same advice) but you can still get hurt by an ill-timed remark or a bad tie or a misfortunate typo. Your good performance during an interview can function as a tiebreaker during extremely tight circumstances, but it won’t make up for even a modestly less impressive (in terms of accomplishments) resume.
That’s why campaigning doesn’t matter. The entire enterprise is too formalized and scrutinized for a well-run campaign to matter much. And as the electorate gets more polarized, it’ll matter even less.
Except Jeb isn’t going to be her opponent. Scott Walker is. Not sure she can beat him.