I think we all know the personality type that is cynical about politics regardless of the circumstances. We all know some people who have a consistent “throw the bums out” attitude. You can measure the broad electorate’s shifting attitudes toward the president or Congress, but some people are perpetually disgruntled by nature.
I don’t know if you can really call them swing voters, although their votes reliably swing back and forth depending on which party needs to be thrown out. A true swing voter should be persuadable, and these folks are the furthest thing from persuadable. They can’t be convinced that anyone can be trusted or is worth a good goddamn. They generally don’t have time for political promises (except, perhaps, the most utopian), so their ideological commitment is minimal and easily overcome by a general dislike of any politician or party that actually wields any power.
These are the folks that like term limits because it saves them the trouble of worrying about whether they’ll succeed in throwing the bums out. I find these people boring and naive. They’re the very definition of downers, made all the more annoying by their pretense of sophistication and their contempt for anyone who has an ounce of hope or idealism.
They probably make up close to a seventh of the voting public. When you add in the folks who have concluded that present circumstances justify putting a pox on both major parties, the number comes in at about eighteen percent, and they can make or break the winners of the upcoming midterm elections. Unfortunately for the Republicans, it’s their turn to taste these voters’ wrath:
In our review of the 2016 election, one of the clues we missed on Donald Trump was his overperformance among voters who disliked BOTH Trump and Hillary Clinton. These voters made up 18 percent of voters in our merged NBC/WSJ polls of 2016, and they disproportionately broke for Trump and Republicans on the generic ballot.
Well, learning from that 2016 lesson, here is the merged congressional preference among voters with a negative view of BOTH parties:
2010 merged NBC/WSJ: 49 percent GOP, 23 percent DEM (R+26)
2014 merged NBC/WSJ: 51 percent GOP, 24 percent DEM (R+27)
2018 merged NBC/WSJ (so far): 50 percent DEM, 36 percent GOP (D+14)
It’s really pretty easy to predict this. All other things being equal, if both parties are worthless then the party to punish is the one with the power. If power is divided, then the party that holds the White House gets blasted, although the effect in that circumstance might be less intense.
There’s not much politicians or political parties can do about this bunch. When they produce things people like, the percentage of the electorate that will vote to punish will go done somewhat, but the party in power needs to focus on making up for this built in and predictable deficit in other ways.
If you remember Sean Quinn’s anecdote from the 2008 election, you know what I mean.
A man canvassing for Obama in western Pennsylvania asks a housewife which candidate she intends to vote for. She yells to her husband to find out. From the interior of the house, he calls back, “We’re voting for the nigger!” At which point the housewife turns to the canvasser and calmly repeats her husband’s declaration.
I have no doubt that that couple voted for Romney fours your later and for Trump four years after that. And they’ll probably vote for a Democrat in 2020, because while they might be racist (or overly deferential to their spouse), they aren’t voting based on issues. Whoever is in power is a bum, and that never changes.
You’ve probably heard political analysts say that a president’s party does poorly in his first midterm election so many times that you’re sick of hearing it, but you don’t often hear it explained why this is such a consistent pattern. Part of it is that presidents come in filled with goals, ambition and momentum, and then make changes that are disruptive and arouse opposition. But part of it is baked in the cake from these unpersuadable swing voters.
This time, it’s the GOP that’ll get its turn in the barrel. Considering the Senate map and the way congressional districts are drawn, and the geographical concentration of Democratic votes, it’s one of the few political disadvantages the GOP will have this fall.
Someone tweeted earlier today about turnout in Massachusetts. Guess what it showed? That GOP turnout doesn’t vary much between presidential year and mid-terms. It’s Democratic turnout that varies!! And given that a lot of states, like Massachusetts, elect their governors during mid-terms that spells trouble.
I found it!! Here:
Turnout in the key states should have been really easy for Clinton to prop up, and Trump would have been a footnote.
The Non-Voters Who Decided The Election: Trump Won Because Of Lower Democratic Turnout
You’re citing stuff from November 2016. Why not update your analysis from people who actually know what they’re talking about:
link
So the turnout margin was even smaller than the margin in “one of the closest elections in American history”? Amazing.
But good luck with ever avoiding responsibility in Dems’ hands!
○ Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election | FiveThirtyEight |
○ Hillary Clinton Won the Rich Suburbs, But Not the Working Class | DSA |
○ The Base: The future of the Democratic Party depends on mobilizing of voters of color
Thanks for bringing this up — it’s making me realize how much I can’t stand this phenomenon.
I know people like this, personally — they always make this posturing speech about how “We have to try something else” or, more whimsically, “Why don’t we try something else?”
It’s like they’re fetishizing their one moment of adult power, trying to sound “worldly” and cynically wise, the way smart people on television do. It makes them feel less marginalized. (Or, they’re rich people above the fray, unaffected by it all, like Clint Eastwood voting for Perot because “it might be interesting.”) The whole thing is awful.
This behavior is, at its core, cowardice.
Reminds me of a passage from a recent piece in Democracy:
I can only imagine if you added up all the dysfunctional and counterproductive voting blocs you’d total out at 27% of the population…
. . . preposterous that ‘”quantitative easing” can [be one element of a mechanism that would make it fiscally possible] to forgive student loans’ (whether that would be desirable as policy or politically feasible are separate questions), so your quoted author is off-base to make that his/her basis for calling Stein a “quack” (other available bases exist).
But, yeah, that quibble aside, the floor for The Coalition of the Clueless/Purist/Crazy/Ignorant/Stupid/Reality-Denying stays remarkably consistent at around that 27% level. Hence the staying power of the “crazification factor” meme.
You can stand on your head and squint and come up with some semi-plausible interpretation of Stein’s use of the term “quantitative easing” that isn’t completely incoherent but it takes a Rube Goldburg series of machinations that are really more effort than it’s worth. If you get to the point that congress is willing to empower the fed to buy up and write off student debt it would be simpler and more sensible to just forgive the debt by fiat.
. . . “quackery” to posit that it “can” be done, but “whether that would be desirable as policy or politically feasible are separate questions”.
I’m not sure I understand the point. As the author says, these are voters we’ll never convince. So they matter, in terms of the vote, about as much as convinced felons or 15-year-old kids or litter-trained rabbits. They’re not part of any rational party’s political calculus.
Anyone who tries to get those votes is deluded, and anyone who gets angry about them is masturbating. (Which is fun! But not meaningful.)
In the passage I quoted that is the point. Just as Booman’s point is that there’s a “throw the bums out” block that isn’t available to be convinced.
Oh! Well, fair enough.
Though I’m not as convinced that the ‘throw the bums out’ block is as unmovable.
In this case, they really ARE a bunch of fucking bums, and they SHOULD be thrown out.
Thrown out a window on the 35th floor of a tall building into a vat of broken glass and acid. And then lit on fire.
I would have settled for “thrown from the Tarpeian Rock”.
They’re like libertarians; utterly juvenile, and completely convinced of their own sophistication. Of course, what makes me even crazier is that, given how simpleminded and reflexive these people vote, a clever party with a couple hundred million dollars can’t manage them better.
Are there examples of times when they didn’t vote to ‘throw the bums out?’ If so, what was different?
“Here’s how you fix politics.
Get the parties out of politics.
Then get the politicians out of politics.
Finally, get the politics out of politics.
That’s how you fix politics.
Oh, and don’t vote, it just encourages them.”
(cross-posted from Washington Monthly — if you can do it, so can we 😉
You’re describing people who can’t be trusted to eat with a fork, let alone vote.