Given the farcically erroneous, back-to-back double whammy of political polling in 2016 and 2020 there’s very little reason to get all sweaty and anuguished about the numbers here in 2022. But … if you self-identify as a liberal you are by that definition a morbid pessimist. You know full well that the grifters and fools have us outnumbered and that no matter what any poll says … things are bad and only getting worse. That’s just who we are.
That said, the current, mid-October trend lines are … all grim. Utter morons — here’s looking at you Herschel Walker — are within a “margin of error” of defeating Democrats who unlike them graduated from college, worked at serious jobs, can do basic math, study public policy and just generally don’t genuflect to a twice-impeached clown car insurrectionist or some dope who can’t remember how many children he has.
If by some miracle the polling holds up next month and the Democrats lose Senate seats they should have won — like in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — there’s going to be some kind of reckoning over the strategy of running hard on “pro democracy” issues like abortion as opposed to counter-blitzing the usual, time-tested Republican hysteria-mongering over gas prices and “rampant, out-of-control crime.”
Last week’s New York Times-Siena College poll produced all sorts of gasping and wailing at the sight of suburban, mostly college-educated women, flooding away from Democrats and back to Republicans in reaction to (also) “out of control” inflation and … crime. While dismaying as it is every election cycle, I’ve lost to ability to find this surprising.
If you’re aware of and follow posts on NextDoor, the neighborhood site that some of us use to see who’s tossed hosta, paving bricks and used lumber out on the curb for whoever gets there first, you know that what’s indisputably rampant is crime hysteria. Every fire or police siren sets off a fresh torrent of panicked terror. Every Ring doorbell is picking up murky, horror-film scenes of “strange young men” casing the building … or maybe just looking for their dog, no one can say for sure.
I have perfectly nice neighbors who are astonished I’d dare go listen to music at the Cabooze or First Avenue. For them, downtown Minneapolis for anything other than a Sunday afternoon Vikings game is a “no-go zone”, based on what they see on TV, read on Facebook and hear from campaign ads. “Democracy” is not a life-or-death concern for them.
I can’t remember who or where, but I recall a barroom conversation where the (self-professed) social anthropologist broke down the three key phases of modern American adulthood. As he explained it, from our late teens to late 20s it’s all about getting laid. From our late 20s to late 50s it’s all about achieving status and financial security. And finally, in the years from career apogee until we drool in the Jell-O and turn out the lights for the last time, it’s all about protecting ourselves and what we’ve accumulated.
I’ve heard more elegant breakdowns of the chapters of life, but you have to admit he’s on to something.
Point being … it is a serious, fundamental mistake to think anything … and I by “anything” I mean issues as high-minded and mostly abstract as “democracy”, “Constitutional order” or “a woman’s right to choose” will ever drive a majority of older, white voters in the way $3.50 gasoline and constant, wall-to-wall fear-mongering over street crime will. And never mind nuances and the modulating statistics.
If Team Fear has the dials cranked to 11 shrieking 24-7 about “out of control” gas prices and carjackings, the general concern about a sub-culture of fat-assed authoritarians retracting basic 21st century rights — i.e. abortion — is pretty well reduced to a fringey, optional, luxury of a campaign matter. “Democracy” is something we can get back to and protect once crime and price increases are “brought under control.” (In the Times-Siena poll abortion has sunk to 5% as the “most important issue.”)
Maybe the polls will be wrong again this time. And maybe, unlike so many elections before, and to my ever-lasting amazement, worries that democratic basics are being cut apart at the seams will win the day. Maybe that fringey “democracy” issue will win out over the (nakedly implausible) assurance that packs of policy-averse right-wing politicians will somehow reduce the cost of tanking up the family Yukon or Escalade. And that they’ll flood the streets with so many (competent?) cops every black kid will think twice before trying to jack it out from under you.
Maybe that’ll happen. But being a liberal, all I see come January is the swearing in of Herschel Walker, J.D. Vance, Dr. Oz and Ron Johnson.
Democrats are going to get creamed because inflation is at a 40 year high, crime is high, and Democrats are always vulnerable to charges of over-spending, because they do support more spending than Republicans, and “soft on crime,” because they do stand up against police abuses and the moronic war on drugs BS. If I thought Democrats had effective rebuttals for those two GOP attacks, I’d agree with you that Democrats should place those messages more. I just don’t think Democrats’ rebuttals on those issues would work very well. Maybe they could slightly neutralize the issue if they had more ads that stress that they want more cops (though I do see quite of few of those types of ads and debate lines) and whatever inflation rebuttal works best with swing voters (?).
All of which is to say that I think they reason for the pending electoral armageddon is more about the current environment than the Democrats’ chosen ad mix. I do agree that progressives could have one-quarter as many abortion ads and get whatever benefit they ultimately get. I just don’t think they have anything to say that will move people off of Bidenflation and defunding, because the current environment makes those messages particularly powerful.
It would take a far better communications guru than me to figure out how to effectively blunt a “soft on crime” attack. But the Dems have put a lot of eggs in one basket. Personally, I’d sustain some kind of consistent attack on Republicans’ disinterest in doing … anything … once in power, and that includes fighting inflation and crime. I.e. what exactly are they proposing, other than “getting tough?” In that vein, constant reminders of their obstructive antics in the context of — pick your program — solving middle class household issues. Put another way, emphasize that modern Republicans have essentially no ideas for productive governing. But to your point, once they’ve begun Willie Horton 9.0, nothing is going to convince my older, white suburban neighbors that ANYTHING matters more than stopping “rampant crime” … in leafy, toney Edina.
I do think that’s the right kind of ad to slightly neutralize the Republicans’ “soft on crime” ads. “Democrats proposed more funding for more cops and taking guns away from violent criminals, but Republicans blocked those things and have no ideas of their own to address the problem…” I actually do see a fair number of ads along those lines.
I’m just saying that I don’t think that even the most artfully crafted anti-crime ad by a Democrat is credible to swing voters, because of feelings among swing voters, based in fact, that Democrats are cop critics and not all-in on police state tactics. Just as Republicans aren’t credible as healthcare reform champions Democrats aren’t credible as anti-crime champions. In my opinion, buying a whole bunch of those crime-related ads won’t do all that much to overcome those long-standing swing voter biases. It’s a just a very bad issue for Democrats in a bad environment (i.e. post-pandemic crime increase and the post-Floyd riots).
I just saw this … from Kevin Drum: “Democrats seemed to be doing well this summer as their approval level surged following the Dobbs decision. But now Republicans are surging back. This is partly because the out party always does well in midterm elections, but David Brooks thinks there’s more to it: “The Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force in American life. But I’ve been watching the campaign speeches by people like Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. G.O.P. candidates are telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people.”
Sure, I guess. But this is the farthest thing imaginable from something new. The details change from election to election, but this narrative began with Richard Nixon and became fully weaponized by Newt Gingrich and Fox News in the 1990s. It’s been part of the core Republican message for 50 years, and it’s been their nearly exclusive message for the past 20. The most discouraging part of this is not that Republicans do it. What do you expect an opposition party to do? The discouraging part is that after 50 years Democrats still have no idea how to fight it. It’s not that we lose every culture war battle. In fact, we win quite a few. But when Republicans sense weakness, they circle the wagons and beat the class war drums loudly and in unison. That’s what we don’t know how to fight. Practically all the evidence suggests the United States is fundamentally a strong country right now. Probably the strongest in the world, and with the brightest future. It’s extraordinary to think of just how good a place it could be if only we could figure out a way to overcome the debilitating fear that so many people still have of progress and change.
To beat the dead horse a little more…
I find the George Lakoff stuff persuasive. He’s the “Democrats come across as nurturant parents and Republicans come across as strict fathers” guy. Berkley professor. While a lot of people chalk those two sets of “frames” up to intentional communications strategy, it’s just a reflection of each parties values, which neither party can change without setting off voters’ bullshit meters. Voters know who each party is and you can’t talk them out of it.
Sometimes the environment favors the marketability of the nurturant parent and sometimes it favors the strict parent. When eliminating Obamacare was top-of-mind a few years ago, the nurturant parents were understandably very marketable to swing voters, so Democrats did well in those elections. Now that crime and spending/inflation are top-of-mind with swing voters, the strict daddy starts looking good in this election cycle.
My larger point is that voters have a clear and pretty accurate viewpoint about what each party is, and it’s almost impossible for ads and speeches to talk them out of those preconceived notions. But the environment at any given time dictates which profile is going to sell better with swing voters.
One this is certain: The mid-term winners will be declared by pompous pundits to be political geniuses and the losers will be declare politically tone deaf. That’s what they do every cycle. But it’s more about the environment — the headwinds the party in power always face in midterms and the fact that inflation and crime are bad now — than about the relative skill levels of the two parties’ candidates and political consultants.
Well, I’m staying optimistic about the results come Nov. 8th, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t need quite a few beers on the 9th….
We’ll line up a dozen for each of us on the 9th … .
Agreed that Dems this year banked way too much on reaction to the Dobbs decision, and had no effective counter to the Repugnant demagoguery. As for the outcome next month, I think your worries are well-founded and your last-paragraph don’t-lose-hope optimism is wishful thinking.
When one has been through many, many elections, one gets a sense of what’s afoot. NOT that I was happy about it, but I foresaw the outcome in 2016. This year feels worse. So brace yourself, because there’s no happy ending in sight. Not even here in Minnesota. And of course, the Trump treason party will make damn sure that there’s no chance of ever again enjoying fair and open elections. I don’t have any solutions or good iseas about how to stave off this disaster.