And this relates…how?
Hispanic here, generally a GOP voter and always a registered Republican.
How is this inconsistent with Wesley Clark’s statement? Clearly, "most " need not include you to remain true.
True although as far as I can recall Hispanics have always leaned Republican more than other minority groups.
(Aside: We will see how that holds up as the GOP continues to alienate them…)
Specifically, the Democrats need to become more economically populist. Respond to the needs of the working and middle classes. The only way to bring an abundance of good high-wage jobs back to America is to develop a real industrial policy and revive manufacturing in the U.S., even if that requires protectionism – even, dare I say it, if it requires a bit of dirigisme.
As I said back in 2005, the Dems need to embrace economic populism, downplay cultural liberalism. Cultural liberalism will win out eventually anyway, time’s on our side there.
(bolding mine)
Snerk.
Well, the House just upheld its end of the bargain today; the bill in question would eliminate tax breaks for companies which ship jobs overseas.
True Republicans constitute about 20 % of the electorate. The Repubs exploit wedge issues to get people whose interests are better served by the Dems to vote Republican. They capture the anti-abortion crowd every election. They get the NRA /gun nuts to vote with them by convincing them the Dems are after their guns. Note of course, when they are in power ,they ignore those issues.
They also are deep into selective voter suppression. They have cried voting fraud every election, and attempt to boot the poor and the blacks off the voter rolls.
The Repubs also dominate the media. They have talk radio ,Fox News, and corporation domination over the rest of the news. The surprise is how difficult it is to get a Democrat in office.
No kidding.
Er… I mean… Democrats, do not listen to DanBlather and his crazy talk! Crazy, I tell ya!
Because there is no viable third party and the Democrats in their own way are every bit as bad as the Republicans.
“the Democrats in their own way are every bit as bad as the Republicans”
cite?
I was a conservative with Republican sympathies through college, but am now quite liberal. I’ll take my shot at this, recognizing that I am repeating concepts upthread.
There are a number of reasons for which the Republican party has been successful out of proportion to the population to which the OP believes they should appeal. The following attempts to describe the possible reasons a Republican might be elected while we look at the population and claim that they would be better served or represented by a Democrat.
Note that this does not include reasons like
“They like or recognize their current representative”
“The Republican candidate professes positions more advantageous to them”
“The Republican candidate is better looking, more charismatic, or otherwise attractive”
Also not included, and in my opinion not helpful:
“Fraud or confusing ballots”
“They hate themselves”
“They are evil/racist/sexist”
“They are stupid”
1) Commitment and Organization- I think this is the biggest single influence. The people who go out to vote in every election, who volunteer for their party, and who generally comprise the backbone of most local party organizations tend to be older. These older people tend to be more conservative. It doesn’t matter a bit if 60% of the electorate is against a candidate/issue when 51% of actual voters are for it. The groups most likely to support liberal causes (students, poor people) have very low turnout and high transience, and often seem to channel their energy and anger into protests and internet screeds, but not into organization and voter turnout. The disparity between eligible and actual voters is especially evident in low-turnout midterm and special elections. I think Obama took the strongest shot in my short political memory against the unbalance of committed ground-level supporters by compiling massive lists of donors and volunteers and trying to keep them active through the political “off-season”.
2) Money- Relative to their usual opponents, Republicans favor policies that benefit people with lots of money or other capital. These people recognize this, and it pushes them towards voting for and supporting Republicans. Some people feel less secure in their pocketbooks than in their status with regards to marriage rights or workplace discrimination, and vote accordingly. Either they feel that Republican policies will benefit them and the country, or the feel that their likely gain outweighs the small or uncertain effect of government policy on the economy. I don’t think that anyone who votes Republican for economic reasons believes that they will destroy the economy. Because money is speech, people and groups with deep pockets can shape the overall media climate, influencing opinions and driving turnout in favor of well-capitalized interests.
Here I start getting more speculative and long-winded.
3) Self-Serving bias- People who perceive themselves as successful are likely to view their success as the result of their own abilities. They discount luck and social advantages, and consider success to be won regardless of or even in spite of government or social programs. To these people, government is irrelevant or even harmful, and they could do better without it. Of course, they would get to keep more money after taxes if they didn’t have to fund “useless” programs.
People who perceive themselves as doing poorly attribute their lack of success to outside factors. While luck is often blamed, government taxation, regulation, or other intervention is also a popular target for people who believe they deserve or have earned better than their lot in life. To these people also, government intervention is irrelevant or harmful, and the party that promises less regulation and taxation is likely to get their vote. Of course, when the Republicans hold the reigns of power, this cuts both ways; people want less government, but blame their problems on the government and the majority party.
3b) Just-World Hypothesis- People want the world to be fair. The world is not entirely arbitrary in its allocation of success- on average people who work hard and are smart tend to do better than people who are lazy or dumb. But the world is also not perfect- cheating and gaming the system are “bad” but rewarded, and crime sometimes does pay. People make up their mind as to how fair the world is, but have significant motivation to err on the fairer side. This is a source of comfort in what might appear to be an arbitrary and capricious world. A common tenet of modern religions is that unfairness against you will result in a reward (often in heaven or future lives) and the same thinking results in New-Age concepts like those in The Secret. The ugly flipside to the just-world hypothesis is success worship and victim blaming, also evident in American culture.
If the world is inherently fair, there is little incentive to redistribute wealth and fund social safety nets. In a just world, the people who would use such safety nets must deserve their misfortune. Combined with the self-serving bias, a belief in the basic fairness of the world implies future success even to people who are disadvantaged or discriminated against. Republicans have a major advantage in running against taxes and social welfare programs because most people believe that they will be improbably successful in the future, and want to protect their potential future assets. Democrats are unlikely to motivate people who are satisfied with their well-being by implying that they may in the future need a safety net, because this has an unspoken implication that a person is incompetent or deserving of misfortune. Appeals to the plight of children (who are not considered responsible for their station) and family members (who may be incompetent or bad people but deserve mercy anyway) are possible but not as immediately impactful as appeals to self-image.
4) Wedge Issues- The most prominent of these are abortion, gay rights, and gun-control. There is a strong narrative surrounding these issues that appears to me to be astonishingly well-controlled by Republicans. Many religious people believe (and are explicitly told in church) that, when given a choice, they must vote for the candidate who (more strongly) supports the restriction of abortion. At the same time, Republicans appear to make only token efforts to seriously restrict abortion at the federal level and don’t trigger a strong response by abortion rights supporters. Because Democrats and liberals are largely on the side of the status quo, they can’t summon the same level of energy and money from the abortion issue.
Gay rights and gun control are state-by-state issues that both parties cover based on their local environment. In the last decade, Republicans have driven lots of voters to the polls by implying or outright declaring that Democrats will enact polices that threaten marriage or seize guns. These appeals are unlikely to backfire, because if nothing happens, it can be attributed to the valiant opposition. They have intelligently run national campaigns in areas in which gay marriage and gun control are unpopular, while running local campaigns in areas more supportive of gay marriage and gun control. Democrats are picking up on this- they ran a national race against Bush in 2008, but have moved to running local races in 2010 in more conservative areas.
Here I run off the rails into my own musings.
5) Discipline- The Republican party has it, the Democratic party doesn’t. Because no member agrees with their party on every issue, a disparity in party discipline means Republicans can count on a few Democrats voting with them on any contentious issue, while Democrats can cound on unified Republican opposition. This inflates the effective size of the disciplined party, making Republicans look strong while Democrats look weak.
Incumbents who have the backing of their party enjoy a major advantage in their bids for reelection. Of course, the national party would rather have a disobedient member than an opposition member in a given seat, but if they commit to (successfully/effectively) primarying anyone who doesn’t toe the line they can force junior members especially to conform to the party orthodoxy on “important” votes. If they don’t often have to follow up on the threat, it doesn’t hurt their numbers too much. This can backfire, and I believe it hurt Republicans who were unable to distance themselves from the party/president in 2008. It appears that Democrats tolerate significantly more dissent in their ranks, making them unable to sustain or break filibusters in the senate, and leading to more conservative bills in both houses. If they can avoid looking ineffective, this may enable Democrats to credibly run local races in 2010 to maintain as much of their majority as possible.
5b) Orthodoxy and National Issues- Related to discipline, and enforces it. For someone who wants to see results on a national level, following the lead of the Republican leadership in the primary may result in a more electable candidate in the general than the primary voters would choose. Faced with a Democrat chosen by the primary voters for positions rather than electability, the Republican might win in a left-leaning district. Until recently, liberals appeared to be much more willing to stay home or vote third party when underwhelmed by the Democratic candidate. Conservatives have been better at painting races as national referenda (though again, the Democrats hit a home-run on this subject in 2006/2008). By talking about congressional races using terms like “Obamacare” and “the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Agenda,” they tap into the fact that, while most people approve of their representatives, approval for congress as a whole and government in general is (generally) very low. The Tea Party movement imperils this course of action somewhat by tapping that discontent to fuel high-energy primary challenges that are conservative to the point of questionable general electability.
First post in Great Debates.
Well, stick with it. You’re very good at it.
Should I quote the same cites as the OP did?
How about the idea that successful people should be punished for making money.
How about the advocacy for a socialist state that is creating more welfare such as UHC.
How about the open-border policy that Mexicans should be allowed to come across our border at will.
How about pro-choice (I am actually pro choice but for many people abortion is state sanctioned murder - and not in a good way like the death penalty)
You are kidding ,right? The tax rate is the lowest since 1950. How is that punishing successful people? Nobody advocates punishing successful people, but it would be nice if they paid their fair share without loopholes and offshore bank accounts.
The open border policy ,which does not exist, would be a bonus for businessmen who hire and exploit the Mexican work force. How would it help Dems, especially since the Spanish population leans right?
Good post NLN. I have one nit to pick, and it’s one that consistently needs to be picked around here. Fighting ignorance and all that.
It’s a common meme around here - hell in all the political discourse I’ve heard - that the Democrats are beleaguered on all sides by the rich and powerful Republicans. But it’s just not true. Big money supports the Democrats just as much, if not more so, than the Republicans.
This is not quite accurate. While the US is absolutely a free country and would not try to stop you from leaving most other countries will not let you move there because you feel like you don’t want to live in America anymore. The places that most democrats would agree with politically and feel comfortable living in (Canada, England, etc.) do not want immigrants any more than the US does and don’t allow you to move there unless you have a job lined up or are marrying a citizen. Even then there are a lot of people who have a job lined up in Canada and they aren’t allowed to take it because the Canadian government requires that if a job can be done by a Canadian it must be done by a Canadian. Sure, the US isn’t going to stop you from leaving but there is no place to go if you want to leave without jumping through some really difficult hoops.
The answer to the OP is that financial matters come before everything else when it comes to politics. The Republican party has positioned itself as the party of fewer taxes and smaller government. So long as that’s true, they’ll continue to win as many votes as they are today.
Thanks A.Selene, I hadn’t seen that.
What I must confess to, on rereading a post that took embarrassingly long to compose, is that I have conflated two separate effects.
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People alienated by Republican social positions might vote “against their interest” if they think they will save enough on taxes to be worth it. I can’t back this up with numbers, but it’s not a very strong claim. I was just trying to lay out an explanation for Republican votes from people the OP believes have been alienated by republicans. If someone can find a reliable breakdown of gay and straight voters by wealth, I’d love to see it. Ditto for race and wealth.
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I was under the impression that Republican-leaning groups had more money with which to influence elections. This has been true in the past, but appears to be less so recently. We will have to see if Democrats stay even in less favorable political climates.
I have no great explanation for my belief that these two were bound up in each other, but high-dollar donations statistics from the same site seem to support the idea. I looked at the contributions of donors giving $200-$2300 and donors giving $1000+ and they lean republican for all years before 2008. I wish I had better data to work with, because I would like to see PAC money broken down by contributor and corporate money separated from employee money. As it is, I am willing to withdraw this claim.
I will try to be a little more careful in the future, and refrain from assuming a money advantage until I see what results from the Citizens United decision.
“How can Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him!” If you think reality is weird, it’s more likely that you’re out of touch with it. On an online echo-chamber, it’s even more likely.