March 2020, In These Times articles
Perhaps detailed blueprints are beside the point. Maybe, as the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein argued 100 years ago, the end goal of socialism is meaningless, while the socialist movement, advancing toward a more democratic horizon, is everything.
Conventional wisdom puts the number of swing voters around 15–20% of the electorate, but Bitecofer argues it’s more like 6–7%. The actual swing voters to pay attention to, she says, are not those swinging between parties, but those swinging between voting or staying home.
Also: The 7% Matter by Dan Cohen and The Swing Voter Chimera by Micah Uetricht “Indeed, research by sociologists Robb Willer and Jan Voelkel shows that the most effective way to promote progressive policies is in terms of broadly held values, such as family or “the American Dream”—the net result being a broadening of support among moderates and no loss among liberals. When these values are neglected or rejected, we cede them to moderates who typically use them to mask regressive agendas.”
Sanders masterfully ended the South Carolina debate by answering the question of what people misunderstand about him—pointing out that nothing he is saying is “radical.” His platform has not changed, but to those voters who might be turned off by talk of “political revolution,” he sends reassurance. If Sanders builds on that foundation in the coming months, he will be able to grow far more support among less ideologically motivated voters, all without abandoning a single position. Sanders does not lose his bold progressive credibility because he happens to be trustworthy, or Independent, or anything else. Progressive movements and campaigns do not succeed by convincing everyone to be radical; they succeed, as Sanders understands, when those ideas are no longer considered radical. Micah is correct that progressives can (and must) win voters beyond our base—but we also must understand that their beliefs and motivations are not always ours, and that’s not a problem as long as we find ways to talk about our agenda, the way they find compelling.
(Illustration by Terry LaBan) FEATURES » MARCH 25, 2020. In These Times
BY IN THESE TIMES EDITORSShareTweetReddit0EmailPrint
man•da•to• ry vot•ing noun
1. The requirement that all who are eligible vote
“[Republicans] don’t want us to vote. They want to push voter ID laws that block Black and Latino voters. … Not voting is not a protest, it is a surrender.” —Keith Ellison, Minnesota Attorney General and former House Rep.
Isn’t forcing people to vote kind of … undemocratic?
Well, potentially. Some countries enforce penalties for failing to vote, such as a monetary fine or passport restrictions. But done right, mandatory voting isn’t about dragging people to the polls against their wills. Its goal is to increase the legitimacy of elections and make sure everyone’s voice is heard. Coupled with policies like a national holiday for Election Day, universal voter registration and robust resources for all election agencies—all of which would make voting simpler and more accessible—mandatory voting could turn the tide against voter suppression.
Where does mandatory voting exist?
Belgium was the first democracy to implement mandatory voting—back in 1893—and its authors saw the policy as a way to empower the working class. Twenty other countries—including Bolivia, Brazil and Australia, but not the U.S.—now have mandatory voting, with uniformly high voter turnout. Mandatory voting became the law of the land down under in 1924, when voter turnout was below 50%. Today, it sits around 90%.
How does turnout in the United States compare?
Not well! Turnout in U.S. presidential elections hovers around 60% of eligible voters. In midterm elections, it falls below 40%. A turnout this low calls the legitimacy of elections into question and ensures that only a portion of the electorate can make a “majority” decision for all of us.
What causes would get a boost from mandatory voting?
It’s hard to say! In 2014, Pew reported that “about half of nonvoters (51%) either identify as Democrats or lean Democratic [while] just 30% affiliate with the GOP or lean Republican.” Other evidence suggests, despite this Democratic-leaning among reluctant voters, full voting may not significantly change election outcomes. Regardless, we do know that voter turnout is especially low among the poor—in November 2014, for example, just 36% of eligible voters showed up, but for people making less than $10,000 a year, the number fell to 25%. Historical research also reveals that marginalized communities who get the vote wield it to enhance equality. The expansion of suffrage to women led to an increase in government spending, for example, and the abolition of literacy tests for voter registration shifted the distribution of government funds to areas with larger Black populations. It’s possible that a raft of policies to promote full participation could have a similar impact.
This is part of “The Big Idea,” a monthly series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism. For recent In These Times coverage of voter supression and voting reform, see, A Win Against Voter Suppression in the South, How Ranked Choice Voting Could Make the 2020 Election More Democratic, and Ranked Choice Voting Is On a Roll
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The 7% Matter by Dan Cohen and The Swing Voter Chimera by Micah Uetricht
The 7% Matter
BY DAN COHEN In These Times ShareTweetReddit0EmailPrint
This piece is in response to Micah Uetricht’s article, “The Swing Voter Chimera.”
Micah and I agree on many points about how progressives can best win general elections and about the failure of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. But it is a trap to look at the failure of a moderate campaign, such as Clinton’s, and conclude that progressives should simply do the opposite. To plot a successful course for a progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders, we must move beyond ideological frameworks and address the more nuanced reasons for voter behavior.
Micah and I both reject the simplistic and convenient “moderate swing-voter argument.” Anyone following the major news networks has heard this argument ad nauseum—that elections are decided by moderate swing voters, so winning candidates should position themselves in the ideological middle. The reasoning is not without some merit, because there are certainly moderate swing voters we want to attract. But progressives, especially those who want to win elections in the context of greater movements, should reject this logic not simply because Clinton used this strategy and lost, but because it would undermine our ability to build support for a more progressive agenda.
While many progressives have correctly rejected the moderate swing-voter argument, they have unfortunately replaced it with another simplistic idea, the “progressive argument.” It goes like this: In order to generate the turnout we need to win, we ought to run only on a bold left agenda with bold left rhetoric (to inspire infrequent, or “nontraditional” Democratic voters, to come to the polls). Both arguments fail for the same reason: They view voters purely in ideological terms.
In fact, plenty of evidence indicates that winning over either group—infrequent voters and moderate swing voters—requires going beyond the ideological. FiveThirtyEight estimates that about 7% of voters cast their ballot for one major party in 2012 and the other major party in 2016. Three-quarters of these so-called moderate swing voters went for Trump. If they had broken for the more ideologically moderate Clinton, she would likely have won. Simultaneously, infrequent voters did not show up for her. Lower turnout in 2016, especially among African American voters, may equally have cost her the election.
But these supposedly conflicting goals—winning more moderate swing voters and mobilizing infrequent voters—were both accomplished by Barack Obama. And therein lies the key flaw in the logic of the ideologically motivated voting arguments: If ideological positions actually dictated outcomes, one would not expect moderate swing voters to choose the same candidate who inspired infrequent voters to show up. In fact, the voting results for these two groups tend to move up and down together—because neither group votes, broadly speaking, based on ideology.
That means a hyper-ideological campaign is not likely to win over either group. That’s okay. Winning elections, just as building strong movements, requires persuading people who do not believe all the same things we do and, crucially, who are not necessarily motivated by our same motivations. We should never retreat from our values, but the righteousness of our work must still be measured by our ability to effectively engage and win critical fights. There is no virtue in losing a winnable fight on account of a rigid adherence to some orthodoxy or unrelatable political framework.
So what nonideological factors can compel both infrequent and swing voters? Past races show they can be moved by trustworthiness, transparency, independence, anti-establishment credibility or even civility and unity (values oddly maligned by progressives). Progressives can absolutely embrace these values as part of our agenda, which would open more doors to mobilize infrequent voters while gaining trust in the middle, no matter the size of that middle. Indeed, research by sociologists Robb Willer and Jan Voelkel shows that the most effective way to promote progressive policies is in terms of broadly held values, such as family or “the American Dream”—the net result being a broadening of support among moderates and no loss among liberals. When these values are neglected or rejected, we cede them to moderates who typically use them to mask regressive agendas.
The good news for progressives is that these nonideological factors are perfectly compatible with progressive politics—so there is no need to adopt a centrist position that would be anathema to progressive goals (and, frankly, ridiculous for a candidate like Sanders to credibly adopt). Instead, candidates who understand these realities carefully frame progressive agendas in ways that expand their reach.
Sanders masterfully ended the South Carolina debate by answering the question of what people misunderstand about him—pointing out that nothing he is saying is “radical.” His platform has not changed, but to those voters who might be turned off by talk of “political revolution,” he sends reassurance. If Sanders builds on that foundation in the coming months, he will be able to grow far more support among less ideologically motivated voters, all without abandoning a single position. Sanders does not lose his bold progressive credibility because he happens to be trustworthy, or Independent, or anything else. Progressive movements and campaigns do not succeed by convincing everyone to be radical; they succeed, as Sanders understands, when those ideas are no longer considered radical. Micah is correct that progressives can (and must) win voters beyond our base—but we also must understand that their beliefs and motivations are not always ours, and that’s not a problem as long as we find ways to talk about our agenda, the way they find compelling.
Views expressed are the author’s. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
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The centrist argument for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that, while she may have been compromised by her political history of pro-corporate and pro-war policies, her political “moderation” would endear her to swing voters who would spare us a President Donald Trump.
Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) foresaw the possibility of a depressed voter base as a result of a rightward party shift, but predicted it wouldn’t matter. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” he claimed. But the results didn’t work that way.
In Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, for example—most of which are majority black, a demographic Democrats take for granted—turnout between 2012 and 2016 dropped significantly more than the rest of Wisconsin, helping deliver the state to Trump by only 23,000 votes. In Michigan, 87,810 people voted without choosing anyone for president—twice as many as 2012—and Trump won the state by less than 11,000 votes.
Conventional wisdom puts the number of swing voters around 15–20% of the electorate, but Bitecofer argues it’s more like 6–7%. The actual swing voters to pay attention to, she says, are not those swinging between parties, but those swinging between voting or staying home.
The typical Left argument, instead, is to simply focus on activating the Democratic base. Offer something exciting to vote for, like a progressive platform, and they will show up. Those voters in Milwaukee and Michigan, and other dejected voters around the country, might have voted for a Democrat with a more inspiring platform. By running a principled campaign on policies that actually benefit the working class—rather than kowtowing to the center—we can excite the base while still winning over moderates and even conservatives. It’s a key insight of the Sanders 2020 campaign. Sanders has not campaigned to be all things to all swing voters. Instead, he has called for a “political revolution” to liquidate the private health insurance industry and end the crushing burden of student loan debt for millions. And he has insisted that workers themselves be the ones to win that revolution, summed up pithily in his campaign slogan, “Not me, us.” That strategy is far from guaranteed to win and has not been uniformly successful, but the signs are promising. Sanders became the first candidate to ever win the popular vote in all three early voting states, Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. And he has the highest favorability rating of any Democratic primary candidate.
In Nevada, according to entrance polls, Sanders won 50% of Latinos, a plurality of whites, a strong 28% of black voters, a majority of Independents, a majority or plurality of all age categories between 17-64, and, incredibly, a 23% plurality of self-identified moderate or conservative voters. Combined with poll data from around the country, the results indicate Sanders is assembling a broad and potentially winning coalition, all without playing to the center.
The swing-voter strategy that marginalizes progressive policy is a strategic dead end (to say nothing of being morally bankrupt) and should be abandoned. But that doesn’t mean we can’t win over voters beyond “the base.” The Left represents a politics that benefits the majority, not the few— and if we run on that, we can win that majority.
For a response to this piece, see Dan Cohen’s article, “The 7% Matter.”
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Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, March 2020
…perhaps detailed blueprints are beside the point. Maybe, as the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein argued 100 years ago, the end goal of socialism is meaningless, while the socialist movement, advancing toward a more democratic horizon, is everything.
In other words, we never know what the future holds, but we can set a course. At this magazine, we celebrate a fighting tradition to democratize the economy and give working people a say in the decisions that most affect their lives.
In Sanders’ speech about democratic socialism at George Washington University in June 2019, he said, “Democratic socialism, to me, requires achieving political and economic freedom in every community.” More recently, Sanders said, “I’m an existential threat to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. For too long, the Democratic Party and leaders have been going to rich people’s homes raising money, and they’ve ignored the working class and the middle class, the low-income people. … That has got to change.”
Democratic socialists like former Swedish prime minister Olof Palme and former West German chancellor Willy Brandt never managed to break with the capitalist system, but they achieved meaningful reforms that gave back power to working people. Whatever we call those European welfare states, we might consider them base camps for some future ascent toward a society we can’t yet entirely describe.
