People like that

The TPM Café’s Book Club last week was discussing a book called Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. The conversation was interesting and wide-ranging, but some of it, and particularly the comments, indulged in one of the things that really ticks me off about conversations around political persuasion and rhetoric. Just as quick background, the authors, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, make the case that in the last ten years, the Republican Party has done a tremendous job of gaining (and holding on to) political power, despite having a policy platform that is quite unpopular with the American people, and they have (so far) escaped the electoral consequences of actually implementing unpopular policies. The authors evidently do a tremendous job of sifting the survey data and showing that Republican policies really are unpopular, and they evidently also show that historically, when a governing party holds unpopular policies, they either fail to implement them, or they implement them and get thrown out. So what the Republicans are doing is new.

Anyway, I haven’t read the book, and although it all seems plausible enough, my beef isn’t with any of that. What gets up YHB’s nose is when commenters or analysts say things like ‘nobody votes for policies’ or ‘people vote for candidates, not policies’, based on a notion of what people are like. Now, I’m not claiming that everybody who votes actually votes for a policy slate; that’s clearly false, but—

Look, there are something like 200 million eligible voters in the US, right? Of those, say, 80 million never vote at all. Another 40 million only vote in Presidential Election years. Of the 80 million who vote regularly, pretty nearly 30 million just about always vote Republican, and pretty nearly 30 million just about always vote Democratic. I’m making these numbers up, by the way, but I think they’re pretty close to the actual ones. In other words, most people who regularly vote, regularly vote on party lines. That’s still only 60 million or so out of 200 million, but I think it’s fair to say that those people vote on policies. They have political principles, and parties that (more or less) align with those principles (or oppose the party that opposes those principles), and whether they like Al Gore or whether they like their State Senator, they won’t cross the party line to vote against him except in extraordinary circumstances. So if you are arguing from human nature, you need to account for those sixty million people.

You see, it’s one thing to say that there exists a group of swing voters (which is a terrible term for them, but there it is) who are like this or like that. Such statements obviously need some sort of data, some sort of research. And although I think that even the swing voters are sufficiently heterogenous that statements that they don’t vote on policy are likely to be wrong, they as a group do obviously share something, that is, they sometimes vote for a Republican, and sometimes for a Democrat. Most people aren’t like that. Almost three-quarters of people never vote for a Democrat and/or never vote for a Republican.

So an argument from what people, in general, are like, has got to take into account that most people aren’t like that. Just like arguments about why people smoke have got to take into account that most people don’t smoke, and arguments about why Moslems are terrorists has to take into account that most Moslems aren’t terrorists. Actually, people are different, one from another, and that’s what makes the world interesting and fun. And hard to generalize about.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.