A Basic Theory of Voting Behavior
And a reminder of the role of political parties.
Because I am perhaps a glutton for punishment (or because I really do want to be understood, which is not a mutually exclusive position), allow me to try and distill the point that I was trying to make in my post about the Georgia race for US Senate and the problems with Herschel Walker. These are points I know I have made before, in a similar manner (but I am not going to try and search the archives at the moment to find the links).
The bottom line is this: most people have already made up their minds about which party they will vote for in the next election (and the next and the next and the next). Yes, some people will change their minds, but most won’t. Keep in mind that social science, at its most basic level, is the study of patterns of mass behavior. While it is certainly true that human patterns are not as predictable as chemical reactions, we are not random creatures. We do behave in ways that lend themselves to some level of predictability at the mass level, such as with voting.
The odds that a large majority of the state of Alabama will vote for the Republican Party candidate in 2024 is about as certain as any given known reaction between two chemicals. Same for 2028 and probably 2032, 2036, etc. At some point, yes, something may happen to change that pattern, and that would be an object of study that would hopefully increase our overall understanding of the system the way the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 added to our understanding of the US party system.
Here’s a key observation: since people are largely fixed in their partisan affiliation they will find themselves often having to rationalize how they can vote for someone who is otherwise an awful person. While the readers of this site (or, in fact, any given random good person) would like to think that what voters should do is “vote for the person, not the party” and therefore reject a terrible co-partisan, that’s not how it works for most voters.
Instead, most voters do a combination of the following: explaining away the problem (i.e., rationalizing why it isn’t so bad) and engaging in a stark calculation (whether they think of it that way or not) that a co-partisan with a poor character is better in political terms than the opposing party winning with a fine, upstanding candidate.
It is worth noting that instead of seeing the opponent as having a good character, voters of the opposing party will focus on all the opponent’s flaws and short-comings and rationalize how the opponent is just as bad as their flawed co-partisan (indeed, likely worse-so much worse!).
All of that is amplified by media consumption (especially in the current era) but also simply by one’s social circle (which likely shares one’s partisan predilections–again, especially in the current era).
This is all known, observed, and utter predictable human behavior. While there may be some unicorns in the audience, the odds are that everyone reading this has engaged, to one degree or another, in this very behavior.
All of this is amplified when a given election can have serious national political consequences, such as a single seat perhaps being the difference between controlling not just one chamber of Congress, but perhaps even control of the entire legislature.
Under such conditions the incentives to rationalize are turned up to at least 11.
As such, it is simply not the case that a given set of voters have to proactively want a terrible person to be in office in some normative sense to explain why they might vote for said terrible person. It means that this is how human behavior works: we very frequently have decided on a conclusion and then work backward to justify it.
I would note, by the way, that this is the basic function of a political party: to give people a group that is supposed to be the best fit of all of the options and the label provides a shorthand.
Every representative democracy has parties.* It appears to be a natural result of having legislatures (exploring that claim is its own long discussion). Given the importance of these groups within such systems is why I continually note the following:
- Since people are going to behave as described above, candidate selection processes matter. And the US system of selecting candidates has some serious flaws insofar as the parties are porous and parties therefore can be changed without any deliberate, centralized attempt to do so (this, too, is its own discussion that I have written about many times).
- When you only have two viable choices, the behavior described above is deep and hard to change. Consider: it is hard enough to change parties for most people, but it is especially hard when changing means going to “the enemy” and not just to another team.
On point #1 I would note that since party loyalty is baked into most people’s political identity, as the party changes, voters are brought along often without thinking about said changes. Indeed, they will often integrate those changes into their belief structure without realizing it and start asserting those beliefs as if they are obvious and long-standing (think about how recent partisan views on vaccines has evolved).
On point #2 think of it this way: if the only two baseball teams were the Yankees and the Red Sox, deciding to jump ship from one to the other would be seen by friends and family as a weird betrayal and it would utterly upset your social relations. You are now one of them. But, in the real world, if your family roots for the Yankees and you decide to become a Braves fan, you are just a weirdo, but you haven’t aligned with an arch nemesis (who is really only the enemy on rare occasions). Having only two choices amplifies the cost of defection. Having multiple choices dilutes it.
The US primary process (which is the way that we nominate almost all candidates) is not controlled by a set of Republicans or Democrats making sure that the candidates adhere to the party platforms. Instead, the very definition of what it means to be in the parties is shaped, over time (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) by who the candidates are. The voters, however, are already dedicated to voting for whoever is on the right team.
Almost all of the voters who voted for Trump in 2016 would have voted for Jeb! or Rubio or Cruz.
Almost all the voters who will vote for Walker in November would have voted for some other individual with an R by his or her name.
This is the way that it works and the evidence for this is overwhelming.
As such, it seems to me that it would be better if there was more clarity in the identity of the parties (which would require changing the nomination process).
It also seems to me that we would be better off if voters had more than a stark binary choice to make since that just makes the rationalizations noted above all the stronger.
And yes, a thousand times yes, accomplishing that is complicated and hard, maybe even impossible. But I will state that focusing simply on the fact that a given party is “bad” and we would all be better off if that party would be “good” is a pointless exercise–at least if one thinks that ranting about it will solve it. One of the things I find more than a bit frustrating in some responses: I am not justifying behavior by explaining it. Facts are facts and if the basic theory of human behavior noted above is accurate, and I think that it is, then explaining it is no different than explaining climate change or how a given asteroid may hit the Earth. The issue becomes, as I so often note, understanding a problem and diagnosing a solution.
Indeed, I would note that if, as many readers assert, the problem is just Republicans, you are misdiagnosing the problem. There is little doubt that reactionary ideology is a major problem in the US at the moment (and indeed globally). There is a lot to be said about why that is the case. Of the things that I am trying to explain here is how that reactionary ideology is able to take over a major political party (via the primary process as a major avenue, but I am not saying it is the only cause) and how it is strengthening (via the above-discussed rationalization in the context of a binary partisan choice).
It doesn’t help any of this that in the American context a poor character candidate can get the second most votes and still win the presidency (as in 2016) or that a poor character candidate can possibly shift control of half of Congress, even if that chamber would then be controlled by a party that lacks national majority support (as may happen with Walker and in the Senate). The core protection against allowing people like Trump and Walker to be elected/have substantial power is supposed to be the hope that majorities of the population would reject such persons or, at least, that the structure of the overall government would not empower persons and parties without majority support.**
But, alas, that is not our system, and why I overall write about the need for democratic reform.
Put another way: if our system was more reasonable (or more democratic), Trump would have lost in 2016 because he had the second most votes and a lot of what we are seeing now would have been tamped down because losing has that effect on political movements (and winning has the opposite effect). Moreover, if the 2016 GOP field had not been crowded and if the rules of the GOP primaries did not favor early plurality winner, Trump would never have been nominated.
I am not saying that all we need to know about the contemporary Republican Party is the 2016 GOP primary rules and the Electoral College, but it is not unfair to note that rules and systems that allowed Trump to win when he really should have lost helped put us where we are.
The easiest kind of political analysis is to simply say that the other side is bad and that we would all be better off if people would be good. In some ways that is what most political philosophy is about: how to get people to be good and noting that it isn’t so easy to accomplish. The study of political institutions is, at least in part, an attempt to understand how to get good government even if we can’t guarantee good politicians. Structure certainly doesn’t explain everything (nor have I ever claimed that it does, as careful readers would note), but structure matters because it shapes, corrals, and channels human behavior.
*Even with forced non-partisan elections at the municipal level you can discern which groups of candidates go together if you are paying attention.
**And, I would note, majorities can be awful, but the only thing worse than a majority of people electing a bad candidate or government is allowing the minority to rule via bad candidates.
The test of whether Democrats are as mindlessly partisan as Republicans will be the Democratic reaction to an indictment of Hunter Biden.
The field of battle is not the 95% of either party who will follow whoever, the fight is over the small, but not invisible swing voters, and the motivation to turn out. The reasonable hope – as opposed to hoping that people will suddenly stopping being pinheads – is not that R’s will vote D, but that R’s will stay home. If only a very small percentage of R and R-leaning voters in Georgia think, “I should vote, but I’d rather go shopping and anyway, Walker’s a POS,” Team Blue wins.
Actually this post was quite clear in general although part of the responses received resolve to desiring tactics over broad structural reflexion (and of course no small dose of White Hat Black Hat tribal partisan reaction, boring as that is).
@Michael Reynolds:
Yes, moving large percentages is functionally impossible as the good Prf. has highlighted. But moving small percentages in key specific electoral geographies – rather than running up the margins generally or engaging in self-deception using national tallies and margins should be your game, rather than playing to urban coastalism and continuing to lose the centre of the country in narrow contests.
My inner Manichaean is quietly chuckling at reading that, believing that most of the audience is about to claim status as unicorns before the thread has ended.
But thank you for another exceedingly lucid explanation and my apologies in advance for the coming complaints that “you’re just explaining away the fact that Republicans (or “lefties” in one case) vote for evil/stupid people/policies.”
The fact Republicans will hold their nose and vote for a horrible Republican before an exceptional Democrat doesn’t explain why the Republicans are systematically choosing horrible people as the Republican nominee, but Democrats are systematically not doing so.
@Stormy Dragon:
This. Dr. Taylor is so concerned about the similarities between current Republicans and those of prior decades (as well as current Democrats) that he pays no attention to the differences.
This appears to assume that all/most voter groups are equally susceptible to radicalization. I’m not sure that is true.
I’m also under the impression (although I could be wrong) that the number of swing voters used to be much larger (even if I’m fairly certain that, e.g., southern Democrats certainly weren’t). Which would mean that the Yankees/Red Sox analogy doesn’t have to be valid even under the current system.
Maybe these observations aren’t particularly useful if one is primarily thinking about how to reform political structures, but if one is also trying to understand how, exactly, we ended up in the current situation, these points may have some value nonetheless.
Another good post.
I feel your frustration that so many cannot seem to distinguish analysis from advocacy and also believe that human behaviors like rationalization and tribalism don’t apply to their in-group. The irony is that such beliefs prove the point.
I thought you promised us a unified theory.
Pssshhhh…basic.
We are so past that.
{remembers previous thread.}
Oh, right. Carry on.
P.S. Totally going to have a single, twisty horn sewn onto my forehead.
@Stormy Dragon:
Because a small minority of Republicans choose the candidates, which is the result of our primary system that too-easily gives minority factions outsize power thanks to low participation and plurality winners.
In 2016 Trump got the nomination with 14 million primary votes – 44.9% of the total. Said another way, 55.1% of primary voters wanted a candidate other than Trump.
Steven, I agree with almost everything you say here. It’s a lengthy post, though, and so I do have three comments: an observation; a question on an assumption; and an actual, although slight, disagreement.
The observation:
I’ve noticed that some of the comments you take as challenging your statements or not understanding them are really a case of people saying, “Yeah, I saw all those words you wrote up there and read a couple of sentences, but here’s what I really want to talk about, and I’ll just go ahead and use this space to do so.”
The questioning of an assumption:
We’ve been down this path before. I don’t think you’ve ever described what you mean by “better”. Would we be less likely to have extremists elected? More likely to have competent governance? More likely to have sound long term policies enacted? More just laws? If those are the types of things you are talking about, I’ve given examples of systems that provide more choice but don’t achieve better result than the US, perhaps even worse (UK, Israel, Italy). You pooh pooh those as examples but never explain why.
The disagreement:
This is not always the case. If a party becomes extreme enough, losing forces the non-extremists to leave the party. It becomes more extreme, but the voter momentum you describe above keeps them alive for quite a while.
@Moosebreath:
But is he? I am pretty sure that isn’t the point he is making. Like, not at all.
@drj:
Weirdly, not the claim.
@drj:
The number of true swing voters has been consistently small for quite some time.
@Andy:
Yup, yup. and (check notes) yup!
@Kurtz:
🙂
It slices! It dices! Look at that tomato!
@MarkedMan:
I do try and will continue to do so, but I understand that you do not find my answers satisfying.
@MarkedMan:
I mean, maybe?
The bottom line is that winning tends to produce copy cats and losing doesn’t. A lot of what we are seeing in the GOP right now is based on the perception that Trump and friend’s successes can be replicated.
It seems weird that what Steven wrote is in any way controversial or open to question. Walker is the Republican so of course nearly all Republican voters who go to the polls will vote for him. In the Doug Jones versus Roy Moore race, Jones won because a lot of Republicans decided not to vote rather than vote for the creepy guy who wants to date teenagers. Very few Republicans actually voted for Jones, they just stayed home.
All of which leads me to think: maybe the rules should be changed in primaries so that only candidates approved by the party can run in party primaries. Getting the party’s stamp of approval (so to speak) would be step one in running for office. This would, of course, be used to defend incumbents and this take away the “fear of primary challenge’ explanation/excuse that so many Republicans use to justify objectionable behavior like supporting the Jan. 6 rioters.
Not that I expect it to happen, but I think this may be the kind of change Steven is talking about.
Polling has Walker running about 10 points behind Kemp, despite the same party id. I think your unified theory is missing a key chunk of the electorate behavior in a closely divided state.
Good enough for Alabama though. (Unless the Republicans nominate an actual groomer)
“Almost all of the voters who voted for Trump in 2016 would have voted for Jeb! or Rubio or Cruz.”
Not in 2016. Many life-time Democrats voted AGAINST Hilary. They weren’t voting for Trump. They were voting against Hilary.
Trump was the only candidate that could have defeated Hilary. Hilary was the only candidate Trump could have defeated.
@Gustopher:
Most of those polls show Walker with much lower support than Kemp, but Warnock with about the same support as Abrams – typically about 2% higher. This suggests very few swing voters and a handful of Republicans not sure they will vote for Walker.
@Kari Q: It’s worth noting that Jones was running in a special election*, so I don’t think there was another candidate that would draw Republicans to the polls. It was easy to skip.
I suspect that Moore would have won if there was another race on the ballot.
——
*: Sessions resigned in disgrace to join the Trump administration.
Via Balloon Juice, Phillip Bump has a relevant analysis at WAPO, Figuring out how many ‘MAGA Republicans’ there actually are. Turns out, not that many. 19% of adults believe Biden didn’t legitimately win. He sees similar or lower numbers on other questions. Anne Laurie at BJ talks about how the supposedly liberal MSM bend over backwards to avoid being accused of bias by this small minority and what a crock it is to claim Biden was insulting half the country when he talked about MAGAts. I see confirmation of how a small, but motivated, extreme is driving the GOP crazy train via the primary system. Something Dr. T has mentioned a couple times.
I freely admit to not being a unicorn. I’ve said for years straight ticket voting is the only thing that makes sense. Whatever the quality of the candidates, the party pretty much defines who they’ll gang up with to do stuff and who has strings on their money. I might vote for a GOP or Independent if the D candidate was someone clearly unacceptable, but that’s never really come up. The one D I thought was a sack of spit was on a vote for x out of y city council candidate list with enough other Ds I didn’t have to not vote or stoop to a Republican. So I don’t hold it against “moderate” GOPs that they vote for their guy, I fault party “leadership” for who they have to vote for.
I do take some issue with the idea the party is completely at the mercy of entrepreneurial candidates. Not completely, but partially. You say “And the US system of selecting candidates has some serious flaws insofar as the parties are porous and parties therefore can be changed without any deliberate, centralized attempt to do so” Some of this is grassroots voters and entrepreneurial candidates. Much of it has been centralized. The Tea Party wouldn’t have come to much without money and support from Americans for Prosperity (sic). The Club for Growth (sic) used to be famous for primarying from the right any GOP who didn’t toe their line. (Past tense because I’m not sure there any incumbent GOPs left who aren’t on board with the Club.) The money is largely centralized and often determinative. And the money guys decided long ago that as long as they had an R after their names and appeared controllable, nothing else mattered. In the general they expect to get away with pretend turns to center, turnout, and money. IIRC I saw a headline this morning about another xx million going to Walker. The McConnells and Kochs and the rest of GOP “leadership” seem OK with their candidates as long as they’re winning. And they started the culture war long before they could spell MAGA.
@Gustopher:
Yes, I agree. In any other election Moore would have won in spite of everything, which is pretty much Steven’s point to begin with. People vote for the party candidate regardless of any other consideration.
@Gustopher:
Except that Kurtz was joking about a unified theory.
And the title of my post on Walker was “Why Walker Will Win a Lot of Votes” not “Why Walker Will Win.”
Honestly, if I had to bet, I would bet that Kemp wins and Walker loses narrowly. But that more than fits the points in my argument.
@Gustopher:
I suspect that you are quite correct.
@Steven L. Taylor:
“I am pretty sure that isn’t the point he is making.”
I am also pretty sure it is not the point you are making. I am even more sure that it is my response to the point you are making.
@MarkedMan: I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t leave the GQP (and conservatism) behind because they were losing. I left them because the people in my state representing the movement were lying sacks of [expletive, deleted] who did not carry through on what they ran on when they achieved power.
@Steven L. Taylor: The slices are beautiful and even though. And not all bruised and torn like with the other products.
The first ballot I cast for President USA was in 1972 in Colp, Illinois. I was unable to vote in the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace contest four years earlier as I was 20 years old in November of 1968. Just two months shy of my 21st birthday.
Besides being my first vote the experience was memorable because just after I pulled the lever to close the curtain on the voting machine one of the poll workers, a black woman, stuck her head inside the curtain and said: “I can show you how to vote for all Republicans.” Yes, that’s what she said. I will never forget it. I was stunned. “No.” Was all I could bring myself to say.
In Illinois when a citizen registers to vote that’s all one does. Register to vote. There is no registration as the member of a political party or independent.
Fits me like a glove. I have been a one issue voter since I cast my first vote for George McGovern. I have known since grade school that the President appoints Supreme Court Justices and I always wanted a Democrat in the White House to insure that Roe v. Wade would not be overturned.
Does voting exclusively for the Democratic candidate in 13 Presidential elections make me a Democrat? Reviewing a list of the Republican candidates in those elections I think that I made the right choice every time.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I only like the slap chop. I love his nuts.
@Skeet: “Trump was the only candidate that could have defeated Hilary.”
Meh… I think Cruz, Rubio, or Kasich would have beaten Hillary just fine. Trump’s win was shocking because no one, not even Barack Obama, believed that rational people would vote for Trump. (Turned out everyone was wrong. 🙁 ) The three stooges didn’t have that kind of baggage.
@Steven L. Taylor: I honestly can’t remember a single time you did anything other than dismiss them out of hand. Believe me, if there was a structural reason why what seems to me to be similar government structures yield such different results, I would be all in with your central point.
@Steven L. Taylor: Perhaps you are right but I think it is too early to tell if the national GOP will maintain its relative popularity or go the way of the California GOP. I assume you agree that is an example of a party that took itself out of power by doubling down on extremism?
@Kari Q:
It shouldn’t be controversial. But it also shouldn’t be surprising that it is controversial for same reason (as well as others that are beyond the scope of the conversation at the moment.)
@Kurtz:
Re all the shoulding, I hope you’ve got some Proust in the etagere.
@Mimai:
All I need is one madeleine.
@Mimai:
I should explain the cheap italicizing. Initially, I was going to cast the second sentence differently and it would have been justifiable to flag it to minimize the risk of misreading. Now, when I changed the sentence,
I shouldit would have been better to eliminate the code.I did not.
@Andy:
And an equally small minority of Democrats choose the cadidates. Why is the small minority of Democrats behaving so differently from the small minority of Republicans when they’re facing the same systemic pressures?
@Kurtz:
It didn’t read cheaply to me. I got your point.
I have a thing about “shoulds” and “musts” and “needs” and the like…..explicitly and implicitly conveyed. And my thing has nothing to do with your post, rather it’s a professional bugaboo.
I was merely telling myself an inside joke while also giving a call-back to your witty post from yesterday. Prolly better to ignore me.
@Mimai:
Ahhhh, I see. Using italics or bold for emphasis is my personal bugaboo, so I just try to avoid using them at all.
Our bugaboos ought to meet for a drink. But it better be a dive, because yours dresses professionally. But mine has one top. It’s a ribbed A-shirt with multiple holes, two coffee stains, and a Gulden spicy mustard stain from three days ago.
An interesting development this century in Australia has been that both major parties have been bleeding support to the Green Party and independents. This has been facilitated by ranked choice voting, which allows a popular independent to win with a lot less than 50% of first preference votes. The current Labor government can only just pass bills in the House of Representatives by itself – it has 77 of 151 seats. There are 16 ‘cross-benchers’ – four Greens, two minor party representatives and 10 independents.
In the Senate, the government (26 seats) depends completely on getting support from the 12 Greens and at least one of the four cross-bench senators. The need for negotiation and compromise to get anything done demonstrates how foolish are the claims that governing by simple majority must result in policy whiplash every time the government changes hands.
There was a tipping point somewhere over the last 30 years when many Australians abandoned longstanding loyalties to party and began to pay more attention to personnel and policies. The two major parties’ “primary vote” – i.e. the number of voters who place their candidates first in the ranked order – has steadily declined for decades. Almost a third of voters gave their first preference vote to an independent or minor party last year. Numerous explanations for this have been proposed, but the most important observation for the purposes of this discussion is that party affiliations can weaken over time, even if they once seemed unshakeable.
@Michael Reynolds: “The test of whether Democrats are as mindlessly partisan as Republicans will be the Democratic reaction to an indictment of Hunter Biden.”
Speaking as one mindless partisan, I can safely say that I care as much about the fate of Hunter Biden as I did that of Billy Carter and Hugh Rodham.
so many cannot seem to distinguish analysis from advocacy and also believe that human behaviors like rationalization and tribalism don’t apply to their in-group. The irony is that such beliefs prove the point.
Yup, yup. and (check notes) yup!
People are tribal, but they’re tribal in many many ways. Telling the truth is something people are tribal about. Knowledge and background are tribal. A person for whom the only tribe is the political party would end up, I think, with a party that looks a lot like the Republican Party.
So no one is arguing tribalism or in-groups. They just don’t live in the same world as Republicans, where apparently the only tribe and in-group is the Republican.
@Modulo Myself:
Which I understand.
So, do you just want “Republican bad!” posts?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Put it this way–my social world is not only baseball teams, and it’s not as capricious as the in-crowd clique in a high school cafeteria. You seem to be describing a very remote small-town environment, where candor doesn’t exist and everything is still stuck at age 17. Add that to the fact of a history of racial segregation and how it was enforced and the utter silence surrounding this enforcement and you have a place where the incentives match what the Republican Party has used to get power.
So I’m not saying that the GOP is bad. I’m saying that the structure of the places that produce the base of the Republican Party are by necessity terrible for creating a good society. If you grew up in Georgia and you are white, and four generations are behind you, tribal loyalty to you will be much different than a person who grew up in New England with liberal parents and some sort of ability to be candid, and I suspect that the average New Englander would behave differently if they were in Georgia. The person in Georgia is going to be learning lessons about deathly silences regarding violence and how everybody has a few terrorists in the family and that’s how human nature works.
@Stormy Dragon:
Republicans are in the lead when it comes to the devolution of the American political party. They were the first to, for example, start primarying their own moderates. A few years later, Democrats starting doing that. Republicans got rid of the institutional party checks in the nomination process before Democrats. Democrats got rid of the last of those by defenestrating super-delegates relatively recently.
In short, there’s now no checks on the kind of populist takeover of the Democratic party that happened to the GoP. And if you look at the 2020 primary, that almost happened. Sanders was on track to win because the moderates were dividing the moderate vote and Biden kept doing poorly. What stopped him was conservative black voters decisively supporting Biden first in SC and then elsewhere, along with several moderates getting out of the race to give more moderate Democrats a single candidate to support (Biden). So Democrats avoided a Sanders nomination because of specific circumstances and decisions by a few key players. Is that something Democrats can count on forever? Seems unlikely. Just like the Republicans, there is no central control, and a well-organized and motivated minority faction can wrest away the brand, just as Trump did with the GoP. There aren’t any institutional or party rules that would prevent it.
@Modulo Myself:
Except people keep describing “Republicans” as this unitary group of people who are basically all the same, or the same in the ways that matter. This binary thinking that all Republicans live in one world while others live in a different world is definitionally tribal, in-group/out-group thinking.
Except people keep describing “Republicans” as this unitary group of people who are basically all the same, or the same in the ways that matter. This binary thinking that all Republicans live in one world while others live in a different world is definitionally tribal, in-group/out-group thinking.
Yes, it’s a tribal judgement against people who voted for Donald Trump and who will still vote for Donald Trump. What exactly is wrong with in-group/out-group thinking in this case? I’m not even sure what’s wrong exactly with in-groups. As an adult, most in-groups seem based on showing up, doing the work, and genuinely caring about others. They’re based on real values and not fakery. You guys speak as if everything revolves around being 16 and if you were cool or not.
@Andy:
Bernie Sanders may or may not be a populist, but he’s not a dirtbag. There’s no intellectually honest comparison between the morals and character of Bernie Sanders vs those of Herschel Walker (or Donald Trump).
This is an attempt to move the goalposts. We’re not talking about populism, we’re talking about character. The question is not “Why are Republicans choosing populists?” the question is “Why are Republicans choosing scumbags?”
The answer is because most in the Republican base are scummy peoole. Many here don’t want to admit or accept this very simple answer because many aging white men find it congenitally impossible to hold white people accountable.
If the “something” referred to here is not the populism red herring and refers to Democrats having their party taken over by evil people…
…Yes, because the base of the Democratic Party is black Christians and their allies — mostly decent people. Whereas the base of the Republican Party is increasingly white supremacists and their apologists, who are uniquely awful people.
@Andy:
Polling has consistently shown Donald Trump with a ~90+% approval rating among Republicans, even as late as this month.
The world Republican voters live in is one where a scumbag like Trump — who launched his toxic political career with racist birther lies, tweeted a White Power video on 28 June 2020, praises and defends Putin, caused mass death and record unemployment with his coronavirus lies and incompetence, and then incited the deadly Jan 6 QAnon terrorist attack — is someone worthy of approval.
We know what this says about the values, morals, and character of Republicans, as much as some don’t want to admit it.
That assessment is not based on tribalism. That’s based on Republicans’ choice to keep supporting, approving of, excusing, rationalizing, and defending the indefensible.
@DK:
I never made such a comparison, and that’s not what my comment was about. You’re the one moving the goalposts here.
@Modulo Myself:
My view is that individuals, policies, and arguments should be evaluated on their merits and circumstances, not on their labels. In my view, that is what adults do – or should do. Condemning people for what group they supposedly belong to is what 16-year-olds do. I find that so much political behavior today is pretty much like high school cliques, especially on places like Twitter, where virtue signalling for the in-group seems to be of utmost importance.
I also think that regarding ‘in-groups’ we have a group that says life is about status, money, image, power, rationalization, and getting what you want and signaling that you are a successful. I.e, it’s winners vs losers, zero-sum, war in perpetuity. And then we have an in-group that says winners vs. losers is pathetic and boring way to go through life. I.e. compassion, being interesting, caring, loving, and developing a real self is what the other in-group would call winning, and socially comes off as being the in-group, because nobody good, really, wants the first in-group.
And I think most people have both of these in their heads but American society can make it hard to access the second. Trump doesn’t have the second, and the constant fear of judgement radiating off his voters comes from fears relating to location, power, frequency, whatever of the second.
1. Agree that most voters make up their mind early based upon tribe and are not open to voting across parties.
2. But WHY?
3. The Rs campaign on fear (e.g., abortion, gun control, vaccinations, non-Evangelicals, etc.) and they have not chosen to endorse science that warns of finite water resources, lack of diversity to support ecosystem health, and human-accelerated climate change because (a) these are D issues, and (b) remediation would require restructuring the economy and reduce profits for those who make profit based upon ecological degradation and negative impacts upon life.
4. No restructuring of political mechanisms will be succesful in improving public policies until (a) the money is taken out of politics, (b) politicians and voters are motivated by a common set of fears based upon science, and (c) non-Evangelists reject the fusion of church and state.
5 Am I hopeful? No. Irrationalty is vogue and the next century will be difficult.
Condemning people for what group they supposedly belong to is what 16-year-olds do. I find that so much political behavior today is pretty much like high school cliques, especially on places like Twitter, where virtue signalling for the in-group seems to be of utmost importance.
If everyone is virtue-signaling they are just lying, and that’s a remarkably bleak view about humans. Nobody cares about the environment, or ending racism, or has compassion for migrants. No, it’s all a quest for status….This is just not my experience in life. It sounds horrible and about you, rather than others.
@Andy: White Hats Tribe, Black Hat Tribe.
Afraid you are playing Don Quixote.
@Modulo Myself: What is wrong with In-Group / Out-Group black-and-white good-and-evil is you lot end up simply writing off significant voting blocks (in self-congratulatory moral preening) en masse by rendering reaching out and splitting off morally suspect if not outright evil actions – to the practical effect of then granting the truly awful more power via uncontested locks on votes in key electoral geographies.
To which you lot console yourselves with useless observations about winning the overall national popular vote.
and in the end that is the worse outcome for the broader populations the Left is now desirous to play saviour for, however pleasing to the political activists for whom morally pure losing has never been a problem as it is wonderful for righteous indignation.
In any case it’s rather clear that the partisans here prefer performative moral posturing and noble losses over winning. Much better to show your moral élan and send the troops charging into the cannons than dirty oneself with other less morally pure tactics.
@Modulo Myself: Thats quite the Straw Man you constructed out of his statement – although perhaps it reflects a rather impoverished and reductionist understanding of his statement (as there is nothing in cliqueishness that says that any person is lying or taking any consciously false position, not at all).
Soviet New Manism bottled in new bottles…
@Modulo Myself: You do realize that millions of people is California, just to pick one of the 50 states, vote Republican?
@Andy:
False. I have consistently from the beginning said that this discussion should be based on simple morals, character, values, and the tenets of basic decency, not on small-ball or convoluted rationalizations and attempts to pin it on the system or populism or whatever other distraction du jour we’re on today.
The system is not why ~90% of Republicans approve of vile dirtbag Trump. The system and populism are not why Republican keep nominating amoral a-holes all across the country, while there are far fewer such Democratic candidates.
The reason is actually quite simple: there are more amoral and unethical people among Republican voters than there are among Democratic voters.
I have theories on why some of y’all just cannot admit this. But. An ugly and inconvenient truth is still true.
@Lounsbury: Imagine using the words “moral” as a pejorative lol That’s certainly clarifying.
Meanwhile, over here in realityland where we aren’t controlled by the media’s “Democrats are always losing” fake narrative, in the past few years the Left has recently won control of the White House, Senate, and House, and flipped the Arizona and Georgia Senate seats from red to blue while turning both states into Biden-voting swing states.
In the past few months, Democrats won an abortion vote in red Kansas polls said they would lose, won a a rural upstate New York swing House district polls said they would lose, and won the Alaska at-large House seat polls said they would lose.
So when talking about winning and losing, it helps for the analysis to be fact-based. Facts do matter, not just not to Republicans or to their apologists.
Democrats and the Left should not join that losing crowd’s amoral posturing, nihilistic trolling, and amoral preening — where only Democrats have agency and Republican voters are not accountable for their own terrible decisions. Having and asserting ethics, empathy, and decency is a good thing, especially now. Now is definitely not the time to go wobbly on our values.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes, and they’re flying Confederate flags in the inner part of the state and talking about how San Francisco is a failed city or they’re living in Orange County and reading about cancel culture 24/7 because around them people are not quite so conservative. It’s a small paranoid town from top to bottom.
It used to be that Republicans with money built think tanks who brought in scholars who wrote conservative-friendly books on how to deal with actual problems. These books don’t exist anymore. Now it’s Peter Thiel sponsoring an anti-semitic weirdo in Arizona and the educated closet cases aiming their rapt gazes at Victor Orban, president of a country with its young fleeing, just like any conservative American small town.
It’s not just the candidates who are just changing. It is the total operation.
@Modulo Myself:
You should consider the difference between words and actions. Lots of people claim to care about things online, very few of them are willing to do more than claim to care about them online. Talk is cheap, as they say. Voicing “compassion” for migrants among like-minded co-partisans does absolutely nothing actually to help migrants, to give one example.
And frankly, the same thing goes for most of the commenters here (to include me, if I’m honest). If we all spent less time in mostly pointless internet debates about who are the bad people and who are the good people, and more time actually helping people and “doing the work,” then perhaps we would have a moral leg to stand on. This is why you’ll rarely see me do much moral preening – because it serves no real purpose except narcissism and in-group virtue signaling.
@DK:
And I’ve been talking about something different than that.