Politicians, Generally Speaking, Are Not Idiots
Maybe the key for Democrats is not better messaging, but better candidates
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
The Secret of My Success
Nelson Rockefeller, who served four terms as Governor of New York, and ran for the Republican presidential nomination three times, once said about his quixotic pursuit of the presidency, “I’m a politician. That is my profession. Success in politics, real success, means only one thing in America.”
Though Rocky was talking about the White House, his words have a deeper meaning — they speak to the essential nature of why politicians do what they do. Success in politics is only partially defined through policy accomplishments or achieving power and influence. It’s about winning. The ultimate goal of any politician is to win and hold elective office (and one of the ironies of Rockefeller’s words is that few politicians did more to undercut their political aspirations by his refusal to bend politically to the rising conservative wing of the GOP). The ones who prevail are generally better at politics than their opponents. While this may seem obvious, it’s a fact that is often forgotten or downplayed.
I’ve been thinking about that Rockefeller quote as I’ve read various takes on Democratic pollster David Shor’s prescription for what Democrats need to do to win. In Shor’s interview with Ezra Klein that launched a thousand takes, his philosophy was defined as such:
Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.
As the kids might say, duh. Shor acknowledges that he isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel with this argument. After all, politicians have been doing some variation of this for generations. It’s how politics works. But Shor argues that the problem is that Democrats are not succeeding in following through on this rather basic formulation.
“I think the core problem with the Democratic Party is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal and they live in cities, and ultimately our candidate pool reflects that.”
Shor argues that Democrats can’t win if they don’t get more non-college-educated whites to support their candidates — and they’ve been losing that battle by focusing on cultural, elite-driven issues rather than those that concern working-class Americans. Shor is right about the need to win over more white voters, but his diagnosis doesn’t add up.
Welcome Idiots!
While it’s likely true that the people who run the Democratic party are more ideologically liberal, I struggle to see how that’s reflected in the candidates chosen by the party. Indeed, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has come under significant criticism from the party's progressive wing for giving their political blessings to milquetoast, centrist politicians rather than liberal firebrands. In 2018 Democrats picked up 41 House seats by choosing a bevy of moderate candidates, who focused their campaign messaging on poll-tested policy messages, like Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare and criticism of the Trump tax cuts. If anything, Democrats that cycle deemphasized ideology, avoided focusing on cultural issues, and stayed away from references to Donald Trump. In 2020, the party’s voters picked Joe Biden, the least ideological of the major Democratic candidates and the one viewed as most electable. And his messaging seemed to reflect Shor’s prescription for what ails Democrats.
There’s a reason why Democratic politicians have been successful the past two election cycles — they’re not idiots. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but it’s worth keeping in mind that politicians are successful because they have both a good intuitive and data-driven sense of the electorate. They tend to know what issues resonate and which ones don’t. Of course, even the best politicians will lose in bad political environments, and some races are unwinnable. But, generally speaking, in politics the cream does rise to the top.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that all politicians are Mensa grads. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville and Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert are not exactly the sharpest butter knives in the drawer. Sara Gideon pretty royally screwed up a very winnable Senate race in Maine against Susan Collins. But even someone like Jim Jordan of Ohio, who might come across as a buffoon, understands that acting like a buffoon is what appeals to his constituents.
Earlier this month, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley appeared at a campaign event in Iowa with Donald Trump, who spent much of his stump speech lying about the 2020 election. I doubt Grassley shares Trump’s views about the election, but he understands that prostrating himself before the former president is his best political path forward. Is it cynical, immoral, anti-democratic, and incredibly dangerous? Absolutely. But it’s also smart politics. Republicans who embrace Trump are not dumb. They’re trying to win.
Last month, moderate New Jersey Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer blasted progressive House members for holding up a vote on a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The legislation included billions of dollars for the Gateway Tunnel, which, if constructed, would improve commute times for his North Jersey constituents who work in New York City. Focusing on that parochial goal is smart politics for Gottheimer, who represents a swing district, even if the attack felt grubby and mean-spirited.
The Gateway Tunnel is an issue that resonates for other Democratic members in New Jersey, many of whom are in seats decided by less than 10 points in the last election. So too does the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which was capped in the Trump tax cuts leading to a tax increase for millions of affluent, Democratic-leaning voters. New Jersey Democrats have been at the forefront in getting it lifted because they are wise politicians who understand that it’s an issue of significant importance to their constituents. The same is true of Democratic members from other affluent districts in California, New York, Illinois, Virginia, and Oregon. For California members, a major issue these days is the push for a permanent offshore drilling ban in the state, which could be decisive for them in 2022. In short, Democratic members in competitive seats — and there are only about 30-40 seats that will be truly up for grabs in 2022 — will focus on the issues and the messaging that plays best with their constituents. In short, they will do precisely what Shor prescribes but perhaps not emphasize the same issues that he does.
Shor makes the case that calls from progressive activists to “defund the police” trickle down to every House race and puts moderate Democrats in the challenging position of having to defend a deeply unpopular policy position. In other words, no matter how much they try to change the story to focus on the issues that help them the most, national issues will find a way to creep in. But ultimately, no Democrat is running on “defund the police” and the smart ones have already figured out how they are going to show their support for law enforcement in order to innoculate themselves from such charges.
Shor’s argument assumes, to some extent, that politicians don’t know what they’re doing, that their liberal campaign aides and strategists too profoundly influence them, and that if their campaigns better hewed to policy messaging that polled well nationwide, they would do better. I’m generalizing a bit, but you get the idea. None of these notions seem overly compelling to me, though some may apply in the case of Kyrsten Sinema.
There’s also a trade-off here that I don’t think is being accurately considered. For example, this column by the Nation’s Elie Mystal points to the challenges in Shor’s prescription for Democrats:
We have come to a familiar crossroads of American politics. Democrats, who cannot win national office without the overwhelming support of Black people, are facing rejection from perpetually aggrieved, poorly educated whites. These whites are poised to vote to defeat Democrats in upcoming elections. In response, a chorus of powerful Democrats has risen up inside the Beltway to tell Democrats that abandoning Black people—the very people who put them in power in the first place—and making performative efforts to win the support of racists, is the only way to stay in power.
And Democrats are, predictably, listening. Black people, our concerns, and our agenda, are always the first ones to be thrown overboard, even when we’re rowing the damn boat.
Mystal’s thesis is a gross mischaracterization of Shor’s arguments. Shor argues that Democrats need to tailor their policy messaging to low-income whites and blacks and pay less attention to affluent white liberals. But Mystal’s broadside highlights the dilemma that Democrats will always face when trying to appeal to white non-college-educated voters: it risks alienating their most loyal supporters. While that may be less of a danger in our polarized times, the importance of mobilizing as many of the party’s core supporters as possible is simply essential. Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton could get away with embarrassing Jesse Jackson by going after Sister Souljah because Black and Hispanic voters were a much smaller segment of the electorate and the party could still rely on the support of white Southerners and union members (after all, Clinton won Louisiana, Georgia, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennesee).
Today’s that’s no longer the case. Minority voters are a much larger segment of the electorate, and their support is essential for Democrats to win. In short, Democratic candidates, particularly in statewide races but also nationally, need to understand how they can best mobilize their base supporters while also not alienating more moderate, swing voters.
There are smart Democrats who have figured out how to square that circle. Joe Biden is the most obvious example. Ohio’s Sherrod Brown is another. Terry McAuliffe is trying to do it right now in Virginia by playing up his job creation record as governor and his policy agenda if given a new term while also constantly trying to link his Republican opponent to Donald Trump. Of course, it also helps that he’s running in a blue state.
But most Democrats who run in red states aren’t going to succeed because of the depths of our polarization divide. That’s not a knock on their political skills. Some races just can’t be won. However, the ones who succeed are, to put in the most simplistic of terms, the ones who are best at politics. They’re good at raising money. They’re disciplined. They avoid political quicksand and focus on the issues that they understand will best resonate with their constituents — and that can run the gamut from parochial issues, like infrastructure projects, to national ones, like prescription drug pricing.
In short, Democrats would do well to worry less about who is staffing campaigns and show more concern for who is running. With so much of national politics being, well, nationalized, the most effective politicians are the ones who can overcome the tribalism of the electorate and win over the small number of persuadable voters. For the most part, not even the best messaging and the most popular policy proposals are going to help a lousy candidate.
What’s Going On
I also have a new piece up today in the New Republic — demolishing among the most vacuous of foreign policy tropes: credibility.
As I argue in the piece, “leaders calculate credibility not by past events, but by their interpretation of current ones. Quite often, those interpretations are not as simplistic or binary as the credibility cabal would have us believe.”
In my latest column for MSNBC, I look at Joe Biden’s declining poll numbers and argue they are partly his fault. Biden needs to play a more active role in the success of his presidency. He’s ceding too much ground to Congress, not using the bully pulpit to his advantage, and allowing others to control the media narrative around this legislative agenda.
Musical Interlude
I haven’t done a “what I found in the record store” post in a while, but I picked up two discs recently that have been getting a lot of repeated lessons.
The first is Richard Lloyd’s first solo album, “Alchemy.” Lloyd was the lead guitarist in the legendary 70s band Television. In more recent years, one of his claims to fame was playing lead on Matthew Sweet’s power pop masterpiece “Girlfriend.”
Lloyd’s solo career didn’t get much attention. I bought this disc for $1. But it’s great. This is the title track, but the whole album is worth picking up.
It’s hard to go wrong with a 1970s Earth, Wind & Fire album, and “Spirit” is no different (check out the cover above … that is some serious 70s action right there). “Getaway” is the most famous cut from the record, but I love the infectiousness of the opening cut “On Your Face” and Philip Bailey’s wondrous voice. If this doesn’t get your feet moving, you might want to check in with your doctor.