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 Movember Special continues. Click below for a 20 % discount on a subscription to Truth and Consequences.
First, a quick reminder that I’ll be nerding out with Elliott Morris today as we talk Virginia, New Jersey, and all things politics. Here’s the link, and I’ll see you at 12:30.
I did, however, want to bring up one thing that hopefully Elliott and I can discuss — and that is, how not to analyze elections.
Beware of False Prophets
This morning, the New York Times editorial page took Joe Biden to task for ignoring the will of the voters — and leading Democrats down the disastrous path of gubernatorial defeat in Virginia (and near loss in New Jersey):
Many in the president’s party point to Tuesday as proof that congressional Democrats need to stop their left-center squabbling and clock some legislative wins ASAP by passing both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a robust version of the Build Back Better plan, the larger social spending and environmental proposal. They believe this will give their candidates concrete achievements to run on next year and help re-energize their base.
But Tuesday’s results are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better, which have some strong provisions and some discretionary ones driving up the price tag. The concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government, should not be dismissed.
Here’s the problem with this argument: there’s no evidence to back it up.
Indeed, to the extent there is data on this point, it would suggest that the Times is wrong.
First of all, recent polling suggests that most voters have no idea what’s in the “Build Back Better" bill, which might have something to do with the fact that no such bill currently exists.
However, there is broad support for some of the key provisions in the legislation:
Other polling tends to back up these numbers.
Moreover, in the Virginia race, Terry McAuliffe spent the last few days boasting about the possibility of the bill’s passage, hoping that it would give him a political boost. Republican Glenn Youngkin focused on the issue of education and less so on the budget package. I feel confident that if Americans were outraged by the president’s leftward tilt, Youngkin would have run on that issue — but that isn’t what happened. This is not to say that the Times is wrong. Maybe Virginia voters are concerned about Biden’s allegedly leftward tilt (though, in fairness, he pretty clearly ran for president on the Build Back Better plan). But saying something and proving it are two very different things.
I’ve spent many years working as an opinion journalist. One lesson I’ve learned is that writing opinion pieces is not just about expressing a viewpoint on a political outcome. You do need evidence to back it up, and, as far as I can tell, the Times provides none.
No, the Problem is White Women
To show you that I’m not criticizing the Times because of my own ideological priors, I’d like to direct your attention to this piece by Wajahat Ali in the Daily Beast, titled “You Damn Karens Are Killing America.”
As a student of American history and a person of color, I never underestimate the white, hot rage, anxiety, and resentment of a Karen scorned. You might think you’ve won them over with Beyonce, Oprah, chai latte, and henna, but the cult of Karen will always turn on people of color on a dime to uphold oppressive systems that ensure they remain influential and powerful handmaidens of white supremacy.
Don’t believe me? According to an NBC exit poll, 75 percent of white women without college degrees voted for Glenn Youngkin for Governor in Virginia, compared to 56 percent who went for Trump in 2020. They voted for a man whose single campaign message was about stopping the manufactured bogeyman of Critical Race Theory, the latest incarnation of the Southern Strategy, which most of his voters can’t define and isn’t taught in schools, but they are certain it is absolutely terrifying and worth canceling because it’s making their kids hate white people and become transgender.
… When push comes to shove, many white women in this country have historically shoved people of color out of the way. These suburban, PTA moms were “segregation’s constant gardeners” who helped keep Jim Crow alive; they upheld white power at the expense of Black and brown women as they marched towards suffrage; and they even came out to derail the Equal Rights Amendment, thanks to the advocacy of conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly, who argued that (white) women, and their (white) families, were better under the current, unequal system that promoted patriarchy and white supremacy.
Where does one begin? The first and most obvious point is that one of the keys to Democratic electoral success in 2018 and 2020 was the shift of suburban women from the GOP to Democrats. While it’s true that white women usually vote Republican, they vote less Republican than white men.
Second, there is a wide gender gap in the American electorate: women more strongly support Democratic candidates than their male counterparts. In 2020, that gender gap shrunk, and one of the reasons may have something to do with education. In other words, white working-class women are more inclined to support Republicans, while Democrats are increasing their advantage among college-educated women. That trend is also happening among men and may even explain the drop-off for Democrats among Black and Hispanic voters. Indeed, the educational gap between the two parties is one of the most important trends in modern American politics. That is perhaps a better explainer for what happened in Virginia than “white women are unreconstructed racists.”
Third, Ali has the same problem as the Times — no evidence. The fact that 75 percent of white women voted for Glenn Youngkin might be because he railed against critical race theory or because they’re all secretly racist. But to make a claim like that, you have to prove it — and Ali does not. Political analysis that masquerades as “I believe/want this claim to be true” is not analysis. It’s simply noise. In general, one should be highly dubious of an assertion that comes down to “white women shifted to the GOP this year in Virginia thus they must all be racists.” How does one explain those same white women voting against the most openly racist presidential candidate in modern American history last year? Maybe, just maybe, there’s another more complicated explanation.
Ali’s argument is no more accurate than that of Republicans who claim that Youngkin won because of his focus on education and critical race theory. Until we have more data, none of us can say with certainty why Youngkin prevailed. From a historical standpoint, the fact that Joe Biden’s poll numbers are lousy and that the incumbent party candidate usually loses the governor’s race in Virginia would suggest that these boring explanations hit closer to the bullseye.