Who's More Loyal: Democrats or Republicans?
Also, vaccinations are up and Covid cases are down, but the pandemic is still a huge and frustrating part of our lives.
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.
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Quick housekeeping note on tomorrow’s Zoom Cast: I’m thrilled that Elliott Morris, a data journalist for the Economist, will join me. Not surprisingly, we will be discussing what happened on Tuesday and why Democrats might be in big trouble for the foreseeable future. Elliott has been on before, and he is one of the smartest poll readers I know, so it should make for a great conversation! As always, the Friday Zoom Cast (scheduled for 12:30) is open to all subscribers, but for those who miss it, the audio will only be available to paid subscribers. Here’s a link, and I’ll send a reminder tomorrow morning.
Virginia and New Jersey, I Can’t Quit You
I wanted to do a quick follow-up post on Tuesday’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. One issue that I failed to mention but deserves more discussion is the impact of COVID on the election outcome. I thought CNN’s Brian Stelter addressed the issue well in his daily newsletter:
Ask yourself: In 50 years, how will the year 2020 be remembered? Quite possibly as the year of the pandemic. 2021? As the year of vaccines and reimaginings and rebirth. Think of the timing: The CDC cleared the way for vaccinations among children ages 5-11 on the very same day that off-year elections were being held across the country. Shots were administered on Wednesday morning.
CNN's John King brought up the Covid angle repeatedly during Tuesday's coverage. "Nineteen months into the Covid pandemic," he said, "you have Covid exhaustion, whether it's from a public health standpoint; whether it's 'what about my kids at school' standpoint; whether it's about 'why hasn't the economy come booming back' standpoint." Exactly!
Many of Wednesday's postmortems about Democratic weakness and Republican strength at the polls were about "education" and "critical race theory" and "wokeness." That's understandable, but the best articles are also layering in pandemic discontent and a profound desire to get back to normal. Those factors are front and center, even as the death toll continues to rise, chiefly among the unvaccinated...
Stelter's analysis resonated with me because I just took my first train ride to DC in two years (I was there Tuesday and Wednesday for a conference). Two things jumped out to me. First, how annoyed I am that I still have to wear a mask on Amtrak. I know that you’re all likely tired of hearing from me about this, but I got vaccinated seven months ago. It is truly a nagging frustration that I still have to wear a mask for 3:30 hours on a train … but inexplicably can take it off when I’m eating and drinking as if the COVID virus can’t be spread in those moments. It all has the feel of pandemic theater and inconveniencing people because it’s the path of least resistance (i.e., it’s easier to make everyone wear masks than go to the trouble of checking vaccine status or barring the unvaccinated).
Second, eight out of ten Americans have received at least one shot of the vaccine. The risk to our health is minimal at best. If I can go to an indoor concert, as I did last Friday, show proof of vaccination, and not wear a mask, then I should be able to do the same on an Amtrak train. It’s not like a plane. You can segregate people based on vaccination status or if they are immunocompromised. You can even bar people who are unvaccinated from getting on board.
While part of my frustration is due to how much I hate wearing a mask, once I was vaccinated, I also believed that life would return to normal — and it’s still not happening. There is any number of reasons why Americans might still feel annoyed about this situation. It could be mask-wearing or not being able to go to the office or stress about them or their kids getting sick. Of course, some of this is simply unavoidable. There are times and places where continued precautions, like mask-wearing, make sense. But it can still be annoying, and if people are irked, that will influence their political decision-making. Maybe the impact on their lives isn’t overwhelming, but it’s a factor, and I have to think it is playing a role in Joe Biden’s lousy poll numbers and, in turn, Tuesday’s election. If people are annoyed at how things are going and desperate for things to return to normal, they will take it out on the incumbent party — and right now, Democrats are the incumbent party.
Asymmetrical Tribalism
One of the many things that I love about this newsletter is it allows me to explore ideas as they are still formulating in my mind — sort of like a column-writing workshop. Yesterday, a wise friend made an argument to me about what happened in Tuesday's election and I've been thinking about it non-stop since then. So I wanted to share some thoughts on it with you.
We know that American politics today is intensely polarized — and that this polarization is mainly asymmetrical. That means one side (Republicans) has moved in a more extreme direction than the other. It's a point spelled out in great detail, more than seven years ago, by Norm Ornstein, in a piece that captured the trajectory of modern American politics with eerie prescience.
But Tuesday's results suggest there is another phenomenon at play — asymmetrical tribalism. That means one party (again, Republicans) is more loyal and tribalistic than the other. In the book, "Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats," Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins get directly at this issue:
While the Democratic Party is fundamentally a group coalition, the Republican Party can be most accurately characterized as the vehicle of an ideological movement. Most Republican voters—and nearly all of the party's activists, financial supporters, candidates, and officeholders—identify as conservatives and voice support for the abstract values of small government and American cultural traditionalism. In contrast to the variety of single-issue interest groups and social movements that collectively constitute the activist population of the Democratic Party, Republican politics is dominated by a broadly organized, cross-issue conservative movement that now maintains control of the party apparatus. Likewise, the Republican base of support in the mass electorate is less an aggregation of conscious social groups mobilized by the activation of identity-based interests than a less diverse set of voters who perceive themselves as mainstream Americans defending the values of individual liberty and traditional morality against the encroachment of left-wing ideas.
In short, Republicans are more united. Their group identity, as Republicans, is more substantial. And they are influenced more by defensiveness than aspirationalism. Moreover, symbolism and ideology are more powerful organizing concepts for Republicans than they are for Democrats, who are united more by policy considerations and disparate group identities. Indeed, to the extent that policies are unifying for Republicans, it has much to do with their symbolic or cultural meaning (guns, abortion, and generalized anti-government attitudes come to mind). Wealthy business people and white working-class laborers may come to their hatred of government from very different places, but the end result — a belief in small government conservativism — exerts an equally powerful political pull on both.
Democratic unity is more grounded in transactionalism — support for Social Security and Medicare, a stronger social safety net and environmental policies, etc. Group identities are a strong pull but not necessarily toward the Democratic Party. In other words, Black and Jewish Americans are overwhelmingly Democratic but often because they see the party as more reflective of their interests and values rather than because they view the party as a larger piece of their identity. Or, to put this in simpler terms: Black Americans view themselves as first and foremost Black. White conservative Americans are more inclined to view themselves as Republicans. Self-identified liberals may be even less willing to view themselves as Democrats or have a strong feeling of loyalty to the party.
It's perhaps the best way to understand why Republicans can express support for gun control measures while at the same time consistently voting for pro-gun candidates. Or why they supported candidates who espoused repealing Obamacare, even though they might have benefited from the law. The tribal connection to the GOP and conservatism trumps all other considerations.
Asymmetrical tribalism is also, perhaps, a good explanation for why in an era of intense polarization, a blue state like Virginia elected a Republican governor and why an even bluer state, New Jersey, almost elected a Republican. Democratic voters, who don't feel a strong tribalistic sense of loyalty to their party, were more inclined to stay home or vote for a Republican. They, in effect, felt less loyalty to the party and its candidates. Conversely, as we saw in 2018 and 2020 in red-state America, there is virtually little that can get core GOP voters to question their support for the GOP and its standard-bearer.
I should be clear in saying that I'm spitballing a bit here. I have to look inside the data a bit deeper. For example, it does seem that on Tuesday, registered Democrats and Republicans voted overwhelmingly for their party's nominees and that Democratic voters turned out in big numbers. In addition, perhaps the most significant factor that hurt McAuliffe in Virginia is that he lost support among independents. All of this data undermines my argument. However, independent voters are a bit of a misnomer since most who classify themselves that way tend to lean pretty strongly toward one party or another. So it would also make sense that independent voters who lean Democratic — by the very fact that they register as independents, not Democrats — feel less tribal identity to their party and thus would be more inclined to vote for a GOP candidate. Conversely, perhaps the tribal identity of independent-leaning Republicans is simply stronger for the reasons cited above.
I plan to write more about this because it's a phenomenon worthy of deeper investigation. But, if it's correct, it also speaks to the acute political challenges facing Democrats. It's not just that they are structurally disadvantaged and facing off against political rivals who are happy to change the rules to benefit themselves politically. It's that their supporters are simply less loyal -- and there's no easy fix for a challenge like that.
Democratic voters are disillusioned by the failure to deliver on their programs despite holding all three branches of government. They provided the presidency and Georgia worked really hard to provide the senate, but the party pissed away that advantage. No matter what the reason(s), voters feel betrayed.
I consider independent (actual term is "unenrolled", Independent is a political party) voters to be, by and large, Republicans who feel a sense of guilt about labeling themselves that way, instead preferring a veneer of plausible deniability. I don't see many left-leaning unenrolled, because what is there to be uncertain about if you are leaning left? The Republicans are trying to steal our democracy one state at a time, one SC appointee at a time, one circuit judge at a time. And they are succeeding, largely because of your excellent piece's reasoning.