I just discovered DataforProgress today when comparing housing plans between Warren, Booker, and Harris (who all get plaudits for having a housing plan-every Democrat running for president should!). It’s an awesome website with a lot of data about progressive politics. Another great section is voter survey data, particularly looking at whom the Democrats should target and what issues they should push. This one looked at several subsets of voters across three election cycles. 2012, 2016, and 2018. To save time skip the Weeds and go to Takeaways.
The Weeds
The split had loyal partisans split into Obama-Clinton-Dem and Romney-Trump-Dem control groups. The median switchers were Obama-Trump-Dem, Obama-Trump-Rep, Romney-Clinton-Dem, and Romney-Trump-Dem. A few interesting trends emerge, and I recommend reading the entire thing.
There are actually more Romney-Trump-Dem voters than Obama-Trump-Rep voters or even Romney-Clinton-Dem voters. This is a good sign, it means that more economically conservative and socially moderate voters are coming into the Democratic tent. 30% of Obama-Trump voters overall are Obama-Trump-Dem voters, indicating that the right appeal can win back some of the ‘deplorables’, something I have constantly harped on here. That said, Tom and other critics of this strategy are also right-there is a far higher number of Obama-Trump voters who have become Obama-Trump-Rep voters (70%).
The segmentation makes it quite clear that these voters become more Republican as the Democratic party becomes more racially progressive and the GOP becomes more white nationalist. We all have to acknowledge the reality that up to 70% of the Obama-Trump voters are never coming back due to a combination of sexism or racism. Yet 30% still are, almost 2.5 million voters. We should not dismiss them out of hand.
What do all of these voters like? They actually love the Green New Deal, they actually love price controls on drugs and government produce generics, they love taxing pollution and progressive plans to make college more affordable. They like government jobs programs. A wide majority support campaign finance reform and taxing the wealthy. A wide majority identify as economic populists. A wide majority support expanded gay rights and legalizing marijuana.
What they dislike is abolishing ICE by wide margins. They dislike Medicare for All by a slim margin. They dislike gun control overall (though the Romney-Trump-Dem and Romney-Clinton-Dem favor it by a small majority). They are uncomfortable with trans rights and gender identity issues overall.
An agenda centered around reducing health care costs, reducing housing costs, creating better paying jobs, taxing the wealthy, getting money out of politics, legalizing marijuana, and solving climate change is an electable agenda. One that appeals to our bases top priorities and a broad cross section of the modern swing voter (who admittedly is all over the place).
Takeaways
So A lot of interesting results. I’ve been bearish on Warren, but her policy mix seems to do better with these voters than a more lefty candidate (bernie) or a more centrist candidate (the rest of the field). Even if she is not the nominee, the nominee should just steal all her ideas.
Also climate change, pot legalization, and economic populism are winners in all key subgroups (Romney-Clinton-Dem 18, Romney-Trump-Dem 18, Obama-Trump-Dem 18). Gun control and immigration liberalization are losers (as I suspected). Also there are more Romney-Trump-Dem voters than either Romney-Clinton-Dem or Obama-Trump-Dem. The latter being a lot smaller than I thought compared to Obama-Trump-Rep.
The survey has a very small sample size and did not ask questions about foreign policy or abortion. It also did not ask about specific candidates. I have long thought that Warrens policy message is far more popular than the messenger, which is an interesting and complex dynamic. My big takeaways is that a retreat back to centrism on economics is a huge mistake. I was wrong (sorry Charley!) that climate is irrelevant to these voters. I was wrong that the split of redeemable/irredeemable in Obama/Trump voters was 50/50. Tom was wrong its 0/100. It’s 30/70 and we should be all be more reality based about that. Check it out for yourself and see what your takeaways are.
It still boggles the mind that anyone could vote for both Obama and Trump. They represent such polar opposite visions for and images of this country.
Yes, that is true a few years into Trump’s presidency, but during the campaign, Trump was promising to deliver prosperity to voters who trusted Obama to deliver and failed.
During the campaign Trump was promising to keep as many Muslims and Mexicans as possible out of the United States. Please don’t try to excuse or obscure that.
I think it’s a little more complex than that. It’s all about what issues candidates emphasize. Romney emphasized strong conservative economics while downplaying cultural conservatism and using dog whistles against Muslims and Mexicans. Obama loudly emphasized his opposition to conservative economics while downplaying his own cultural liberalism.
In this environment, it was easy for a culturally conservative, economically liberal white voter to pick Obama, a cultural liberal he knew was an economic liberal over Romney who was a strong economic conservative and a suspect cultural one.
Trump threw out the dog whistle and made an overt appeal to racism that was previously covert while abandoning the widely unpopular supply side economic policies of the Reagan-Romney GOP. Hillary ran as a much more overtly cultural liberal than Obama while downplaying her economic liberalism in a misguided attempt to win soft GOP voters disgusted by Trump. Trump took the cultural conservatism to 11 while running as a soft economic liberal co-opting previously left of center views on trade and entitlements as his own.
I think he has governed as an incompetent Reagan-Romney cultural and economic conservative with a whole lot of overt white nationalism sprinkled in. I think following the Obama model of amplifying economic liberalism while downplaying cultural liberalism is the smartest strategy for our next nominee. It pulls back in the soft cultural conservative economic/liberal voter without alienating the strong social liberal/soft economic conservative we picked up in the midterms.
Remember the lyrics from “The Boxer” by Paul Simon?
I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
That’s how it is in life, sometimes. No one is trying to excuse or obscure anything that Trump said.
I’ll say it again: The Democratic Party had abandoned many of the blue collar principles that made it strong. That created a vacuum. Trump is not the brightest guy out there, but like any con man, he knows how to take advantage of an opportunity , especially with weak people, and he took it.
Mr. Trump promised everything to everybody. He’s always done that, whether promoting steak, vitamin supplements, wrestling, gambling, or beauty pageants. I don’t believe that ANYBODY paid any attention at all to any of those promises.
What got Donald Trump elected was his eagerness to tell millions of racist, bigoted, and sexist white men that they were right all along. Mr. Trump didn’t even bother with dog-whistles, he just out-and-out told them what they wanted (and want) to hear.
Any voter who believes ANYTHING uttered by Donald Trump deserves the resulting consequences. A person who loses a month’s pay trying to beat the street-corner three card monte huckster is not a “victim”. Donald Trump plays his supporters for stooges. He has spent a lifetime perfecting the skills to accomplish that.
Mr. Trump is more correct in that assessment than any of us.
Unfortunately, I also sometimes think he might actually be correct in his assessment that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support.
Indeed.
This is the ugly reality that makes the pessimism of people like Paul Krugman so concerning.
We talk about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue like its an aberration that will never happen, while we forget that Mr. Trump cozies up to dictators like Rodrigo Duterte — Mr. Duterte proudly boasts of the many people he has personally killed.
Mr. Trump has “joked” about being President for life (emphasis mine):
If Mr. Trump loses the 2020 election, or if he is removed from office some other way, I think it’s entirely possible that he and his supporters will kill people perceived to be their enemies.
I think the hard-core Trumpists who believe he has been “raised up by God to save America” (they do exist, I’ve actually talked to people who truly believe this) will welcome such bloodshed. They will see it as “God’s will”.
We underestimate the depravity and pathology of these people at our extreme peril.
The data are very interesting on this question. I guess more socially conservative Democratic leaning voters were sticking with the party on economic messages than we thought and Trump finally gave them permission to vote with their wallets as well as their prejudices? Considering 2/3rds stuck with the GOP despite health care as an issue, it may be that identity is the bigger trigger for this segment than economics.
The challenge for Democrats is that the economic message is what Trump used to lure these voters, but the broad disgust at his social policies are what’s causing the large number of Republican leaning voters to defect to our side. They have interestingly moved left on economic questions as they become more Democratic.
So it looks like a pivot to an economic message wouldn’t alienate the Romney-Clinton-Dem or Romney-Trump-Dem voter while attracting the persuadable third of the Obama-Trump contingent. Climate change is a cross partisan issue while the previously presumed consensus on more tolerant immigration policies seems to be wrong.
Is this really so difficult to understand? Or is it perhaps a blind spot for Democrats?
Obama ran against the status quo, though in the most generic ways. Hope and change.
He did not govern that way, particularly, because reasons, some good. But going into 2016, the party was a status quo party. Which then nominated Clinton.
Clinton campaigned magnificently (oh yes she did), but was a status quo candidate.
Are you seeing where this is going? These are voters who feel betrayed by the entire system and do not have much affection for it let alone allegiance to it.
So it;s not about “visions for the country,” opposite or not. It’s about your relationship to the status quo as understood by these voters.
I guess I agree with this as far as it goes.
Still, most of us learn at a very early age that being against something is MUCH easier than being for something. It is terrifyingly easy to leave a terrible relationship or awful job and jump from the frying pan into the fire of another relationship or job that’s even worse. Passion against something can be very effective at blinding oneself to obvious faults of an alternative.
I reject the premise that anybody was surprised by the reality of who Donald Trump is. A person literally needed to live under a rock to not know about his long list of boondoggles, cons, and pyramid schemes even before he decided to run for President. Whether the scam was Ideal Health AKA the Trump Network or Trump University or WWE (professional wrestling) or Trump Steaks or virtually ANY of the multitude of Trump-branded enterprises, ALL of them were cons.
A person pulling the lever for Donald Trump in 2016 was at best willfully supporting a fraud.
I therefore think it actually IS about “visions for the country”. It was bad enough in 2016, and far worse today.
In 2016, I was willing to accept that not all Donald Trump supporters were deplorable. There is no excuse for ANYBODY today to not know better.
I think petr has it more accurately. I think the number of individual voters who pulled a lever for Mr. Obama in 2008 and/or 2012 and also for Mr. Trump in 2016 is vanishingly small. The statistics about vote counts, turnouts, exit polls, and so on tell us about aggregates. They do not tell us about the “longitudinal” behavior of individual voters across the three elections (2008, 2012, 2016).
Very well said.
Still waiting for data to back this point up.
I think this is the default presumption. It is the premise that a significant number of voters actually changed their vote from Mr. Obamba in 2008 and/or 2012 to Mr. Trump in 2012 that requires evidence.
The point has been made: if the cohort of Obama-Trump voters isn’t very small, it is very much insane; an Obama 2012 vote isn’t a marker of sanity and therefore someone who may have voted Obama in 2012 and Trump 2016 isn’t encompassed by your rationality and logic; why do you insist that the Obama 2012 vote is a marker of sanity and therefore subject to suasion of any kind prior to 2020?
Some people are beyond your assistance. If you want to make them your own personal windmill against which to tilt, have at it… just, please, stop suggesting it’s a course of action we all should either take or applaud.
But the two parties stand for two very different things! Just switching back and forth between whichever party is the challenging party each time because you want some sort of undefined “change” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Oh spot, thy name is blind.
It can make a ton of emotional sense.
You really do make me fear for 2020.
Well, at least we’re the ones with the change argument going for us this time.
History is chock full of victims, criminals, and tragedies caused by irrational and/or passionate action that made “emotional sense”.
I expect adults to have SOME at least limited ability to look past their biases, prejudices, and passions and face the underlying facts.
One of my large and growing fears — and not just for 2020 — is that we are becoming a ignorant, illiterate and irrational electorate ruled by petty greed, passion, and bigotry and intentionally disconnected from facts, truth, and rationality. Talking about the “emotional sense” of these attitudes only rationalizes and normalizes them.
Legions of heavy smokers are dead because their habit makes “emotional sense” to them.
“One of my large and growing fears — and not just for 2020 — is that we are becoming a ignorant, illiterate and irrational electorate”
We’re pretty far down that road. Republicans decried Obamacare as essentially a Communist plot and never had a plan of their own to address the issue. Plenty of time, 8 years to craft one but zippo.
Now Dems need the Black vote AGAIN, quick what can we promise? Let’s go with reparations this time.
The millenial vote, forgive student debt..
Let’s even throw in the vote for 16 year olds, they’ll get suckered in and we’ll have plenty of sign holders. Give them the responsibility for signing contracts, getting drafted other adult things then maybe we can talk.
The lies of politicians are getting more brazen, less scrutinized and when out of power they don’t come up with real plans, just slogans.
The campaign of Elizabeth Warren is ALL ABOUT real plans instead of slogans.
There is therefore at least one Democratic candidate doing his or her best to do the right thing.
Who is the GOP counterpart? I invite you to offer any GOP primary candidate in any recent election who offers a similarly issues-based campaign.
Certainly not defending the GOP. As I said they had 8 years to plan a “fix” for Obamacare and did squat. I lament the ability of the electorate to discern real plans from slogans and understanding real gains need real sacrifices. People want the easy way out and at the same time distrust ALL politicians (often rightly so) so much they’re ready to vote in the next shiny object at the drop of a hat.
I share your lament about the electorate.
That’s actually my motivation for responding to the “emotional sense” line of commentary.
I think its LONG PAST time to stop talking about “emotional sense” and start talking about actual concrete facts, truth, logic, and rationality.
The acceleration due to gravity is what it is, whether we like it or not. So is the chemistry and physics of climate change. So are the consequences of refusing to vaccinate children.
Paying attention to “emotional truth” and willfully disregarding overwhelming evidence put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
We must resist the temptation to try and use it to remove him — lest we jump from the frying pan to the fire.
The fatal flaw of this, and all comparisons over time, is simply this: the presumption is that A) the exact same people who DID vote the first time, likewise voted the second time and 2) the exact same people who DID NOT vote the first time, likewise did not vote the second time. To then compare the first and second time to the third time, where turnout was distinctly lower forgets the fact that over all instances the number of people who did not vote is large and can encompass any explanation as easily as those explanations proffered. Millions of people die in four years. Millions of youngsters age in over four years. More so in six. While the article cited links to an article (the ‘missing Obama millions‘) which explores those who voted for Obama in 2012 and then simply did vote at all in 2016, the article itself complete elides this issue, not even having a category for no shows. As the nytimes article clearly demonstrates there are people who voted in 2012 who did not vote in 2016. There are also those who may not have voted in 2012 and voted in 2016. And we know to an absolute certainty (because math) that many who voted in both 2012 and 2016 did not vote at all in 2018. These people are probably the true ‘swing,’ if any, to the electorate.
The fatal flaw of the conclusions is just this: that the hypothetical Obama-Trump voter (who, I still contend, simply does not exist… but for the sake of the argument:) may be driven to swing their vote outside of the grip of logic. There is no such sane voter: Either they voted Obama and did not vote Trump or they voted Obama for specious reasons and then voted for Trump for spurious reasons (or vice versa). Just because they voted for Obama doesn’t automagically make them rational: there may be no determinism to their swing vote and therefore they are impervious to any rational calculus about what will, or will not, cause them to swing one way or the other. It is a fools errand trying to pretend otherwise. They are not swing votes, they are, if they exist at all, random variables not worth the time to think about.
The final flaw of this analysis is that it presumes our system isn’t broken and a level playing field as the fulcrum on which votes do, or do not, ‘swing’. All of the above is before we get to voter purges, intimidation/suppression and gerrymandering (which also depresses turnout.) Swing voters aren’t that dispositive. There is no possible way they could be in our distinctly imperfected system. No shows, suppressed and otherwise manipulated registrations and votes are far, far more important.
I showed my data and am still waiting for yours. Wishing for 8 million voters to go away still does not strike me as a valid electoral strategy for 2020.
Now this data does show my assumptions to be incorrect too. Only 2 million of those voters are likely to come back, many did leave forever due to racial and sexist animus. I have to concede that my 50/50 breakdown was overly optimistic. It also shows we need to be sensitive about the other blocs of historically Republican voters coming in. These are two new and entirely unstable coalitions forming around supporting or opposing Trump.
Trickle Up makes a great point that if we run a disruptor and make Trump the status quo defender than we are more likely to win. Hence my trepidation about Biden.
I realize this is a more than one cycle proposition, but we absolutely must bring civics back to engender respect and support for our constitutional system. I like Biden in part because he is steady and almost always go for the most experienced governor (generic term for person who governs or serves in government, not necessarily supreme executive magistrate of a state).
Running a “disrupter” against Mr. Trump strikes me as choosing the blind to lead the blind.
Facts, truth, and logic do not disappear because a small or large number of people ignore them.