Missing the point

Ed Kilgore at Democratic Strategist, who has been refreshingly readable in recent years, is back in the old DLC mode today with a silly argument attacking criticism of Obama's perceived move to the center. Basically Kilgore's case comes down to "Obama's not moving to the center, but if he is it's just because he's awesome, SHUT UP ARIANNA HUFFINGTON," and it's not really worth our time. (Especially his dreamy-eyed contention that Obama is a "remarkable man" who can operate outside existing political paradigms, which is startlingly credulous for a man of Kilgore's intellect and experience.) But there's one bit I do want to take issue with, because it's important -- it has to do with concepts of "swing voters." Kilgore writes:

Second of all, as the TDS Roundtable on swing and base voters earlier this year illustrated, there's plenty of disagreement about the definition and nature of "swing voters." They don't necessarily all reside in the ideological "center" of the electorate on every issue, and moreover, "base" voters don't necessarily have inconsistent or antagonistic points of view from "swing voters." The two things that are pretty hard to deny are that (1) undecided "very likely" voters are indeed a disproportionately important electoral prize because winning each of them produces two net votes, and (2) most successful campaigns in a competitive environment manage to energize the partisan base while expanding it into the ranks of independents and even the other party's base. Huffington's horror at swing-voter pandering, and her manifest contempt for swing voters themselves, probably reflects the fashionable but very dubious Lackoffian belief that swing voters are cognitively confused, perhaps even stupid or amoral people who can only be appealed to by an even more strongly expressed partisan "frame."

This is wrong on a very profound level, and it misunderstands both Lakoff and the entire political-strategy argument of the netroots (which Huffington is making a facile version of). If I can arrogantly presume to speak for Lakoffian progressives for a minute -- we don't think that swing voters are confused. We think they don't exist.

Longitudinal research has shown, consistently, that people who claim they are "independent" or "nonpartisan" or whatever overwhelmingly display identical voting patterns to partisan voters. They may not say they're affiliated, but they vote like they are. A few people are out there whose votes regularly switch from Democratic to Republican or vice versa depending on the election in front of them, but there are so few of them that they're politically and statistically insignificant; most are just partisans who won't admit it. What DOES actually define that self-identified nonpartisan group, meanwhile, is that they're predominantly lower-information voters who are much less engaged with the political process and turn out much less frequently. (Which makes sense: the more time you spend following politics, the more likely you are to take a side. It's not that they are "stupid and amoral," and frankly it's rather offensive that Kilgore put those words in Arianna Huffington's mouth. It's only that they're politically disengaged.)

Therefore, outcome-decisive changes over the course of an election, so often assumed by the best analysts to be the product of swing voters changing their minds, are more likely the product of these marginal voters deciding whether or not to vote. (Traditional polls, not being longitudinal, cannot measure this.) Hence a focus on turning out the "base"; there is nobody else to turn out! Of course that's a controversial thesis, and I imagine Kilgore and lots of other people disagree, but it sure makes more sense to me than the alternative (that elections are decided by a tiny cadre of cerebral David Brooksian independents who are somehow engaged in the political process yet fail to identify with a political group).

So even if we grant Kilgore the argument that Obama's not moving to the "center" per se in his pursuit of swing voters, it doesn't matter, because pursuing swing voters at ALL is a wild goose chase. The way to win those valuable marginal votes is to campaign confidently and persuasively, using -- here comes Lakoff -- a cognitive FRAME which can be easily adopted by voters who aren't particularly political in nature. Republicans have done very well since Reagan in establishing their frame (and winning over all kinds of marginal Democrats, both so-called independents and their "Reagan Democrat" cousins, in the process); Democrats are only starting to do so. (I'm beginning to think that Obama's "Change" thing is a good step in that direction, actually, which is for another post.)

From this perspective Obama's movements away from progressivism, then, actually do direct damage to both the Democratic voter coalition and to his own electoral prospects (which are closely tied), by cutting up the party's frame for no damn reason. Hence Arianna Huffington's outrage, and hence the netroots' frustration at those within the party who still (insanely) think nonpartisanship and "triangulation" is a route to victory. Kilgore's total failure to understand this, and to instead treat the argument like he's defending Obama from hordes of raging hippies, is a saddening reminder of how out-of-touch -- how ignorant -- DC-elite centrism is of the way politics works in real life. But what else is new?