I am poking the voter with a stick

And they still aren’t going to do what I want

Some of y’all:

Dreams of chill

One of the dreams of my early days in polling was that while most of our progressive and lefty positions probably weren’t popular, some were. We figured if we could identify those positions and tell the left to run on those, while de-emphasizing their less popular issues, we could make inroads with the average voter. Eventually, I thought, this would allow us to build bridges with voters, strengthen the left’s strength within the party, and allow us to pass policy on a larger variety of issues whether or not they were popular. I still believe that this is a good idea in theory, but goddamn, the implementation.

There are a lot of problems with this- one of which is when you start saying “we should run on popular stuff”, people contort themselves into knots to make evidence that their thing is totally definitely popular and we should focus on it (see, the IMEU poll I wrote about). The more sophisticated version of this strategy has you figuring out what aspects of your issue are popular (think “clean air, clean water” vs “climate change”) and focusing on that. I stand by this strategy, but it rapidly drifts into “claim everything is popular” maximalism. The incentives here are really really bad. Now everyone wants to talk about how their niche issue is a huge electoral winner and candidates should take it up. This is silly, and popularity is not the same as moral importance or value, but again, the incentives are a disaster.

The other problem is that “run on popular stuff” implicitly requires “don’t talk about unpopular stuff”. This requires a certain discipline that’s hard to impose on the miasma of issue focused groups constantly swirling around the Democratic party and the left. It requires you, as someone in and around Dem politics, to 1. Admit your thing isn’t popular yet and 2. Be chill when it’s de-emphasized in electoral politics. It is probably obvious to you why this is impractical. It wasn’t obvious to me early in my career. I am still a bit taken aback by the complete inability to be chill when your thing isn’t the current focus.

Crucially, I don’t see this as analogous to the sorts of post election calls to moderate that are like “ha ha, now we can ignore you”. I find that irritating and destructive of the trust needed for people to agree to sideline their issues for a cycle while we try to win back power. My goal is always to eventually help all the people Democrats want to help, and to keep pushing towards policy outcomes. Instead, this picking and choosing approach is more an admission that politics is a slow process¹, and voters usually loathe anything that looks “radical”. They want change and also for everything to stay exactly the same, in a mix of status quo bias and general distaste for politics. This is frustrating as hell, yes, but that’s politics baby.

What is a party for?

A political party is a machine to win elections and get power, in order to achieve policy goals. It’s not a machine to convince people of policy positions. It's kind of wild to blend these two functions? I know I love optimization more than most people, but it seems obvious that an entity focused on one thing (winning) will do better than an entity focused on a lot of things (winning, promoting issues, building communities, etc). There are good arguments for lots of different functions *in service* of winning, things like building back up local Democratic clubs and civic culture, but I don’t consider those an end goal in and of themselves.

Sometimes, when discussing messaging on difficult and unpopular issues, there's an argument that we just need to explain to voters why we're right and they'll eventually agree with us. This isn't true! This is nonsense! Voters disagree with us in many many ways and the Democratic party isn’t at all equipped to make them agree. Pursuing population-level change in beliefs on a given issue is a noble and long term goal that is well served by activists. The Democratic party taking a position isn’t going to convince anyone of anything (and I would argue, there’s massive risk of backlash when we elevate unpopular-but-niche issues to national prominence).

Plus, the idea that we can just explain away any differences in opinion is pretty condescending? People may not be informed or politically astute but they do have beliefs and they're not stupid. You can't handwave away things like disagreements on abortion or gun control or immigration. These are real disagreements and if we want to win these people, we need to either come around to their issue positions, or find another issue position where they agree with us. Imagine, for a second, that some well meaning young Republican decided that Democrats just didn’t *understand* guns, and what was really needed was to teach them more so they stop being so scared. The poor things! They just don’t get it, because they aren’t educated! (This would be a distinct type of guy from the “Democrats don’t know anything about guns” guy, who would prefer you avoid learning more so he can keep being right). You probably wouldn’t be interested, and the effort would come off as *condescending as hell*, in addition to not changing your beliefs. Why should this work in reverse?

It feels like people are lost in the sauce here. The issues with polling mentioned above make having a clear view difficult- if you’re not staring at the details of polling constantly (or referring to the really very interesting research on ballot measure voting vs polling results, that has significantly influenced my thinking about how much “popular” polling results are real), it’s hard to know that things you personally like aren’t popular. I am fundamentally not optimistic about how much of the modern Democratic party platform is popular with voters, and I am even less confident that us trying to persuade voters will do a single thing about that. Political parties ought to consider altering their positions to align with voters, rather than waiting for voters to come around.

A common refrain right now is “meet people where they’re at”. Usually this is taken to mean where they’re at in terms of platform (TikTok, podcasts, whatever), which is fine. I am more interested in “meeting people where they’re at” in terms of *policy*. I know, I know, there's a complicated dance of appealing to median voters while not making your various allies freak out that you've abandoned your positions. But at this moment I would like to politely suggest that those allies seek reassurance *in private*. It sucks to get hippie punched, it’s not fun to sideline your issue for a cycle, etc. It also sucks to be locked out of power because we lost, and I would argue that is far worse.

“What if everything is fine actually?”

Yes, you can make the argument that Donald Trump’s win wasn’t by a massive margin, and that it was mostly a response to factors like inflation and a global trend against incumbents. You can argue that we should all sit back and wait for that sweet sweet thermostatic backlash to drive us back into power in 4 years or so. If you’re willing to do that, you have a hell of a lot more patience and faith in thermostatic dynamics than I do. I think it’s entirely possible that despite all of his immediate, monstrous, disastrous fucking around, Trump does a kind of okay job. I think it’s possible that in 4 years people decide that he wasn’t all that bad, prices stabilize for some reason outside his control, and we have an uphill battle back to the white house.

I am personally not willing to take the gamble of “change nothing, maybe everything is fine”. I would probably feel differently if I felt the current state of Democratic politics was really elevating me personally or my priority issues. I imagine that would be a much harder sell, and I’m not shocked that folks are objecting to change. The options as I see them are to 1. Do nothing and hope Trump fucks it up spectacularly (possible, but not certain) and 2. Try to do a better job appealing to the median voter (more uncomfortable, but more productive). I am, obviously, interested in 2.

The upshot of all of this is “winning is good and we should focus on doing it more”, with a side of “that probably means sidelining our priorities that aren’t winning”. Neither of these are exciting stances taken alone. Putting them into actual practice is more complicated, and frankly something I’m still working out my thoughts on. It’s very easy to say “we should ditch some unpopular positions” and harder to go “okay, which exact positions that me and my friends hold dear should ditch?”. I’m working on my own ability to chill here- so please don’t imagine that I am writing from a place of perfectly unemotional strategy. If that were true, I probably wouldn’t have had to rewrite this post as much.

1. You might even call it “the slow boring of hard boards”