Lost To the Dark Side

           Sorry Democrats.  They’ve gone over to the Dark Side, and they’re probably not coming back.

            That’s the sad but inescapable conclusion that emerges from the University of Michigan’s 2016 American National Election Study.  The ANES is the gold standard in political polling, and an analysis of its data raises the distinct possibility that it was Barack Obama and not Donald Trump who is the anomalous politician.

            There’s a meme going around in Democratic circles that Donald Trump was the beneficiary of a number of unique circumstances related to Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a candidate and the atrocious campaign she ran, particularly in the last few weeks leading up to Election Day.  The argument is that the stronger candidates Democrats are certain to put on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 should be able to rebuild the coalition that elected Barack Obama to twin terms in the White House. 

           To make that argument work, among other things, we’d have to find that the Defectors—people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016--resemble the “Loyalists” who voted for Obama and Clinton in 2012 and 2016 respectively, but simply liked Hillary Clinton less than the Loyalists did.          

  
          The 2016 ANES shows that almost 14% of the voters were Defectors.  Of these Defectors, almost half identified themselves as Republicans.  Whatever it was that enticed these people to make the difficult leap away from the political party with which they otherwise identified and vote for a Democrat was clearly not present in the 2016.  As of 2016, these Republican voters have “come home” to their party, and while their willingness to vote against their party in 2012 does imply that their partisan identifications are tenuous, all the same, getting these people to vote for another Democrat is likely to be extremely hard.  Hope is not a plan, and Democrats shouldn’t count on Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency to return these voters to the Obama coalition in the next elections.  It’s entirely possible that more conventional Republicans like Mike Pence, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz might be able to wrest the nomination away from Trump, giving these Republican voters a chance to vote for a co-partisan who is at least as acceptable as Trump was to them.

            The remaining Defectors are significantly different both demographically and ideologically from the Loyalists and others who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 are more like the voters who picked Trump last November.  Figure 1, for example, compares the 

                                       

Figure 1

composition of the non-Republican Defectors to that of the Loyalists, Clinton voters and Trump voters.  Donald Trump won 88.48% of white voters and 11.52% of non-white voters.  The racial profile of the Defectors is almost identical to that of the Trump voters overall and significantly different from that of the Loyalists and other Clinton voters.

            Figure 2 compares the non-Republican Defectors to other voters on the basis of educational attainment.  While the equivalences are not as stark as they were in Figure 1,

Figure 2

Figure 2 also shows that non-Republican Defectors are more like the Trump voters than they are like the Clinton voters.  Loyalists and Clinton voters were far more likely to be college graduates than were either the non-Republican Defectors or the Trump voters in general. 

            Apart from these demographic differences, non Republican Defectors and Trump voters share a number of beliefs and attitudes.  Figure 3 shows that non-Republican

Figure 3

Defectors and Trump voters harbor almost identical levels or racial resentment (a key driver of voting behavior in 2016).  Non-Republican Defectors and other Trump voters, as Figure 4

Figure 4

shows, also score about the same on ANES measures of authoritarianism, another key driver of voting behavior in 2017.

            Using a 100-point “feeling thermometer” scale, non-Republican Defectors felt somewhat “warmer” toward Hillary Clinton than average Trump voters.  Even so, as Figure 

Figure 5

5 illustrates, non-Republican Defectors’ ratings of Clinton were more than three times lower than those of the voters who supported her.  And Figure 6 suggests that the non-

Figure 6

Republican Defectors may well have found a champion in Donald Trump.

             Finally, Figures 7 and 8 suggest that there is a substantial amount of agreement between the non-Republican Defectors and the other Trump voters on where they see

            

Figure 7

themselves ideologically in relation to the two presidential candidates and how they view the two political parties. The ANES asked respondents to rate themselves, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump on a scale running from very liberal to very conservative.  Non-Republican Defectors were about 108 times farther away from Hillary Clinton than were general Clinton voters and about 6 times farther away than were voters who had voted for Obama in 2012.  On the other hand, non-Republican Defectors were only about 2.6 times farther away from Donald Trump than were other Trump voters, putting them more than 3 times closer to Donald Trump than other Clinton voters and twice as close to Trump as they were to Clinton.

            Figure 8 reports how survey respondents rated both the Democratic and Republican Parties on separate 10-point scales.  Non-Republican Defectors liked the Democratic party

Figure 8

only about half as much as the Loyalists and the other Clinton voters but they liked the Republican party more than twice as much as the Loyalists and the Clinton voters did.

            What all of this should tell us it that Democratic losses in the 2016 election can’t simply be blamed on a flawed candidate who ran a campaign that neglected an important segment of the population.  The ANES data should tell us that the Democratic narrative about American politics is also flawed.

           That narrative holds that since 1992, American voters, at least in presidential elections, have been trending Democratic.  It’s true that Republicans have won the popular vote only once since then, but that doesn’t mean the Democrats have been adept at getting votes.  Bill Clinton reached the White House in 1992 with a mere 43% of the popular vote and held on to the presidency in1996 with slightly less than 50% of the vote.  In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore outpolled Republican George Bush, but he still received less than half of the popular vote.  George W. Bush received the first presidential majority vote—barely—in 2004 since his father did it in 1988.

           Barack Obama may well have been a special case.  Obama won a clear majority in 2008 (52.9%) and a slightly smaller one (51.1%) four years later.  In 2008, Barack Obama was running against a demoralized Republican party fraught with disgust in the incompetent Bush administration that had become mired in two wars and a congressional party that couldn’t control spending.  More importantly, Obama, with his oratorical skill, had made himself such a sensation that McCain campaign felt obliged to lampoon him with a commercial titled “The One” and another titled “Celebrity.”  Though his popularity didn’t help other Democrats, Obama was able to keep his coalition in tact in 2012 to win a second term as president.

            Hillary Clinton simply didn’t have Obama’s secret sauce, and it’s unlikely that 2018 or 2020 will feature Democratic candidates who do have it.  Party identification is a powerful force in American politics, and without a clear Republican screw-up—an unresolved military engagement, a recession, a government shutdown, or a scandal that clearly and directly implicates the president—or a highly charismatic candidate in Obama’s mold, it’s folly to count on winning elections against Republican incumbents with a strategy focused on converting Republican and Republican leaning voters.

  
          Persuasion is therefore not an option.  If they want to win, Democrats have to do several things, some of which are right out of the Republican playbook.  First, they’ll have to find a way to depress Republican turnout by building public discontent with Republican incumbents a la 2006.  Second, they’ll have to redouble their efforts to get courts to strike down laws designed to suppress Democratic votes.  Third, they’ll need to increase their profiles in local communities year round so that they don’t seem like aliens when it’s time to vote.  Fourth, they’ll have to impress upon their base voters that voting matters, even when the White House is not up for grabs, even when the Democratic candidate is not their first choice.  Fifth, they’ll need to stand for a few simple and popular policies—addressing the coming retirement crisis with expanded Social Security and Medicare funded through higher taxes on the wealthy, for example—that can appeal to rich progressives who are willing to pay higher taxes for a better world and the vast middle and lower classes who would benefit from such policies. 

            Oh, and sixth, they’ll have to stop talking about “flyover country,” insisting that people who are resentful about policies meant to help groups in which they’re not members are racists, denigrating religious belief and practice, and failing to include lower and middle class whites in the litany of groups entitled to special protection.  Nobody votes for political candidates who think they’re stupid or deplorable.