The results of yesterday’s elections demonstrate several truisms about politics. My favorite take about the current elections is this:
Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 3 Nov 21: American Politics Are Controlled by Voters With the Memory of a Golden Retriever
This is an example of how democracy is the worst of all possible governments — except for all the others. Because democracy depends on voters, no matter how ill-informed or casually-committed they are.
Mathis-Lilley writes:
On the other hand, what in the damn world is this latter group of voters thinking? Do they have the memory of a domestic animal? Is it possible that any adult American has truly thought through the issues and decided that the best way to stabilize a chaotic political and economic situation is to elect a leader from the Donald Trump–era Republican Party?
Apparently so! After four years of embarrassing Trump-created disasters that culminated in mass COVID fatalities, a violent attempt to overturn the presidential election, still ongoing efforts to fabricate evidence of election fraud, and the ascendance of an electorally significant movement whose premise is that Democrats operate a cannibalism ring with Tom Hanks, a determinative number of Virginia voters have decided they’re OK enough with the Republican “brand” that they’re going to give the party a shot running their state. Again, this is on the same day that a number of ardent Republicans gathered in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza because they thought John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in 1999, was going to appear there to confirm an alliance with Trump.
…
There are also many independent voters who are not particularly politically engaged and simply tend to ping-pong between parties based on the vague sense that whoever is in charge must be responsible for all the bad things and instability. But I think it’s fair to say the dog-memory issue applies equally there, given that those voters have swung back to supporting the GOP less than a year after it got done creating the problems that they are now upset at Democrats for not immediately solving.
The first line of the third paragraph is the key here: there are some voters (perhaps not many) who are without particular convictions and who are easily swayed back and forth. Their votes are the ones who swing the majority of votes from one side to the other — in other words, many elections are determined by a relatively small number of noncommittal voters in the middle who tend to vote for the most superficial of reasons.
At the same time, the Overton window applies to politics. The positions each party takes keep shifting, over the years and decades, to appeal to as large a population as possible at any given time. These shifts are generally progressive, even among Republicans. Thus even Republicans are no longer campaigning, as they were nearly 60 years ago, against civil rights, or even against gay rights and same-sex marriage as they were 30 years ago — well, only a few of them, anyway. In the other direction, Republicans via D***** T**** discovered a vast well of racist, jingoist, self-centered, anti-science voters who could be counted on to respond to the fantasy of “make America great again” without ever being able to explain exactly what that means. DT won with those voters, and other Republican candidates count on those voters to win elections…
Even if they don’t invoke DT explicitly. In a way, it’s a sign of progress, and returning sanity, for Republicans, that the Republican winner of the Virginia governor’s race won without cosying up to DT. He won despite him, even as he appealed to the crazy talking points that Trumpist politicians use, e.g. the controversy over Critical Race Theory, which doesn’t exist in public schools, yet which still fuels outrage among easily-frightened (and racist) Republican voters.
Media Matters, 3 Nov 21: Professional conservatives find a path to victory with ginned-up outrage over critical race theory, subtitled, “Right-wing operatives birth an astroturf campaign, right-wing media whips up a national frenzy, and another conservative is elected on the back of professional outrage.”
Still, the crazies still align Republican: Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley again, 2 Nov 21: Trump Supporters Crowd Dealey Plaza Hoping to See JFK Jr. Announce That He’s Still Alive (We’ll Update This Post if He Is).
(JFK Jr. did not appear. He died in 1999.)
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 3 Nov 21: Virginia election: Democrats left listless without Donald Trump, subtitled, “Youngkin didn’t need Trump for a bigotry-based campaign, but McAuliffe couldn’t get out deflated voters without him.”
This was all entirely predictable.
Republicans are reliably easy to rile up with two main weapons: bigotry and resentment of liberals. The performative freakout over trans rights and “critical race theory” in public schools was built on easily debunked lies, and will be dropped the second it’s no longer electorally useful. But none of that matters, because Republicans live in a cloistered media ecosystem where kids reading “Beloved” in high school and imaginary rapists-in-dresses jumping strangers in the bathroom are treated like far more pressing threats to society than climate change or wealth inequality.
