What moves swing voters

[Berkut]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/briefing/swing-voters-us-elections.html
This is an article people who actually want to win elections need to understand. It based on the results from polling done aimed specifically at both left leaning primary voters, and working class voters in general.

YouGov, a large nonpartisan pollster, conducted the poll, in collaboration with Jacobin and the Center for Working-Class Politics, a new progressive group.

Some key takeaways:

1. Sorry, but there really are such things as swing voters, and they really do decide elections.

blue-collar swing voters helped elect Barack Obama twice, Donald Trump once and Joe Biden in 2020.
They have also played a deciding role in congressional and state elections, including in Virginia last week.

In the current polarized political atmosphere, many college graduates follow politics obsessively — almost as if it were a sport — and identify with one of the two parties.
Many working-class voters, on the other hand, vote for both parties and sit out some elections.

2. It is not as simple as "Anyone who would ever vote for Trump is too dumb to ever ever be reachable so we can safely ignore them and run as far left as we like".

A central conclusion is that infrequent voters are not a huge Democratic constituency just waiting to be inspired by a sufficiently progressive economic message. "That's just a fantasy," Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, a socialist magazine and one of the poll's sponsors, told me, "and it's a fantasy we ourselves have engaged in." (In fairness, numerous other people — including Trump and, well, me — have believed that same misplaced idea.)

The poll instead finds that working-class swing voters hold a swirl of progressive and conservative views.

3. The left needs a version of progressive populism that is aimed at swing voters, not die hard lefties. The woke message does not get votes.

Many Black working-class swing voters are attracted to candidates who focus on racial justice — by promising to "end systemic racism," for example. Many white working-class swing voters are turned off by these same positions. There is no simple answer on race for the Democratic Party, given that it must attract a multiracial coalition to win.

But the political costs of a campaign message focused on ethnic identity seem significantly larger than the benefits, Sunkara said. Among five different candidate sound bites presented to respondents, the worst-performing was one that the pollsters internally described as "woke moderate." Its first sentence sounds like something out of a corporate mission statement:

Our unity is our strength, and our diversity is our power.
But for too long, special interests have blocked critical progress in addressing systemic racism,
climate change, and access to affordable health care. We need creative leaders who will fight for our values,
listen to the experts, and make real change happen.

4. The good news - the best selling message was one that was progressive, even more popular then the right wing populist sound bite:

The second best-performing sound bite was one that pollsters internally referred to as "Republican."
It warned that "freedom is under threat from radical socialists, arrogant liberals and dangerous foreign influences."

the most successful sound bite was the "progressive populist" one. It was as pugnacious as the Republican entry, albeit with different targets:

This country belongs to all of us, not just the superrich.
But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living.
We need tough leaders who won't give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists,
but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.

5. Identity politics as an issue in elections does not work. It does not sway polarized voters on either side (obviously) and tends to move swing voters the wrong way.

Note: I am not making an argument about whether or not the left should care about race, racism, and what to do about it. This is entirely focused on how to win elections.

[Razgovory]

Angular momentum?

[Zoupa]

I'm not sure how you guys will ever fix your racial hangups if candidates can't talk about race in a progressive manner.

[The Brain]

I'd like to see more ads aimed at schwing voters.

[garbon]

I'm not sure how you guys will ever fix your racial hangups if candidates can't talk about race in a progressive manner.

He's not making an argument about whether or not the left should care about race, racism, and what to do about it.

[Zoupa]

I'm not sure how you guys will ever fix your racial hangups if candidates can't talk about race in a progressive manner.

He's not making an argument about whether or not the left should care about race, racism, and what to do about it.

I know, my post was just a comment on the impasse.

[garbon]

I'm not sure how you guys will ever fix your racial hangups if candidates can't talk about race in a progressive manner.

He's not making an argument about whether or not the left should care about race, racism, and what to do about it.

I know, my post was just a comment on the impasse.

Mine was a copy and paste.

[Berkut]

I'm not sure how you guys will ever fix your racial hangups if candidates can't talk about race in a progressive manner.

It is definitely a problem, since doing so is key (and ought to be key) to a important constituency - minority voters.

IMO, however, the key to fixing the problem is getting the power to do so. That has to come first. The left has to win elections, and they have to do so in an environment where their inability to win important elections at the more local levels has created a rather fucked up playing surface where the right has disproportionate power to effect future elections.

If I thought that the left should never mention race ever again as election messaging, I would say that. I think the left has to learn how to WIN.

Now, I don't think that is the case, and in fact that would be counter-productive since there are people who won't vote if they think their real issues are being ignored.

So it is a fine line to be walked, for sure. I do think that there are more things that can be talked about then there is time, space, and attention to talk about them all. Given that systemic racism and its effects are one of several issues that are critical, it makes sense to focus in the context of elections on the critical issues that will sway the voters that need to be swayed.

[Barrister]

I feel like this re-affirms things I've been saying for awhile about US politics.

Dems need to attract swing voters, not just double down on progressives.  Issues around race are an important part of their overall message, but can be over-emphasized at the risk of alienating whites who are still in the majority.  Attracting swing voters doesn't mean becoming right wing - issues around jobs, health care can all be very left-wing and popular.

[Malthus]

US has two really big social problems: racism as a historical legacy, and stagnation in the social mobility that used to act as a safety valve for the comparative poverty of its social programs aimed at ameliorating somewhat the vast disparities in wealth that exist in the US population.

Of course these are interrelated (the poorest tend to be victims of historical racism), but of the two, poor whites are far more likely to care about the latter rather than the former.

Policies aimed at either providing greater social mobility, or better social programs for those left behind, seem to me to be a more likely election winner than policies aimed specifically combatting racism. That's simply a matter of self interest: poor people of all races would be interested in the latter, but not necessarily in the former.

Problem is that the latter likely requires promising more in the way of unpopular change (like higher taxes), while the former is easier to pay lip service to, and lip service is free.

[The Minsky Moment]

The US has a third problem - created by our courts.
Electoral politics has an extremely high cost of entry and staying in office requires massive regular flow of funds. The funding system gives the greatest flexibility to large corporate funders.

Any discussion of likely feasible political programs and party strategy needs to take that basic reality into account.

[Barrister]

The US has a third problem - created by our courts.
Electoral politics has an extremely high cost of entry and staying in office requires massive regular flow of funds. The funding system gives the greatest flexibility to large corporate funders.

Any discussion of likely feasible political programs and party strategy needs to take that basic reality into account.

I feel like this is the last decade's complaint.

What's really changed politics in the last several years is the growth of low-dollar-value individual donors.  Trump is raising hundreds of millions of dollars from individual donors.  It's not only Trump - "the squad" and others on the progressive side are doing the same.

[The Minsky Moment]

The US has a third problem - created by our courts.
Electoral politics has an extremely high cost of entry and staying in office requires massive regular flow of funds. The funding system gives the greatest flexibility to large corporate funders.

Any discussion of likely feasible political programs and party strategy needs to take that basic reality into account.

I feel like this is the last decade's complaint.

What's really changed politics in the last several years is the growth of low-dollar-value individual donors.  Trump is raising hundreds of millions of dollars from individual donors.  It's not only Trump - "the squad" and others on the progressive side are doing the same.

Don't believe the hype

Even Trump - who has focused his vast grift machine on the mass small donor base, raised most of the money spent in 2020 from itemized (big money) donors or from allied PACs, "independent" expenditures, etc. The Adelsons alone gave over $90 million, a guy who operates a gas pipeline gave $10 million, Blackstone gave $3 million, among many multi-million dollar donors.  Those happen to be people in regulated industries treated very nicely under Trump.

If we focus on the legislature- take Joe Manchin, currently in the news.  For 2017-22, most of his funding has been from $2700+ donors, with many top donors consisting of companies, law firms, and lenders focused on the fossil fuel industry.

[The Minsky Moment]

Obama showed the fund raising potential from mass small donors.  But that funding source has not replaced the big corporate money, it has just raised the overall cost of entry.  Now major party candidates need to play both games to compete.  And competing for real small donor money means building formidable organizations which again requires more money . . .

[Sheilbh]

I'm not sure how you guys will ever fix your racial hangups if candidates can't talk about race in a progressive manner.

Maybe - but do you need to talk so much? I think they'd be better doing more and talking about issues less - and as goes for all political campaigns that talk shouldn't be a checklist of issues, but a story.

I think one of the biggest problems the Democrats have had over the last decade and more is that they sound far more radical than they actually are. So they're scaring the horses without actually doing things that might excite/energise the people who want them to be radical. Which I think is probably the worst place to be.

I'm not necessarily concvinced that talk of a "swing voter" as some idealised median voter is right because I feel like swing voters will be different in different elections depending on what the parties strategies are. So I suspect what the "swing voter" is change in each election.