The problem with our election obsession

The problem with our election obsession

Opinion by Perry Bacon Jr.

Columnist

Today at 2:48 p.m. EDT

Every day is not Election Day. Most days are not Election Day. Most of what happens in the years between elections won’t affect what happens on Election Day. Yet the United States’ political culture has become singularly obsessed with elections, directing us away from important debates about issues and turning every question into an analysis of Wisconsin swing voters.

Of course elections matter, because they decide who gets to set policy. And with the Republican Party becoming more authoritarian by the day, state and federal elections matter especially now. If the GOP wins enough state legislative, gubernatorial and congressional races over the next few years, it may well use gerrymandering, voting-law changes and other moves to create entrenched one-party rule.

And perhaps because of the radicalism on the right, I am seeing a rise in political discussions framed around elections, from not only politicians and activists but ordinary citizens, particularly Democrats. Read political reporting, scroll Twitter or watch cable news, and you’ll notice that much discourse ostensibly about, say, the infrastructure bill, Afghanistan or President Biden is really focused on one all-consuming question: “How will this affect what swing voters in Wisconsin — or Pennsylvania, or Arizona — do in 2022 and 2024?”

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Given the high stakes, the obsession is understandable. Nonetheless, it’s a bad development. Why?

First, some ideas deserve a hearing, even if they are unpopular. The civil rights movement of the 1960s could not have survived a daily analysis of how it affected the Democrats’ standing in swing states — the March on Washington was unpopular when it happened, as was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at times. Today, it makes sense that the Republican policymakers keep pushing abortion limits — they believe that is the moral position and are willing to absorb some electoral heat for it. (And it might not be that much heat.)

On the Democratic side, defending the rights of immigrants and Black people may never be particularly popular, and I am not arguing that Biden should completely ignore electoral consequences and propose a major reparations program next week. But Biden generally should not act in morally dubious ways on racial issues simply to woo conservative White voters, not only because such actions would be wrong but also because there is limited evidence this would actually win him many White swing voters.

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Second, debating on electoral terms can prevent important discussions about the substance of politics. “What should be in the reconciliation bill?” would be a more useful question to explore with the public and Democratic officials than “What are the electoral effects of passing or not passing the reconciliation bill?”

Third, if we knew the precise electoral effects of passing those bills (or most other things that happen in politics), those effects would be important to talk about. But the truth is we don’t.

Here’s what we really know: Most Americans will vote for the party they normally do. Voters don’t know much about policy details but have some generic predispositions that are heavily shaped by their ideology and media coverage. There is a small group of voters who don’t pay that much attention to politics who swing between the parties and/or vote in some elections but not others. The president’s party generally does worse in midterm elections and when he has a low approval rating.

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That isn’t much to work with. Nonetheless, a whole class of elected officials, strategists, pundits and others constantly make confident claims. More conservative Democrats are arguing that the party will suffer electorally if it doesn’t pass an infrastructure bill as soon as possible, while more progressive Democrats argue that it will suffer if it doesn’t pass the reconciliation bill they favor. Democrats on neither side of this ideological divide argue that the party must pass something or voters will punish them next year. And Republicans confidently say that the Democrats will lose in 2022 if they push through the bills.

All of these arguments are at best overconfident and might be more accurately described as nonsense. There is little evidence that most voters carefully track the legislative success of a political party and vote accordingly — and undecided and intermittent voters know even less about what’s happening in Washington.

Similarly, it’s unlikely that the Democrats making slight moves to the right on racial issues will affect voters’ broader perceptions of the GOP as the party that is conservative on race and of the Democrats as liberal on those issues. I would bet that Republicans win the major statewide races in Texas next year despite the unpopularity of its recent abortion law — and my guess is most of the Democrats crowing about how that law will boost them electorally would bet on the Republicans, too.

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I know that politicians have long used polling to inform their decisions. I know that the complaint that American politics is now a “permanent campaign” is not new. And I actually think it’s useful to know where the public stands on issues, because the government generally shouldn’t take actions that only a small minority of the public supports.

But the problem isn’t really polling. Rather, it’s the use of polls to center everything that happens in politics around those November 2022 swing voters in Wisconsin. We can have election month, maybe even election season, but when every day is Election Day, we are robbing our politics of real, substantive debates to instead concentrate on possible electoral outcomes that we can’t predict or control anyway.