Conspiracy Theories Are Not a Partisan Phenomenon

Conspiracy Theories Are Not a Partisan Phenomenon

Some voters may have some crazy beliefs, but all voters have some legitimate concerns — and those are what politicians should be addressing.

John Fetterman in a diner in 2018. 

John Fetterman in a diner in 2018. 

Photographer: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

On a trip to Marietta, Ohio, last week for a speaking engagement, I found myself practicing the lowest form of journalism: interviewing voters in a diner. It was an IHOP, to be precise.

This is not the kind of work I normally do, and I had no intention of interrupting a couple of burly, bearded, older men who were just trying to get their coffee refilled. But they were seated next to me and firing off some incredibly hot takes about how diesel prices have increased five-fold in the past couple of years (not true) and how President Joe Biden’s efforts to moderate the price of oil with releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve have left the US vulnerable in the coming war with China (not really checkable, but unlikely). They also compared the FBI to the Gestapo (fact check: mostly false).

So I had to get their takes on the midterms. The short answer is that voters are complicated, with some crazy views and some rational ones. The slightly longer takeaway is that politicians, especially Democrats, should try to appeal to their not-so-crazy side.

One comforting-to-progressives version of this story is that these midwestern Republicans are drowning in a sea of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories. The less comforting version is that they are also ex-Democrats who almost certainly believed in crazy conspiracy theories when they voted for John Kerry in 2004 — and Barack Obama in 2008.

And as much as they hate Biden (who is senile and being manipulated behind the scenes by a cabal of leftists led by Kamala Harris), their core conspiratorial vision sees “something deeper going on here.” As one of the diners told me: “My dad said it’s been happening a long time. Back to ever since they killed Kennedy. Eisenhower, he warned about the military complex. And three years later they kill a president.”

This is of course a classic left-wing conspiracy theory popularized in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. I said my grandfather told me the same thing, and pitched them on the notion (alluded to in Stone’s followup movie Nixon) that it was no coincidence Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered only after he too turned against the war.

It was this bonding moment that led to our discussion of their history of voting for Democratic candidates in the aughts. And that led to me ask why they’d turned against the party, first tentatively voting for Mitt Romney and then enthusiastically for Donald Trump.

They had a lot of conspiratorial, misinformed or downright wrong things to say about this. They clearly had middling (at best) levels of engagement with the news. Most of their information came from lowbrow right-wing sources that fed them exaggerated tales of Democratic Party radicalism, failed to describe the contents of the Inflation Reduction Act and wildly mischaracterized the specifics of issues such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

But underneath several layers of nonsense was a coherent thesis: Democrats had become more hostile to fossil-fuel extraction at a time when hydraulic fracturing had been a boon to the economy of southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. At the same time, Republicans became less supportive of free-trade policies that had been bad for the Rust Belt economy.

They weren’t unreachable for Democrats — I wanted to ask them about Tim Ryan’s Democratic Senate campaign, but they were in town from Pennsylvania, a just a couple hours’ drive away.  They had broadly positive things to say about Democratic Senate candidate  John Fetterman, though they were also concerned that he “ain’t right in the head.”

Many of the specific things they had to say about politics were wrong or overblown, but in broad conceptual terms they were right. In 2004, for example, Kerry ran on a platform that expressed aspirations of “energy independence” and which slammed George W. Bush for lacking “a plan to end America’s dependence on Mideast oil.”

To an environmentalist, Kerry’s denunciation of Bush policies that left the US “shackled to foreign oil” sounded like a commitment to progressive priorities such as electric vehicles, renewable energy and mass transit. But what Kerry said was also compatible with the idea that a huge increase in domestic oil and gas production was desirable.

If you were the kind of semi-informed conspiracy-minded Democrat who believed the military-industrial complex murdered JFK to keep the Vietnam War going, you’d be likely to read Kerry’s ambiguous statements through a generous lens. By 2020, the US oil and gas revival was real, and the only thing the Democratic platform had to say about it was this: “We support banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters, modifying royalties to account for climate costs, and establishing targeted programs to enhance reforestation and develop renewables on federal lands and waters.”

It’s easy to see why this platform pivot could have induced voters in places where oil and gas extraction have powered growth to rethink their political commitments.

The point here is not to excuse the views of right-wing conspiracy theorists. But it is easy to dismiss voters as brain-poisoned by misinformation when the truth is that most voters on both sides are not especially well-informed, and never have been.

My two diner companions were conspiracy-minded xenophobes back when they were voting for Kerry and Obama. And though they absolutely have some retrograde cultural views, 15 years ago they might have been good fits for the Democrats’ secular coalition. In the intervening years, Republicans reached them by changing their stance on trade, while Democrats lost them by changing their stance on fossil fuels.

Almost everything else, including changes in media diet and the odd-to-me conceptualization of Trump as the heir to Eisenhower’s skepticism of the military-industrial complex, follows from a pivot that was grounded in genuine shifts in party positions.

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Which is just to say that you don’t need to idealize the electorate, or pretend that ordinary voters are carefully weighing the nuances of every candidate’s policy platform, to realize that a party’s vision makes a real difference. Democrats have tended to do worse with less-educated voters over the past 10 years, so they are risk of falling into a trap: They think that they have lost these voters because they are less informed. But what matters is what voters do with the information they have.

People tend to be most knowledgeable about the things they care the most about — so real shifts in those areas are more likely to change voting behavior. Even if people also claim to believe all kinds of other absurd things, too.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Matthew Yglesias at myglesias4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net