November 11, 2022
SOMETIMES NOTHING IS A REAL COOL HAND:
David Shor's (Premature) Autopsy of the 2022 Midterm Elections (Eric Levitz, 11/10/22, New York)
In the past, you've argued that it's largely futile to try to change swing voters' policy preferences, at least within the time frame of a campaign. Your critics on the left argue that your view is unduly fatalistic: Rather than changing their policy positions to appeal to the median voter, Democrats should try to reframe the policy debate in a manner that gives them an advantage.
In this case, Democrats did not change their position on abortion. Indeed, to the frustration of many pragmatists, they declined to hold an "up or down" vote on codifying Roe, but instead pushed a maximalist bill that would leave fewer restrictions on abortion than the pre-Dobbs status quo. And yet, despite this absence of moderation, the politics of abortion changed overnight. Which might suggest that Democrats can rapidly remake popular opinion on an issue if they only find the right way to politicize it.I think it's important to emphasize that what happened with abortion is extremely rare. It's very rare for party ownership of an issue to shift this rapidly. And I think it really boils down to this concept of "thermostatic" public opinion.So, the president's party almost always does poorly in midterm elections. That's a very consistent pattern going back to the 1930s. And we see a similar phenomenon overseas. In local elections in England, or regional elections in France and Germany, the party with national power tends to do less well.I think the best explanation of this comes from a paper by Joseph Bafumi, which basically found that voters like to balance out policy change. They just have a very strong sense of status-quo bias and loss aversion. And as a result, they react negatively to dramatic changes in policy. So when policy moves left, they move right. And when it moves right, they move left. Just as when the temperature goes up outside, you move the thermostat down, and vice versa.You can see this in polling of whether the government has a responsibility to provide universal health care. Support for universal health care went up during the Bush Administration, then down as Obama tried to push Obamacare, and then up again when Trump tried to repeal Obamacare.So the theory is: The reason why the party that controls the presidency does poorly in midterms is that voters are trying to balance out policy change by creating divided government. And I think what's really unique about this midterm cycle is that Republicans created a radical policy change -- and one that was quite unpopular -- without controlling the presidency or the legislature. And that allowed Democrats to plausibly run as the party that was going to make less change than the opposition, which is a super-unusual situation.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 11, 2022 8:43 AM