“Who Cares About Ideology?”: Why Jeb Bush Is Taking Big Risk In Pandering To Conservative Primary Voters
It’s never too early to start questioning the assumptions that guide presidential campaign coverage, whether they concern what candidates do and why they do it, what impact their decisions have, or how voters actually view the whole sordid extravaganza. And there are plenty of those just waiting to be unpacked and cast aside.
Today Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist writing for the New York Times, has what looks like some good news for Jeb Bush. She looks back at weekly polling data from 2012, and declares that if Mitt Romney moved to the right to win the primaries, the public seems not to have noticed. This might suggest that Bush — who has a couple of issue positions that conservative voters don’t like — is free to pander in the primaries to his heart’s content, without worrying about whether it might hurt him in the general election.
But I fear that Vavreck may be forgetting about a myth far more important than the one she’s trying to debunk. Before I explain, here’s the heart of her argument:
Because we have data every week, we can assess changes in average placements of the candidates over the course of the primaries and the general election. The data show that people’s views about the candidates’ ideologies didn’t move over the course of 2012. The lines are essentially flat.
For example, most people started and ended the election year believing, on average, that Mr. Romney was conservative, but not too much so. Any shifting, message-adjusting or pandering that Mr. Romney did during the primaries in 2012 did not hurt him in the general election by making him seem more conservative than he was earlier in the year, and it’s not at all clear it helped him in the primaries either. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, started the election year twice as far away from voters, on average, than Mr. Romney was and got farther away over the course of the year….
These three pieces of evidence — that Mr. Romney was thought to be no less conservative before the primaries than during or after them, that his average rating didn’t shift much at all during the entire year, and that he was ideologically closer to most voters than Mr. Obama — bust the myth that Republicans lost the 2012 election because of ideological shifts in the primaries.
This would appear to tell us that that Romney suffered not at all from his often comical attempts to pander to the Republican base in the primaries, and therefore such pandering poses no danger for Jeb Bush. But is that really true? To believe it, we’d have to believe that this poll question — asking voters to place a candidate on an ideological scale — captures the pandering phenomenon.
But there’s reason to believe it doesn’t. First of all, it’s possible that the pandering registered with many voters as something more like “Mitt Romney is running around telling people what they want to hear,” rather than “Mitt Romney is more conservative than he used to be.” It’s absolutely vital to remember that most Americans are not like those of us who care deeply about politics. Because politics isn’t something they think too much about, they don’t necessarily have a firm grip on even some of the most basic distinctions between the parties. Many don’t even know what it means for one candidate to be a “liberal” and another to be a “conservative.”
That may sound like an elitist thing to say, but it’s true. The National Election Studies has been asking respondents for many years which is the more conservative party. In recent years about two-thirds have been able to provide the right answer, which is actually an improvement over the 1980′s and 1990′s, when barely half could tell you. Think about that for a moment: a full third of Americans don’t know which is the “conservative” party.
It’s also vital to remember that when you look at all of them together, the public always perceives the Democratic presidential candidate to be farther to the left than the Republican candidate is to the right when they’re forced to answer the question. This is a phenomenon driven almost entirely by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, who tend to describe the Democratic candidate as an extreme liberal, almost irrespective of who he actually is. The more partisan loyalties harden, the clearer the effect becomes. Here’s an excerpt from a 2003 article I wrote in my former life as an academic, citing NES data:
Republicans always perceive the Democratic candidate as much more liberal than Democrats and independents perceive him to be. Bill Clinton is the clearest case: while Democrats and independents placed him at about the same ideological position as most other Democratic candidates, in 1996 strong Republicans thought Bill Clinton was more liberal than previous strong Republicans had found Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and even George McGovern.
That’s obviously not a judgment based in some kind of rational assessment of what a candidate stands for. More recently, you can see the phenomenon in this Gallup poll from the 2012 primaries. Democrats, Republicans, and independents all rated the Republican candidates about the same on an ideological scale, but Republicans saw Barack Obama as being far, far more liberal than Democrats or independents saw him. That ends up pulling the candidate’s overall rating toward the perception of Republicans. So when Vavreck tells us that Barack Obama was perceived as farther from voters ideologically than Mitt Romney was, she’s actually describing an old phenomenon that tells us little about what actually happened in 2012.
What’s the lesson here if you’re Jeb Bush — or, for that matter, some other Republican who feels the need to genuflect before conservative primary voters? It isn’t that pandering will have no cost. Wherever they put Mitt Romney on an ideological scale, voters rated him as less honest and trustworthy than Barack Obama, and his performance in the primaries probably had something to do with that. The lesson is probably that “ideology,” at least as political junkies understand it, is something that doesn’t matter all that much to most voters.
They aren’t going to say, “Well, I thought he was a 2.4 on the ideology scale, but I’ve concluded that he’s actually a 3.1, so I’m voting against him.” If Jeb Bush can pander and shift about ideologically while still convincing voters he’s a man of principle who can be trusted — no easy task — then if nothing else he’ll have one less thing to worry about. But if he can’t, then he’s much more likely to wind up like Mitt Romney.
- By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 2, 2015
“The Changing Role Of Money In Politics”: An Electoral Landscape In Which Financial Balance Has Tilted Dramatically To The Ultra-Rich
The 2012 presidential election was the first to be held in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United. Too many of us have forgotten that the results of that election were the opposite of what the megadonors had hoped for.
Can’t buy me gov.
That line neatly sums up the dismal showing on Election Day for the fundraisers, super-PAC strategists, and big-dollar donors of the Republican Party. Outside groups spent north of $1 billion this campaign season—bankrolled mostly by a small cadre of wealthy contributors—and yet they and their funders, especially on the Republican side, were left with little to show for it when the sun rose Wednesday morning. The GOP’s flagship super-PAC, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, had an abysmal 1 percent return on its $104 million investment. Megadonor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, invested $57 million in 2012 races; only 42 percent of the candidates who received Adelson support won. Other big donors—say, Romney super-PAC backers—got nothing for their money.
Perhaps we forgot about all of that because the 2014 midterms turned a lot of it around (with a few exceptions, i.e., Eric Cantor).
The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less…
And the balance almost certainly would tip far in favor of the mega-donors were the analysis to include nonprofit groups that spent at least $219 million — and likely much more — but aren’t required to reveal their donors’ identities.
The numbers — gleaned from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service — paint the most comprehensive picture to date of an electoral landscape in which the financial balance has tilted dramatically to the ultra-rich. They have taken advantage of a spate of recent federal court rulings, regulatory decisions and feeble or bumbling oversight to spend ever-greater sums in politics — sometimes raising questions about whether their bounty is being well spent…
Taken together, the trend lines reflect a new political reality in which a handful of superaffluent partisans can exert more sway over the campaign landscape than millions of donors of more average means.
With sweeping victories for the Republicans these megadonors financed, it appears as though that success overshadows their previous failure in 2012 to influence the election outcome.
But it does raise a couple of questions: Are megadonors more effective at influencing midterms than presidential elections? And if so, why? One possible answer to those questions comes from turning our gaze away from who gives the money in order to focus for a moment on how it is spent.
Over the last few decades, as the amount of money in politics has exploded, the vast majority of those dollars have been spent on media – particularly television advertisements. Recently we’ve been learning more about what audience those ads reach. Derek Thompson reported it this way: Half of Broadcast TV Viewers Are 54 and Older – Yikes. As Cecilia Kang pointed out, younger viewers are trending away from traditional television in favor of subscription-based channels and streaming options.
And so it should probably not come as a surprise that a midterm election focused on turning out older voters in local elections is more fertile ground for expensive television advertising.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the 2016 presidential election. I would simply note that all of Karl Rove’s millions of dollars in TV advertising were no match in 2012 to a simple recording by a catering staff at Mitt Romney’s famous 47% event. In the meantime, the Democrat’s largest megadonor – George Soros – has “shifted his giving away from pure politics, preferring to fund causes devoted to building up progressive infrastructure.”
At least until the laws are changed, megadonors are legally able to use their millions of dollars in an attempt to influence elections. The question will increasingly be…what do they spend it on?
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 3, 2015
“The Strategy Of Confederate Republicans”: I’m Glad That The GOP Has Decided To Come Out Of The Closet As Openly Racist
Steve Scalise, the House Republican Whip-elect, appears to be surviving the flap over his appearance at a David Duke-organized event. It’s good to be able to welcome the New Year with a word of praise for the party I oppose. I’m glad that the GOP has decided to come out of the closet as openly racist.
The event itself has been misdescribed in the press as “white supremacist;” in fact, David Duke’s keynote speech didn’t even mention black-white issues, instead focusing on anti-Jewish themes. “Neo-Nazi” would give a much clearer picture of what EURO was really about.
Still – as even Erick Erickson has pointed out – there was never any doubt of what David Duke, the Klan Wizard, was about. He’s the kind of batsh*t-crazy racist who isn’t sure Jews are actually “white” (and, a generation or two ago, would have had the same doubts about the Irish and the Italians).
So what did Steve Scalise, aspiring Louisiana politician, have to say about David Duke?
The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.
Well, that couldn’t be clearer, could it? “The first and most important thing” is to get elected. Politicians who frankly campaign on their hatred of blacks and Jews can’t get elected. So voters who “care about” hating blacks and Jews need to find politicians like Steve Scalise, who “believes in” Duke’s message but won’t say so explicitly, because such politicians can get elected.
That sums up the current strategy of the Confederate Republicans about as clearly as I’ve ever heard it summed up: seek the votes of bigots by winking at them, and by pursuing policies that are hostile to African-American interests without being explicitly racist. So it’s entirely appropriate that Scalise should have been chosen for, and remain in, the House Republican leadership.
It’s also entirely appropriate, of course, for those who don’t approve of bigotry not to be taken in. Somebody needs to explain that slowly to the ADL.
By: Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy at The University of California Los Angeles; Ten Miles Square, The Washington Monthly, January 2, 2014
“Following The Well-Thumbed Republican Playbook”: The GOP Has A Bad Habit Of Appealing To Avowed Racists
Here’s some advice for House Majority Whip Steve Scalise that also applies to the Republican Party in general: If you don’t want to be associated in any way with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, then stay away from them.
Do not give a speech to a racist organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, as Scalise did when he was a Louisiana state legislator before running for Congress. Do not pretend to be the only Louisiana politician who could possibly have failed to grasp the true nature of the event, as Scalise did this week when the 2002 speech became public.
Come on, a group called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), established by one of the nation’s proudest and most vocal bigots? Who happens to be, Rep. Scalise, from your state?
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) defended Scalise with the usual tut-tut about how speaking to the white supremacists was “an error in judgment” and how Scalise was “right to acknowledge it was wrong and inappropriate.” Despite this lapse, Boehner said, Scalise is “a man of high integrity and good character.”
As if on cue, friends and supporters chimed in to offer evidence of how demonstrably non-racist Scalise truly is. He was an early supporter of Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), an Indian American, over his white primary opponent! He coached in a predominantly black New Orleans basketball league! In the Louisiana legislature, he voted against a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — oh, wait.
See, it’s a ridiculous and ultimately meaningless exercise, putting check marks in one column or the other to decide whether a politician “is” or “is not” a racist. We hold officials accountable for what they say and do. Whatever feelings he might have in the deepest recesses of his heart, Scalise was simply following the well-thumbed Republican playbook by signaling to avowed racists that he welcomed their support.
This is nothing new. In fact, it’s like a bad habit that the party can’t seem to quit.
The addiction goes back to 1968, when Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” leveraged white racial resentment over federally mandated integration into an electoral majority. The GOP became the party of the South, even as the region — and its racial realities — underwent sweeping change. Mississippi now has more black elected officials than any other state. But do pockets of old-style, unapologetic racism persist, both in the South and elsewhere? You bet they do.
In 2002, Scalise was seeking support for his tax-cutting agenda in the legislature — and, of course, contacts that could further his political career. He was invited to speak to the EURO group by Duke’s longtime political strategist, Kenny Knight, who happened to be Scalise’s neighbor.
As prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson wrote and tweeted this week: “How Do You Show Up at a David Duke Event and Not Know What It Is?” Erickson was not alone in finding it hard to believe that anyone involved in Louisiana politics could fail to grasp what the meeting was and who was behind it.
Poor Boehner has more of a knack for getting caught in vises than anyone else in politics. Usually he gets squeezed between the GOP’s establishment and tea party wings. This time, he’s mashed between his party’s present and its future.
Today, the Republican Party depends on a broad coalition of voters, weighted toward the South, that ranges in views from traditional Main Street conservatives to anti-government radicals who believe that menacing helicopters are about to descend any minute. One thing these GOP voters have in common is that the vast majority of them are white.
The nation, however, becomes more racially diverse every day, and the Republican Party will have to become more diverse if it is to survive. In picking and electing state-level candidates, the GOP has been doing better with governors such as Jindal, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Susana Martinez of New Mexico. In attracting voters, not so much.
One way not to attract African American and Latino voters — in fact, one way to drive them away, along with the votes of some whites as well — is to show that the party is still happy to welcome the support of unrepentant racists and anti-Semites.
Maybe someday the Republican Party will say clearly that anyone associated with Duke, his little group or any racist association should find somebody else to vote for. But this message must be sent with actions that have consequences — and it wasn’t sent this week.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 1, 2015
“The Same Weary Tune”: Steve Scalise And The Right’s Ridiculous Racial Blame Game
In much the way one used to savor the sight of some lying schmuck be game-set-match cornered by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, I love watching conservatives try to explain away race scandals. Like the be-Wallaced lying schmuck, they know deep down they’ve had it. But quite unlike the schmuck, and this is the fun part, they never run up the white flag; indeed quite the opposite. They go on the attack, and it’s just a comical and pathetic thing to see.
Before we get to all that, permit me a brief reflection on this matter of Steve Scalise. Let’s allow him the error in judgment, or whatever tripe it is he’s peddling, of speaking to a David Duke-related white supremacist group in 2002. It’s hard to believe, but let’s go ahead and be generous about it.
I think we should find it a little harder, though, to be generous about his vote as a state legislator in 2004 against a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the state of Louisiana. His was one of six votes against the day, which received 90 votes in the affirmative. And in case you think he may have rushed to the floor from the bathroom and accidentally hit the wrong button, he had cast the same ‘no’ vote in 1999. No error in judgment explains that. He was part of an extreme, racialized white faction in the Louisiana state house that was clearly dead-set against honoring King. (In which goal he is hardly outside the Southern mainstream; some states in Dixie still sometimes celebrate King on the same day they honor Robert E. Lee.)
So it’s hardly shocking that Scalise spoke to the group. Indeed it would have been more shocking if he hadn’t. This is a state, after all, where Duke, in his statewide race for governor in 1991, received a majority of the white vote. In fact, a large majority, of 55 percent, meaning that even though Edwin Edwards walloped Duke by 23 points, a near-landslide percentage of white Louisianans voted to make an avowed white supremacist their governor. Yeah, it was a long time ago. But how different would things have been 11 years later, when Scalise attended the Duke event? By attending, he wasn’t doing anything that would have been seen as controversial by most of his white constituents; indeed most of them would have endorsed it.
Some of the defenses of Scalise have been amusing and have followed the expected pattern, like redstate.org finding a black Democratic Bayou pol to avow that Scalise didn’t have—you guessed it—“a racist bone in his body.” But the fun starts when conservatives stop playing defense and go on offense. Here are the three main tropes, which apply not only in this situation but every time we’re met with one of these revelations.
1. But Al Sharpton is the real racist!
Nobody has to lecture me about how Sharpton has played racial politics in New York. I wrote some harsh columns about him back in the day, having to do with the way he played ball in New York City mayoral politics, especially in the 2001 election. But to call him or any black man “the real racist” is to evince complete, and I’d say willed, stupidity about what racism is. Racism isn’t just a person’s feelings and attitudes (and I don’t think Sharpton is “a racist” even by that definition); it is, more importantly, a set of power relationships, legal and economic, that kept and to some extent still keeps one group of people (and they aren’t white) from enjoying the full promise of American life. That’s what racism is, and Al Sharpton just ain’t its practitioner.
2. But hey, we elected Tim Scott.
Right. You did (he’s the African-American conservative Senator from South Carolina). And J.C. Watts back in the 1990s. And there was Allen West. And now’s there’s Mia Love of Utah and Will Hurd of Texas. Bravo. That’s five. Congratulations! Meanwhile, white liberals have helped elect dozens of blacks to high office—mayors, members of Congress, a few senators and governors, and now a president.
This is supposed to “prove” that conservatives aren’t racist, and I would readily agree that on an individual level, most probably are not, and they’re willing to vote for a black candidate provided he or she has the proper right-wing views. Fine. Elect 20 more and then you’ll start to have a case. But they won’t elect 20 more, for many years anyway, because 1) the conservative agenda appeals only to about five percent of African Americans, and rightly so, since it stands in opposition to virtually every policy change that has improved black life in this country over the past 50 years, and 2) the Republican Party puts very little effort into recruiting black candidates and adherents, something the Democratic Party has been doing—at no small electoral cost to itself, by the way, but because it was the right thing to do—for 40 or 50 years.
3. B-b-but Robert Byrd!
Ah, my favorite of them all. Amazing how people can still haul this one out with a straight face. Yes, Byrd—dead four-and-a-half years now—was a Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. And his last known affiliation with the Klan was almost 70 years ago, in 1946. And yes, he voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But as everyone knows, he went on to say—not once but many times—that that was the greatest error of his career by far. As long ago as the early 1970s, he had gone on to support most civil rights-related legislation. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 in May, when Hillary Clinton was still technically in the race and just after Clinton had walloped Obama in the West Virginia primary. Byrd could very easily have gotten away with endorsing Clinton, justifying it as the overwhelmingly clear will of the people he represented. But what he did was reasonably brave and freighted with all the symbolism of which he was well aware.
And saliently for present purposes, and in contrast to Scalise, here’s what Byrd had to say about a national King holiday back in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was still opposing it: “I’m the only one who must vote for this bill.” The only one. There’s no missing what he meant by that. And the italics were his, not mine.
I suspect that somewhere down there in the Freudian precincts of their minds, the Byrd-invokers from Limbaugh on down know this, and it’s what they hate about Byrd most of all: The very sincerity of his repentance makes him a capitulator to the liberal elite and a traitor to his race. But they can’t say that in polite company, so they keep whipping a horse that’s been dead for at least 40 years.
And they’ll probably whip it for another 40, unless demographics overwhelm them sometime between now and then, but they’ll resist that as long as they can too. There’ll be more Steve Scalises, and every time, the right-wing orchestra will strike up the same weary tune.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 2, 2014
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