Politics is more than temperature-taking

Political campaigns, the axiom has it, are nothing more than a math problem. Get 50 percent of the vote, plus one, and you win. Doesn’t matter the race; that holds. So all a candidate needs to do, however easier said than done, is to ensure that they get that 50 percent-plus.

The problem is that securing that figure isn’t always itself a matter of simple math. It’s hard to know where that 50-plus point sits and it’s harder still to know what chunks of voters you can add into your expected total. You need to hit a particular number, but knowing that number and how to get there requires a more complex toolset than a calculator.

In other words — and despite how much it pains me personally to admit it — there is an element of politics that isn’t quantifiable. There’s an esoteric, abstract element of running for office, an endeavor that, after all, centers heavily on human emotion. And no political consultant yet has figured out an unfailing calculus for anger, fear and enthusiasm.

This risks being trite, so let me get to the point.

The release this week of a lengthy assessment of the Democratic Party’s electoral problems, given the rather leading name of Deciding to Win, offers what it presents as a precise, mathematical case for Democratic electoral success. In short, candidates that moderate their positions to match public opinion are more likely to be successful than ones who don’t. Democrats have moved too far to the left, the report argues, and that cost them power.

To reinforce the point, the report includes a glut of charts, tables and graphs — presenting a seemingly mathematical case to prove their point. As someone who tracks a lot of charts, though, I will say that this data presentation is not particularly compelling, often because the reality suggested by the charts falls short of the conclusions in the accompanying text.

But that’s beside the important point, which is that this sort of slide-rule approximation is central to the party’s actual problems. The report suggests that Democrats track the views of the public and present campaigns that are centered on those views. But that’s an approach that has been central to Democratic campaigns for decades. It’s how you try to figure out how to get to 50 percent-plus-one! In part because this has been the approach for so long — a sort of cold-blooded effort to match the public temperature — Democrats have gotten a reputation as pandering and insincere.

I’ve said before and I repeat here that I think this is related to the extent to which college education and Democratic politics have been increasingly correlated. The party’s balance between pugilistic union reps and McKinsey consultants have shifted toward the latter, increasing the appeal of marketing-campaign-style analyses of voter preferences.

Mind you, Democratic candidates have a challenge that Republicans don’t. They are representatives of a party that includes a diverse membership — White, Black, Hispanic; urban, suburban, rural; young, old; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist — that the GOP doesn’t. This wasn’t a significant problem back in the 1990s, when a candidate in Montana and a candidate in Brooklyn could run their own campaigns on their own issues. But it is a problem in an environment like the current one, in which people’s political lens extends little further than the national conversation.

That shift from local to national is in part due to the consolidation of the media industry and the collapse of local news outlets and newspapers. But it’s largely about the emergence of cable news channels, websites and social media platforms that have captured an audience attuned to and stimulated by national themes. It’s much harder for Democrats from Brooklyn and Montana to run bespoke campaigns when their races are framed similarly and their prospective voters have a similar sense of what their party stands for.

Any effort to offer the Democratic Party electoral guidance that doesn’t grapple with the ways in which the national media environment disadvantages the party is at best incomplete.

The American right has a sophisticated, streamlined system that serves as a sort of rhetorical rock tumbler, bouncing arguments and ideas around until they’re silky smooth. Unlike traditional media, this system is centered not on informing the public but on compelling them, with an almost entirely unrelenting focus on depicting the left as dangerous or ignorant. It relies heavily on what was once called “nut-picking”: elevating bizarre individual acts or claims from purported members of the left in an effort to malign the left broadly. This process, too, has streamlined, from Twitchy publishing stories about random Democrats to accounts like Libs of TikTok amplifying social media posts that are functionally attributed to the entire political left.

This ecosystem infects the traditional media. It happens in part because many traditional journalists fail to understand its scale and intent. The shift that’s occurred wasn’t immediate and isn’t solely a function of Donald Trump (he didn’t invent it; if anything, he’s leveraged it) so, feeling the water warm, many simply don’t appreciate what’s changed. Traditional media is also influenced because this rhetoric and approach has supplanted what was once the Republican Party. Reporters trained to include the considerations of the right in their coverage are now often opening the door for bad-faith allegations and attacks. The traditional media is rightfully constrained by a commitment to accuracy and to nuance, both of which serve as disadvantages in the battle for informing the public.

Politics has become nationalized and that national conversation benefits the right. So if your campaign recommendations center on meeting Americans where they are, you’re often going to be arguing for acquiescence to right-wing policies and rhetorical frames. You’re going to be agreeing to battle the right in the right’s stadium in a game where the right empowers itself to change the rules. And you’re going to reinforce the idea that Democrats don’t have core beliefs of their own.

What if, instead, Democrats ran on what they believe in, in terms that sincerely reflect those beliefs? There’s still the problem of the national environment and its accompanying media universe, but by taking this approach candidates can at least better avoid charges that they’re simply pandering or using poll-tested rhetoric. Sincerity can be an affect, certainly, but it’s a lot easier to come off as sincere if you’re actually sincere.

Advocates for following public opinion polling might counter that this approach means endorsing ideas that aren’t popular. And, yes. It sure does. But public opinion is not static. We’ve seen, even just this year, how views of major issues like immigration have shifted in response to sincere rhetoric about what’s happening. The job of an elected official is to represent their constituents but the job of a candidate isn’t simply to tell those constituents what they want to hear. It’s to make a case as a prospective leader, not a dutiful follower.

Consider how the Deciding to Win report explains Republican success since the second term of Obama’s presidency.

Between 2012 and 2024, Republicans became more extreme on issues like democracy, the rule of law, immigration, and transgender rights. But Republicans also moved toward the center on several issues, including moderating their stances on Medicare and Social Security and dropping pledges to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ban abortion nationwide, and pass a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Donald Trump did talk less about reforming social programs, but his party has nonetheless pushed forward on implementing policies that reduce spending on those programs. Saying that the party has moderated on abortion, meanwhile, lands pretty flat three years after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Giving up on saying you’ll do something extreme when you can’t in favor of doing something slightly less extreme when you can isn’t really moderation, I’d say.

But what’s really missing in that paragraph is the advent of Trump. The GOP’s success since 2012 hasn’t been about being moderate, it’s primarily been a function of finding someone who is compelling to a lot of Americans (with a boost from the unevenness of the Electoral College). Trump overhauled the Republican Party through sheer will and cult of personality. Moderated rhetoric played at best a modest role in his trips to the White House. Lying about his and his party’s plans, like on IVF? Probably more important.

Incidentally, this analysis of the Democratic Party’s failings does seem to give rather short shrift to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. 2016 came before the supposed woke-pocalypse — but Trump won against a candidate carefully attuned to public opinion. 2020 came at the apex of the woke era, but Trump lost. 2024 came at the height of the backlash against the fringe positions that Trump allies (and the report authors) ascribe to the left, but it’s pretty clear that inflation played a bigger role in his win than concerns about cancel culture.

The Democratic Party needs to win races beyond the presidency, of course. Perhaps candidates will find recommendations in this report useful as they try to do so. But it seems unlikely that the solution is centrally that candidates should reinforce the idea that Democrats are going to say whatever voters want to hear. Who wants to vote for a party that won’t defend its allies or who will downplay the threat to American democracy? Hell, who wants to run for office as a member of a party deeply committed to raising their voices about nothing other than the price of groceries?

Photo: A Trump rally in New Hampshire, 2019.