Sunday, Nov. 4, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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What’s driving American politics off a cliff? Racial hatred and the cynicism of politicians willing to exploit it play a central role. But there are other factors. And an opinion piece by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes in Wednesday’s New York Times (which is actually social science, not opinion!) seems to confirm something I already suspected: Misunderstanding of what voters want is distorting both political positioning and public policy.
What the authors of the piece show is that congressional aides grossly misperceive the views of their bosses’ constituents; this is true in both parties, but more so of Republicans. What they don’t point out explicitly is that with the exception of Affordable Care Act repeal, Democrats err in the same direction as Republicans, just less so. Specifically, both parties believe that the public is to the right of where it really is.
An aside on ACA repeal: I wonder what’s really going on here. Lots of polling suggests that voters overwhelmingly want protection for pre-existing conditions and subsidies to help lower-income Americans afford insurance — that is, they want the substance of the ACA, even if they say they disapprove of the law. So I’d take this result with a grain of salt: Democrats may not be as wrong here as it appears.
Anyway, what I’d really like to see are comparable surveys of other groups — say, political analysts for major media organizations. Why? Because I suspect we’d see a similar result: people who opine on politics also imagine that voters are farther to the right than they really are. What I’m suggesting, in other words, is that there’s a shared inside-the-Beltway delusion: that America is a conservative, or at most center-right nation, a view that isn’t grounded in reality.
It’s true that Republicans, who are increasingly a far-right party, have been more than competitive politically, controlling the White House, the House of Representatives, or both for all but four of the past 24 years. But this owes a lot to a tilted playing field — they only won the popular vote for president once over that stretch, and because of gerrymandering, can hold the House even when Democrats get a lot more votes.
And it also reflects a political strategy in which Republicans run on anything but their policies. Trump’s frantic attempt to make next week’s election about scary brown people rather than health care or tax cuts is cruder and uglier than anything we’ve seen for a long time, but it’s not fundamentally out of character. Bush the elder ran against Willie Horton. Bush the younger ran on national security. Their actual policies, not so much.
In fact, we got an object lesson in the dissonance between GOP electioneering and public preferences in 2004-05. Bush made it a national security election, with a tinge of culture war; as I used to joke, he ran as the enemy of gay married terrorists. Then, with victory under his belt, he proclaimed that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. He didn’t.
But many pundits thought he did. For several months after the 2004 election, it was conventional wisdom in the commentariat that of course Bush would get his way on Social Security, and that people like Nancy Pelosi who were trying to stop his push were on the wrong side of history. The overwhelming backlash from voters, who really, really like Social Security (and Medicare, and Medicaid) completely surprised many self-proclaimed political experts.
So what are the effects of this delusion of America as a center-right nation? It has clearly inhibited Democrats from taking bold policy positions, out of fear that they’ll be too far left for voters — a fear fed by journalists who keep insisting that the public wants centrists who are somewhere between the parties. Remember the Bloomberg for president bandwagon, which consisted of a number of prominent pundits and maybe three nonjournalist voters.
But Republicans are even further out of touch. Hertel-Fernandez et al note correctly that the Trump tax cut has proved consistently unpopular; they don’t point out that at first Republicans were sure it would be a big political winner: “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared. But they couldn’t sell it, and the tax cut has virtually disappeared from GOP messaging.
And Republicans appear to have been completely blindsided by the public backlash against their attempts to remove protection for pre-existing conditions, which is amazing if you think about it. How could they not realize that this is a sore spot?
Which brings me to something David Roberts wrote, which complements something I’ve been thinking for a while. He notes, in regard to the frame-Mueller debacle, that we’re dealing with the “second generation of Fox News conservatives,” who grew up entirely inside the right-wing bubble and don’t understand how people outside that bubble talk, think and behave.
I’d say this goes even more for professional GOP politicos, who are all apparatchiks. That is, they grew up inside the apparatus of movement conservatism, and really imagine that everyone except a few leftist losers shares their ideology. They don’t even realize that their party’s success has been based on racial antagonism, that most people want to raise taxes on the rich and maintain social benefits.
And this, by the way, is where Trump has an advantage. He didn’t grow up in the conservative hothouse; his very crudity means that he understands that his electoral chances depend not on repeating conservative pieties but on maximum ugliness.
Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.
