I generally accept the Yglesian view that voter restrictions aren’t really as pivotal as they’re portrayed. But I also recognize that most people… don’t.
Which makes me wonder about something.
A related dichotomy out there is that most GOP politicians know that voter fraud is a lie, or at least an exaggeration, but don’t mind the electoral advantage that voter restrictions putatively give them.
So, assuming this is true, I wonder if there are also any Yglesian truthers among those GOP leaders, who understand that there actually isn’t even a direct benefit to voter restrictions, but don’t care because it (1) distracts the opposition with something threateningly shiny, and (2) helps keep their base on-side with red meat about voter fraud, that gets them to buy into the rest of the propaganda and distracts them from any other potentially-Democrat-friendly wedge issues.
The Bulwark has the best take about fundamental trends in the recent elections:
“Democrats remain energized. But Independents are turning on them and no longer view Trump as a salient issue. While Republicans are as energized as they were when Trump was actually on the ballot.”
But I think Charlie’s wrong when he extrapolates the corollary that the swings in Virginia and New Jersey indicate there’s still some great, wide-open “middle” alive and kicking in this country.
Moreover, such a simplistic take risks dangerously misreading the swings we do see. To wit, I think it ignores the “reservoir” role that the large number of nonvoters we have plays.
If you split the country between nonvoters and voters, they probably have roughly identical distributions of political sentiment, with the nonvoters slightly weighted towards a more “W”-shaped distribution than the voters — we’d expect detectable minority to be more extreme than their voting counterparts, and we’d expect more centrists/apathetics as well.
But the big difference is that nonvoters are highly idiosyncratic. They probably care about one or two issues running the gamut from relatively mundane to outlandishly bizarre, and have a host of poorly-formed and -informed opinions that they don’t think will ever change much.
What no one seems to grasp is that the present Republican propaganda machine’s core strategy is oriented towards these nonvoters. There’s a method behind the madness of the nonstop nonsense: It’s meant to activate the deactivated. The scattershot nature ensures that at least something is hitting someone at any given point.
Getting back to my original point, though, is that it’s possible that among the habitual voters, turnout indeed dropped like it usually does, but then habitual nonvoter turnout surged as the latest “whiff of [right-wing scatter]shot” fell on some particularly rich vein of sentiment. That doesn’t mean Charlie’s completely wrong, either. There indubitably are people who are swinging, it just doesn’t mean they’re necessarily all swinging from party to party; and to mistake them all for that based on a few of Charlie’s fan-mail anecdotes doesn’t make it any more true.
Ultimately, we’ll have to wait for the deeper analyses to come out until we can evaluate this hypothesis. But until then, the important lesson is just to be vigilant about even these “good” takes, because the world is more than complex enough for even relatively-good take-havers to simply be seeing different aspects of a larger, more complex whole, mistaking them for the entire picture, and then misleading the rest of us by having bitter arguments about which picture or interpretation is the right one.1 In other words, it’s plausible that the truth extends beyond both Charlie Sykes’ and the Squad’s respective email inboxes.
The fact that the Virginia GOP rigged their primary for Youngkin — ironically, resorting to some shenanigans that involved Ranked-Choice Voting (!) — is preliminary evidence that the party hasn’t completely stopped responding to electoral incentives, especially not in places they think they can swing an upset (like, to wit, Virginia). Democrats should not ignore this potential microtrend, and as always, should never lazily get high on their own supply of slander like they apparently did with Youngkin2.
It’s also evidence that RCV isn’t DOA with the GOP establishment, at least not when they see it as beneficial to themselves. It’s just sad that Never Trumpers like the Bulwark still haven’t gotten over their melodramatic mourning and realized that RCV might help them retake the party from the nutjobs in their base. Anyways, maybe Andrew Yang was right about trying to sell it in a party-neutral pitch! For my money, I’m just happy with “all of the above” strategies; we need RCV everywhere it can take root.
I’ve recently come in contact with a crowd I’m calling the “RCV Truthers”: They’re people who think RCV is terrible/not all it’s cracked up to be, and also variously that it’s being ignorantly pushed by fetishists3 who think it’s going to solve all their problems, at the expense of potentially better reforms.
While I respect the contrarianism, it’s also just not realistic.
Look, guys, RCV is already A Thing. It’s happening. It’s passed the critical mass of mainstream attention, and is on the path towards adoption. It’s practically the only game in town. That’s not to say some other electoral reform might piggyback along on its wave, nor that there isn’t an outside chance that said reform might even outshine and replace RCV — “Top Two Jungle Primary” seems to be a good candidate.
I’m not a fetishist. But this is RCV’s show. If you want to try to hijack the wave, then be my guest. The more, the merrier!
But don’t fight the wave because you’re sore that it won’t end up where you want. The single most convincing argument I’ve seen is that “settling for RCV will stall out deeper reform”. But the larger context isn’t just some abstract policy battle. We’re literally staring down the barrel of a civilizational gun with Trump 2024, and if the Republic miraculously survives our second brush with an authoritarian coup, we really need to work on fixing the reasons why it got here, which RCV can help do by being less zero-sum than our abominable status quo.
Like with that stupid fucking dress.
And as they did with all the other various challengers to prominent Republicans they hate — remember Amy McGrath (for McConnell) and whoever challenged Susan Collins?
We really need to stop mistaking “people we hate” for “people we can beat”, but this isn’t a uniquely Democratic thing — as I’ve mentioned offhand many times here, my local GOP has been on this hilariously quixotic jihad against our state senator for years solely because he’s the chamber’s majority leader.
Putatively including yours truly.