Democrats Need To Learn That Voters Aren’t Simple Machines

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Sometimes it’s very useful that we can get a granular sense of what issues people truly care about when they are voting. Instead of simply guessing or attempting to read tea leaves, there is now an entire multi-million-dollar industry dedicated to dissecting these people to find out what they really think.

But like most things, I think this can frequently be a double-edged sword. Because while we can ascertain what the key issues are that voters care about, or what they don’t care too much about, it is not a precise science by any stretch.

Too often, however, Democratic leaders and the political consultants who work for them operate as if politics is a precise science. To many of their minds, “politics” boils down to scraping up the main things people are worried about, smushing them all together in a package, and like a formula or computer program, getting a predictable final result.

In this world view, issues are in silos and merely part of the equation. Take a little from columns A, B, C and that adds up to 51% of the vote or more. Therefore, a candidate just has to twist and fiddle enough knobs and levers and they can adjust the settings on the voting populace the same way one adjusts the display on a television or computer.

The problem is, voters are way messier than our appliances and personal technology. In fact, voters are an absolute mess and it is frankly a miracle that things have survived this long.

This entire process comes to mind as I have watched President Joe Biden and the Democrats roll out their new curbs on immigration. The thinking behind the proposal is startlingly obvious. In their minds, there’s a group of voters out there who, while not super lefty, are moderate enough that they’re open to voting for Biden. But on the issue of immigration, they hold on to some pretty right-wing beliefs. So the Democrats, in their infinite wisdom, figure that if they crank up the right-wing pander control under “immigration,” they can fill out the rest of the formula and produce a Biden voter on the other end of things.

But it doesn’t work like this in the real world. The odds are that if one prioritizes a conservative approach to border politics, when it comes to pulling the lever for a party in the ballot box, it isn’t the overall equation that matters but which candidate best reflects that view of things. For the person favoring a security/immigration restriction outlook on things, the Democrats are never a viable option. Biden could call for a “big, beautiful wall” and the people who vote on that – not just the most diehard Trump cultists – are going to vote Republican.

There is no amount of fiddling with the precision controls that will get that voter into the Biden column. The math formula will never work. At the same time, by pushing at the right-wing solution to a problem that clearly demands a humane, progressive approach, the Democratic Party’s actions pose the very real possibility of backlash among the core voters the party needs not just to be viable but to be the majority it has been.

Because voters are emotional wrecks. We like to think of ourselves as Spock from Star Trek, coldly analyzing the pros and cons of a topic before jumping in headfirst. But the reality is we are balls of irrational emotion.

The equation works the same from the other side of things. Republicans and conservatives are the architects of the draconian abortion bans we now face at the state and federal level. Voters hate the restrictions, and particularly women – with good reason.

Republicans have tried to solve this problem by acting a lot like the Democratic knob-fiddlers. Perhaps, they ask, if they advocated for abortion restrictions instead of an outright ban. Maybe a few months, maybe a few rape and incest exceptions, surely there is some setting on the machine they can custom tweak to get results?

The answer has been a resounding “no.” Ballot initiatives and candidates who support abortion restrictions have been largely getting blown out by massive margins. Because the people who vote on abortion rights aren’t coolly analyzing the Republican record on “moderation.” They see abortion ban enforcers and architects at the ballot box and one thought comes to mind: Crush Them.

Just because one can scrape up all this data on voters doesn’t mean the “problem” has been solved. Politics is not a precise science that we can just dust our hands off because it has been figured out.

Politics involves human beings, who are contradictory trainwrecks of chaos. And they vote.

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— Oliver

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