The Hidden Liberals

So sockpuppet-master Glenn Greenwald (that never gets tiresome, does it?) rips into Larry O’Donnell for not being progressive enough – really!!

The core of Greenwald’s electoral argument, though, is one that needs to be examined. He says that:

As for the substance of our discussion, O’Donnell — in standard cable TV form — basically had one simplistic point he repeated over and over: exit polls show that only a small minority of voters (a) self-identify as “liberal” and (b) agree that government should do more. There are so many obvious flaws in that “analysis.” To begin with, exit polls survey only those who vote; it excludes those who chose not to vote, including the massive number of Democrats and liberals who voted in 2006 and 2008 but stayed at home this time. The failure to inspire those citizens to vote is, beyond doubt, a major cause of the Democrats’ loss…

This is the Left’s version of a tune the Right often plays as well…”if only we had candidates as pure as our electorate.”

In which they imagine the hidden voters springing forth, bosoms heaving, in response to the Man On The White Horse (or with the correct ideological spin). My reaction is “whatever”. But it’s a real question.

Lots and lots of people don’t vote. Would they be inspired by a True Believer on either side – and more to the point, since I care about the future of the Democratic Party – if there were a goodlooking, articulate Dennis Kucinich, would these hidden voters return like the Hidden Imam?

I’m dubious, and have been dubious for a while. The candidates who tend to pull new voters in tend to be charismatic populists with huge name recognition like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwartzenegger. You know, celebrities.

Then, something interesting pops up on Memeorandum.

According to months of data from leading media-research company Experian Simmons, viewers who vote Republican and identify themselves as conservative are more likely than Democrats to love the biggest hits on TV. Of the top 10 broadcast shows on TV in the spring, nine were ranked more favorably by viewers who identify themselves as Republican.

Liberals appreciate many of the same shows, mind you. But their devotion typically is not quite as strong as right-wingers, and Dems are more likely to prefer modestly rated titles.

Basically, political preference is highly correlated with program choice, according to Experian Simmons.

And the shows that conservatives like are significantly more popular than the shows liberals like.

I’m not going to claim that this is deeply dispositive; it’s suggestive.

But it suggests a country where a lot more missing voters would vote for a Jesse Ventura than for a Dennis Kucinich.

I kind of hope that the Democratic strategists are thinking about that…

19 thoughts on “The Hidden Liberals”

  1. I wonder if there isn’t some “you aren’t supposed to like this” bias in there, which may be stronger in libs than cons. After all, a good liberal isn’t supposed to watch TV at all, or if they do, they only watch PBS on a 20 year old tube TV with an ancient VCR used only for Fellini films from the library.

    Conservatives aren’t generally quite so self-conscious about the signaling value of this sort of culture stuff, at least in my experience.

  2. The polysci term for Greenwald’s thesis is “centrifugal politics” and they’ve been trying to prove it for as long as I can remember. But about every study that’s ever been done on the US two-party winner-take-all system is that it’s inherently centripetal. The main proponent of this kind of cross-national analysis was Mattei Dogan. In fact, I did one of the first studies that used an ideological scale for both incumbents and challengers, and it’s pretty clear that, at least in the year 1996 which was the topic of my dissertation, the politics were centripetal. Many of those who claimed that ’96 was a centrifugal year were only looking at one side of the race.

    The reality of centripetal politics is pretty obviously why one of the perennial tactics in party politics is to paint your opponent as an extremist.

    I really wouldn’t object to Greenwald’s mythology, except that it’s generally unhealthy for the country as a whole… in addition to being bad electoral politics for Democrats.

    What *is* true, however, is that people want their politicians to propose identifiable policies and solutions. They don’t like vague talk, and don’t especially like ideological talk. However, the US does have a national identity that’s ideologically defined… and it’s not leftist, nor is it “conservative” in the historical sense. It’s classical liberal.

  3. Obama was on the campaign trail full-time, something which I’ve never seen a president do in a mid-term election. Spending and media attention reached new levels.

    Your “base” is supposed to be the people you count on automatically, so if they stay home then a) they’re not your base or b) they require such massive amounts of motivation as to be useless.

  4. This is the Left’s version of a tune the Right often plays as well…”if only we had candidates as pure as our electorate.”

    This just fails basic logic and basic understanding of humanity. So badly it’s almost insulting. To everyone.

    The United States is vast, physically and demographically. We have three hundred million citizens and counting, arrayed in a complex matrix of geographic, demographic, social, economic, and ethnic concerns. In many cases (but sadly not all) this is coupled with enough wealth to allow us to think beyond our day to day, or even week to week survival concerns of food and shelter.

    What possible shallow arrogance could prompt someone to say, “All those millions of people who didn’t vote? They all agree with me! Me, Me, Me!” It’s insane.

    And that basic failure of understanding turns into a basic misunderstanding of American politics. The Democrats are not some monolithic block of groupthinkers, even though Greenwald may wish it to be so. They are a coalition of concerns, some of which are related for good reasons, some by historical accident, and the notion of realignment is always possible.

    This is obviously just as true of Republicans. It is a quality of American politics in general, not of our particular parties at any one moment in time. Nor do I want to overplay the coalition of concerns angle to suggest that there are no common concerns. Merely that people develop their politics based on their personal circumstances, and those personal circumstances are really shockingly unlikely to be identical to mine, unless they live in the same city as me, work in the same industry as me, have the same type of family as me, and make about the same amount of money as me.

    I’m not delusional enough to think I’m iconic of millions of people around the country. Evidently, Greenwald is.

  5. I believe in results. The results were that he held the Senate by more than anyone thought he would.

    He changed the country more than any president aside from Reagan than I can remember, with the worest economic times in my lifetime which goes back quite a few years.

    This is only the beginning of the second quarter. And Obama ran up the score pretty well in the first.

    If the Republicans stumble, a filubuster proof senate is a possiblity. Everything is in flux and It is definitesly not a time to gloat.

  6. Wow, toc3. The largest loss of seats in the House in decades, making 1994 look like nothing; losing six seats in the Senate, which is virtually unheard of; losing governorships by the dozen, state representatives by the hundred; all this less than two years after the media proclaimed the death of conservatism and the eternal triumph of progressivism from every front page… and you spin that as a victory because the GOP didn’t take every single Senate seat on the table. I am seriously in awe. You remind me of dead-ender GOP partisans in 2005 insisting that Bush’s rope-a-dope strategy was going to turn everything to gold, any day now.

  7. “Today, we sometimes hear that democracy stands in the way of economic progress.”

    That’s our amazing president speaking in Indonesia this week, apparently describing the voices he hears in his head.

    There might be a filibuster-proof Senate coming, all right.

  8. Toc does make a good point that this is not an inevitable retreat from Obama liberalism. In fact if I had to name one factor most likely to get Obama reelected given our current state of affairs- giving the current Republican leadership the catbird seat in Congress would easily be it.

    We _hope_ the GOP old guard have learned their lesson, and we _hope_ the Teaparty can and will hold their feet to the fire, and we _hope_ they won’t alienate the electorate further with petty political stunts and business as usual instead of substantive reform… but in the cold light of reality none of those things actually seem very likely.

  9. I figure folks don’t vote because they a estranged from government. Government happens, the bigger the government the bigger it happens, the voter doesn’t count for much and sensible people recognise that fact and don’t bother to vote. This sets up a positive feedback where the more powerful the government the less inclined folks are to participate. Unless, of course, they are paid by the government to do so, like the public sector unions.

  10. mark:

    Toc does make a good point that this is not an inevitable retreat from Obama liberalism. In fact if I had to name one factor most likely to get Obama reelected given our current state of affairs- giving the current Republican leadership the catbird seat …

    I’m surprised at how little comment there has been on the obvious parallels between Obama and Clinton, which have played out faithfully so far:

    1. Candidate campaigns as a vague moderate.
    2. Becoming president, he sets out to govern as a Democratic strongman, relying entirely on his partisan majority in Congress.
    3. He introduces massive health care “reform”, which was in no way advertised to the voters. (And which he himself seems to have little interest in or knowledge about.)
    4. “Reform” produces massive political backlash, and he loses control of Congress.

    Some people are already broadly hinting at the next scene of the script:

    5. President gets some face back by squabbling with Congress over the budget, then accusing them of trying to “shut down the government.” (While compliant media keeps up a steady chant of “Gridlock”.)

    So yes, there is always a possibility that Obama can get back on his feet before 2012, and even resume the offensive. He’ll need lots of help from clunky Republicans to do so – a lot more than Clinton got, because Obama is far short of being Clinton.

  11. Obama’s problem is that he passed his suicidal health care law. Hard to run away from _that._ And the clever idea of dribbling out the pain over a few years before the program really kicks in (instead of doing everything at once) is already coming back to haunt Obama. Businesses have to adjust to the law _now,_ and any (alleged) benefits won’t be seen by the people for another few years. Instead of being comfortably lame duck in a 2nd term by the time the actual crap hits the fan, Obama has to wade through a little bit more every day… while the critics can smugly note that we aint seen nothing yet. Which is true.

  12. Obama’s problem is that he passed his suicidal health care law.
    I don’t think it is. If the economy had been better, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

    Not only that, since in 2 years it will be ancient not old news by the time the next election rolls around and the fact carrot is not ready to kick in until, 2024, it could be a plus for him.

    What I have been hearing form conservatives sounds a lot what I heard from liberals after 2008. If you are expecting Obama to roll over, you are on thin ice. We took the house. Without immensely hard work in the next 2 years all I can say to takeing the house is big deal.

    Don’t be to quick to gloat, this victory could prove mighty ephemeral.

  13. The democrats now have 190 seats in the New House 6 are still undecided. At the very most, they are 29 seats away from regaining the House.

    You know, I’m all for healthy pessimism, but you sound like you’re trapped on a desert island with Nancy Pelosi. Watching MSNBC.

    The Democrats are a lot farther than 29 seats from their customary felicity. They got slaughtered in the statehouses, dropping 100 seats in New Hampshire alone. They lost North Carolina, which they had gerrymandered into a perfect bag of pretzels. The coming reapportionment will give them night sweats and make their scumbag lawyers richer than Soros.

  14. Isn’t it sort of ironic that one progressive myth is “a goodlooking, articulate Dennis Kucinich” is necessary to unlock the hidden progressive voters, and another progressive myth is that progressives are the sort who vote with their heads and don’t fall for good-looking smooth talkers?

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