My dad was a very good gambler. The best bets he made were ones where the suckers other bettors saw the odds differently than they were really.
I’ve argued for a long time that the progressive netroots weighs more in the consciousness of the political class than it does in political reality. I was meaning to do a post on the Political Arithmetik post showing netroots-fave Edwards 4th and stalled when Jeff Jarvis did a much better post for me.
“Boy, those results don’t look like those from Gallup – from the real voters. At the Politics Online conference in Washington a few weeks ago, I remember one of the many pundits there arguing that Hillary has no grass roots support and momentum because you can’t find it in the blogosphere. Well, maybe in one blog.”
The political blogs are all about Edwards and Richardson, and the polls are all about Hillary.
It’s a fundamental mistake to presume that because one narrow slice of the chattering classes (us) happens to be all excited about a candidate – like, say Ned Lamont – that the enthusiasm is shared by the larger electorate.
I think there’s a lesson there for the netroots – especially the wannabe political consultant class netroots – and I’ll cite my perennial source John Schaar:
“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”
Saw this on Penny Arcade the other day, and I think it fits nicely with this topic….
“People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat. I’m afraid this test may require more from the community than a sardonic jpeg.”
I think I’ve missed something. Didn’t Ned Lamont come from nowhere to win the Democratic primary? He then lost when the GOP adopted Lieberman as its unofficial candidate, plus a (rather small) residuum of Democratic votes.
Against that, we could put, say, Jon Tester and Jim Webb, both of whom were netroots preferences in their primaries, who carried through to victory in the general election.
I’d suggest that the real question here is high-information voters versus low-information voters. I imagine that Hillary Clinton, with fantastic name recognition, is doing much better among the latter. Liberal bloggers (actually, almost anyone who bothers to read ten political blogs a day, regardless of perspective) are mostly the former. The reason we have a campaign, and not just a poll a year in advance, is to see what happens as low-information voters are exposed to what happens in the campaign (and, of course, how that interacts with the real world, e.g., news from Iraq).
Andrew, we’ll have to disagree here. CT is abour 35pct D, 25pct R, 40pct I, and like all primaries, it’s not difficult for a committed 10% to swing control at the primary level. How much better than zillionaire Michael Huffington did Lamont really do?
Neither Tester nor Webb were outlier candidates recruited by the netroots – they were strong mainstream candidates that the netroots adopted.
Good for them.
And you’re skirting “the smart people vote for” meme here, don’t you think?
A.L.
Oh, after Andrews “ahem” post, now the candidates have to be “recruited” by the netroots to qualify as bona fide “netroots successes”?
You’re readjusting your argument as you go….just the kind of behavior that people who start out with a conclusion and then go seeking support for it engage in.
“The Netroots” is not a monolith and it does not exist for the sole purpose of electing Democrats, and it is a fundamental mistake to presume so.
I also find it a bit offputting that you choose to end your slippery self-defense post by tacitly accusing Andrew of viewing the average contemporaneous poll respondant as the “uneducated masses” who are not intelligent enough to choose “the right” candidate. He clearly means to differentiate citizens with greater access to news and information (i.e., those with internet access) from those that do not. Intelligence is not a factor in this, despite your apparent suggestion (or is it another presumption?) to the contrary.
OK, AL, how about Carol Shea-Porter? Remember the GOP laughing about how her netroots-fueled primary upset turned the seat into a Republican lock… Jerry McNerney, CA-11? In respect to the 2006 election, Lamont was the exceptional case.
TCG identified specifically something I only saw vaguely. Many intelligent people in some sense of the word are not really involved in the campaign yet. I’m not sure if or how, say, Bill Richardson’s campaign is going to catch fire—I think the netroots are most interested in contrasting his foreign policy experience with Dear Leader’s, not his campaign per se—but I’d say it’s rather early to dismiss it out of hand. On your formulation, name recognition 15 months out is the final arbiter. I don’t think so, not in a crowded field. (I would disagree with tcg’s remark about internet access; I am referring to political junkiehood, internet access is becoming universal.)
I haven’t been paying much attention to the dextroblogs’ heroes, but is it possible that Brownback and Huckabee are supported far out of proportion to their asterisk-returns in the major polls?
tcg – no, the netroots are clearly a participant in the process and don;t take my point to suggest that they aren’t. My point is that there is a general misperception of the influence of the netroots and netroots audience, driven in large part by the fact that a) the political blogs (including this one) are largely an echo chamber and that the MSM loves the blog insurgency story.
Underpinning that are real chanmges which are happening somewhat slowly – but I’ll point out that the two real winners of ‘populist’ elections in the last decade have been Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwartzenegger.
So I’d hold off on the MoveOn-fueled triumphalism just now. I say this as someone who is likely to support Obama in the primaries.
A.L.
A.L.–Thought you might be interested in this. This op ed supports an important point that I would have tried to make if I stayed with this thread longer…which is that your effort to measure the success of “the netroots” by examining the outcome from handful of speciifc candidates that were endorsed in recent past elections likely far underestimates it’s true value and worth to the political process.
Even though I (and Andrew) believe that your criteria are unneccesarily (and artificially) selective, the bigger point is that it is too narrow a metric with which to measure whether “the netroots” (or “blogosphere advocates”, perhaps more accurately) is “out of touch” with the sentiments of the general public. Elections are not the only, and oftentimes not the most important, indicator of public sentiment (especially between elections).
In other words, while it’s fine to point out the electoral outcomes, I think you are trying to draw a conclusion that is not supported by a more rigourous or thorough examination of the data.
Anyway, read and enjoy.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Way Off Base
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.
But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.
Iraq is the most dramatic example. Strange as it may seem, Democratic strategists were initially reluctant to make Iraq a central issue in the midterm election. Even after their stunning victory, which demonstrated that the G.O.P.’s smear-and-fear tactics have stopped working, they were afraid that any attempt to rein in the Bush administration’s expansion of the war would be successfully portrayed as a betrayal of the troops and/or a treasonous undermining of the commander in chief.
Beltway insiders, who still don’t seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush, fed that fear. For example, as Democrats began, nervously, to confront the administration over Iraq war funding, David Broder declared that Mr. Bush was “poised for a political comeback.â€
It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given “carte blanche.â€)
But the public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush’s leadership and doesn’t believe anything the administration says. Iraq was a big factor in the Democrats’ midterm victory. And far from being a risky political move, the confrontation over funding has overwhelming popular support: according to a new CBS News poll, only 29 percent of voters believe Congress should allow war funding without a time limit, while 67 percent either want to cut off funding or impose a time limit.
Health care is another example of the base being more in touch with what the country wants than the politicians. Except for John Edwards, who has explicitly called for a universal health insurance system financed with a rollback of high-income tax cuts, most leading Democratic politicians, still intimidated by the failure of the Clinton health care plan, have been cautious and cagey about presenting plans to cover the uninsured.
But the Democratic presidential candidates — Mr. Obama in particular — have been facing a lot of pressure from the base to get specific about what they’re proposing. And the base is doing them a favor.
The fact is that a long time has passed since the defeat of the Clinton plan, and the public is now demanding that something be done. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for a government guarantee of health insurance for all, even if that guarantee required higher taxes. Even self-identified Republicans were almost evenly split on the question!
If all this sounds like a setting in which Democrats could win big victories in the years ahead, that’s because it is.
Republicans will, for a while at least, be trapped in unpopular positions by a base that’s living in the past. Rudy Giuliani’s surge into front-runner status for the Republican nomination says more about the party than about the candidate. As The Onion put it with deadly accuracy, Mr. Giuliani is running for “President of 9/11.â€
Democrats don’t have the same problem. There’s no conflict between catering to the Democratic base and staking out positions that can win in the 2008 election, because the things the base wants — an end to the Iraq war, a guarantee of health insurance for all — are also things that the country as a whole supports. The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.