A blog about history, strategy, geopolitics, and the intersections of governance, ecology, demographics, and culture.
Eric Levitz has a thought provoking interview with David Shor up over at New York Magazine. Shor is a electoral whiz kid who seems to have been making waves in the world of liberal polling for some years, but only came to national prominence a few months ago when he was fired from his gig at Civis Analytics for tweeting that non-violent protests were more likely to shift American public opinion leftward than riots.
I don't share Shor's politics, but in this interview the whiz lives up to his reputation. His take on political behavior is fascinating. The general mode of analysis he lays out has applications that extend far beyond the topics covered in the interview.
The way to win an election then is to figure out what demographics are necessary for electoral victory, determine which issue sets are important to those demographics, further determine which of these issues meld most easily with your partisan program, and then do everything in your power to make the election a referendum on those broad topics.
Important to Shor's discussion is the idea that voters are not evaluating specific policy proposals so much as determining how much they trust parties to handle the general issue of concern:
What is happening here is exactly what Shor describes: for voters in Kenosha, the issue salience of "law and order" is spiking, and Republicans are the party they trust on that issue. Pointing this dynamic out a few months ago was what got Shor fired. He recognized that violent protests make the general issue of race-relations salient in a way unfavorable to the left.
There are a few take-aways one can gleam from all of this. The first is a tidy explanation of why voters rarely punish candidates for failing to live up to their campaign promises. If you understand statements like "build the wall" as a specific policy proposal, then Trump's failure to do just that might seem like it would hurt his prospects with the anti-immigration crowd. But the reality is that voters do not make their votes on the basis of individual policies, but a general idea of whether the candidate can be trusted to handle the issue before him. Statements like "build the wall" are not so much policy commitments as electoral signposts designed to communicate the reliability of the candidate on the issue in question (in this case the message being, "this guy can be trusted to take immigration seriously").
I encourage readers to take this framework and apply it outside of the American context. From this perspective, the recent elections in Taiwan were always the DPP's to lose. Given what was happening in Hong Kong, the most salient issue in was always going to be the cross-strait relations, and for a decade now this is an issue Taiwanese voters have trusted the DPP with more than they have trusted the KMT. Absent an economic crisis large enough to change this framing, the KMT was always going to struggle to compete.
