HorseRaceBlog

Jay Cost has a good blog going at RealClearPolitics.

What I like about his posts is his skepticism about elitist overinterpretation of poll results. In a recent post on this topic he wrote this:

For instance, we like to think of ourselves as an ideologically polarized nation. 33% of America is liberal, 33% conservative, 34% moderate. Not exactly! I would agree that these might be the percentages of people who identify themselves by way of these terms (when they are asked to). However, the percentage of people who make good and full use of the political ideologies we call "conservative" and "liberal" is much, much lower. I am not up-to-date on the latest research, but I have never seen a figure higher than 30%. That is, 30% of the whole public makes at least effective use of these ideologies to organize their political information (so, 30% ideological vs. 70% non-ideological).

This is exactly right. It might be a cliché, but living inside the beltway really does warp your consciousness. It's hard to fathom the degree to which the vast majority of the country not only tunes out the political news that is the stuff of life for Washingtonians, but is ignorant and unconcerned about the most basic political facts. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Elections can turn on a small minority systematically switching their votes.

This is what happened in the midterm election. The conventional wisdom is that the Iraq war was the Republicans undoing, that Democrats were not given a positive mandate but that Republicans received a come-uppance for mismanagement of the war. That conventional wisdom is challenged on the right by the claim that the election was lost on “macaca” and Mark Foley. It is challenged on the left by the claim that 2006 is the beginning of a Democratic realignment. Both of these are ridiculous claims; the conventional wisdom in this case is right on.

The right-wing claim really should not even have to be refuted. On the side of the left, Cost has recently provided a welcome rejoinder to John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s realignment argument. The talk of realignment is overdone as it is, and Cost exposes the wrong-headedness of the idea that we can predict a realignment. He writes:

How can you differentiate a realigning election from the rest? A realigning election is, as I said, broad-based, deeply-felt, and long-lasting. All of these imply a temporal distinction. Many voters must make the same kinds of political choices in multiple contests in cycle after cycle. How do we know if a given event was indeed broad-based, deeply-felt and long-lasting? We have to wait and see if large numbers continue to vote the same way over many offices again and again.

He makes again the point mentioned above in a paragraph worth quoting:

People do not pay much attention to politics, and their political opinions reflect that. Opinions, even on salient issues, are subject to fluctuations and seeming irrationalities that would surprise most political elites. Even if we can identify the public as holding a discrete set of values that seem to us to imply support for the Democratic Party - it does not mean that we can assume this support will be forthcoming. The connection between avowed core values, on the one hand, and issue/candidate preferences, on the other hand, is often quite tenuous.

Even if our political attitudes are well-defined (and for the vast majority of people, even the vast majority of voters, they are not) they will not always predict voting behavior. Ideology is of course important, but very limited when it comes to explaining elections. It’s an easy shorthand that helps reporters frame a segment and op-ed columnists meet their deadlines, but whenever I hear a pundit explain an election with a clear and simple reference to the ideological makeup of the electorate I just shake my head.