As results firm up over the pond, interesting piece from Danny Finkelstein this morning

(copied and pasted)

On election night in 2001 I stood glumly at the count for Harrow West and watched the votes pile up for my opponent. I had been fighting a marginal seat, but was swept away. The Conservatives had registered one of their worst results since 1832. The parliamentary party would be one of the smallest in its history and the leader was about to resign. As I planned the traditional speech of the defeated candidate, one of my party workers approached me. “Do you think we might have won if we’d attached a loudhailer to your car?” he asked.

Attributing electoral triumph or disaster to minor aspects of campaign organisation is a common error of political analysis. Those who use it work backwards. If I had been victorious, the decision not to holler at my neighbours would have been a sagacious strategic judgment. In defeat it was a clumsy tactical error. In reality it was entirely irrelevant.

This is why I have long been drawn to the work of the American political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. They use sophisticated statistical techniques to identify the things that really matter in campaigns.
This week they have published their latest book, Identity Crisis, a review of Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in 2016. They have collaborated for this study with Michael Tesler, a political scientist who has specialised in studying American racial politics. Anyone who wants to understand the US midterm elections will find it helpful — and anyone who wants to understand British politics too.

I described Trump’s victory as surprising. In fact, to the authors it wasn’t all that surprising. They’d been expecting a close election because that is what the “fundamentals” dictated: the central factors that, over decades, have predicted presidential elections. With a few facts it is possible to establish which party is likely to win, even if you do not know the candidates.

The core fundamentals are the change in gross domestic product from the first quarter to the third quarter of the election year, the president’s approval rating, the presence of an incumbent, and how many consecutive terms a party has enjoyed. Taking these together in 2016 the authors conclude — and Vavreck published this in advance — that “the election-year conditions in the country did not support the early confidence in the Democrats’ chances. The presidential race was either party’s race to lose.”

In the event, Hillary Clinton did quite well. She slightly over-performed the expectation of some models by winning the popular vote. Most of the explanations advanced for her defeat turn out to be quite similar to my guy’s thoughts about the loudhailer. The impact that might have been made by her visiting different states, or having a better field operation, or not being the target of Russian fake news is likely to have been pretty minimal. The authors also conclude that her gender wasn’t central to the result

And the emails? Clinton herself is convinced that the intervention of FBI director James Comey, announcing that he was looking afresh at her emails, was critical. The authors cite multiple studies to support their conclusion that “there is no clear evidence that the Comey letter affected people’s intention to vote for Clinton”.

So if this didn’t do for her, what did? In a single word: race. The election of Barack Obama was celebrated as the moment when America broke free of racial politics. Sadly, the authors conclude, the opposite happened. For many years, white Democrats without a college education harboured strong negative feelings about African-Americans, Muslims, immigration and had developed a white identity, convincing themselves that whites were being discriminated against. Yet they went on voting Democrat.

In fact, as Tesler explains, “less than 50 per cent [of these voters] could place the Democrats to the left of the Republicans on which party was more supportive of government assistance to African-Americans”. This changed during the Obama era, despite all the president’s best efforts to take race out of politics.
A realignment began in which these white poorer Democrats started voting Republican. And Trump appealed directly to them. The orthodox Republican leadership wanted to broaden the party’s appeal to immigrants and minorities. Trump went the other way. He won the primaries by appealing to a sense of white identity. And as politics polarised round racial attitudes, the electoral map changed, allowing him to win the presidency while losing the popular vote.

The traditional theory is that Trump voters were economically anxious and angry and that’s why they supported an appeal to race and populism. No, say the authors. Polling does not show that voters were particularly angry in 2016 and if you were economically anxious you were mildly more likely to vote for Clinton. Any anger or anxiety, they argue, was primarily cultural. It was about feeling (absurdly) that whites were being done down.

The final part of their analysis is to point out that despite all the predictions that mainstream Republicans would desert Trump, they did not. After the Access Hollywood tapes revealed his appalling attitude to women, his approval rating dipped, but soon recovered. Partisanship was strong and concerns about Trump much weaker.
All this helps explain the midterm campaign: the emphasis on race in Trump’s speeches, the way that social liberals and ethnic minorities rallied to the Democrats. But what can it tell us about British politics?

Three things.

First, the fundamentals are critical. Next time out, the Tories will be fighting for a fourth term. If the economy is growing, they still stand a chance. If it isn’t, they will struggle, whoever their candidate for No 10 and whatever else goes on.

Second, a realignment is going on in Britain as it is in the US. The racial politics are different here, but social class and economic circumstances predict less than they used to, while social attitudes predict more.

The Tories will have to learn to navigate this. Appealing more to white voters who are poorer, older and more culturally conservative may change the electoral map, but, unlike with Trump in 2016, not in the Conservatives’ favour. The party would lose marginal seats in prosperous areas while increasing the vote in safe Labour seats it can’t win. In addition, as the country is becoming more liberal, more urban and more diverse, it would be foolish for the Conservatives to become less of each of these things.

And finally, the Conservatives are hoping that people who would normally vote Labour will balk at the idea of putting in Jeremy Corbyn. Well, maybe, but millions of Republican women ended up voting for a man who thought it all right to (sorry) “grab them by the pussy”.
Don’t go to the bookies betting against partisanship unless you get very good odds.

Posted By: Old Man, Nov 7, 08:12:42