The case for Beto 2020, revisited
Former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke may be the 2018 midterms’ breakout star. In a 18-month Senate campaign against Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), he seemed to defy the conventions that we call “political gravity:”
- He started the campaign without hiring pollsters and do not appear to have ever hired any (though he did hire outside consulting firms). His first campaign promise was not based on a policy, but a promise to campaign in every one of Texas’s 235 counties.
- He was following through his promise and attracted media buzz. Then he staked the campaign on engagement with supporters: he would livestream his drives across the state and prod his fans for small donation because he eschewed corporate PAC money. His campaign then kept spending on social media advertising.
- The money started flowing in and young people lined up to volunteer for him, but the Texas GOP started spending seriously against this radical Democrat. Beto O’Rourke didn’t shy away from the criticism, instead staged bigger rallies and spread viral clips of him defending his political stances (like the one where he defends NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem).
Yes, Beto O’Rourke lost. But he lost with merely a 2.5% margin and still managed to flip the rich Dallas suburbs in Tarrant county, beat Cruz 3-to-1 in Travis County (Austin and environs) and earned more raw votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016. He did all of this without promising much more than a vision of hope and aspiration, running
a campaign like this one solely comprised of people from all walks of life, coming together, deciding what unites us is far stronger than the color of our skin … who we pray to, whether we pray at all, who we voted for last time, none of that small stuff matters now.
Reports indicate a Beto O’Rourke presidential run announcement could be imminent, by February 28th. This comes a week after I started seriously viewing 2020’s presidential candidates through a typology based on leadership qualities. Thinking through what kind of candidate Beto is using my typology, there are days when I think he could win the presidency. Then there are days when I think he could lose with a small margin again.
I introduced my typology in another post, but here’s the one-paragraph rundown: I think the biggest divides within the Democratic primary electorate on the ideal candidate are not based on ideology, but based on whether the candidate is “establishment or anti-establishment” and if they “promote a political agenda or a vision of American society.” From these two axes, we can categorize voters and candidates into four “quadrants.”
Without solid data for now, I used my gut feeling to plot various candidates across the four quadrants:
Notice something about the distribution of candidates. There is a lot of crowding in the Establishment/Vision (EV) and Anti-Establishment/Agenda (AG) axes. Only one declared candidate is in either the AV or EG quadrants: Kirsten Gillibrand. Excluding candidates with minuscule name recognition or net negative approval (Bloomberg), we get Sherrod Brown in Establishment/Agenda (EG) and Beto O’Rourke in Anti-Establishment/Vision (AV). The prediction that Beto O’Rourke will win the Democratic nomination, then, is in two parts:
- Beto O’Rourke is thought of as an AV candidate, and his natural skill will make him the leading AV candidate;
- Enough Democrats want an AV candidate that the leading candidate in that leadership quadrant either wins the primary outright or can be a compromise candidate.
I think the first part is evident, but will remind people of the argument. It is the second part which is harder to contend and is less evident in the data.
Beto as the leading AV candidate
I hear people say that Beto O’Rourke captures the charisma that defined Obama in his 2008 breakthrough. This feeling of political charisma, I argue, is an intuition about both Obama and Beto being AV candidates.
Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War and some red meat policies (like closing Gitmo and the initial public option promise) burnished his credentials as anti-establishment, someone not to blame for post-9/11 sins. At the same time, Obama’s unique upbringing detailed in Dreams From My Father showed he is a credible ambassador for an America that is a “land of opportunity,” where people like him can prosper and ascend to power.
In hindsight, Obama’s first term showed he was very comfortable with following the political establishment’s norms; his second term showed, beyond Republicans, that he wanted some kind of agenda on gun violence or U.S. race relations.
This shows an instability inherent in an AV candidate: how does a candidate maintain authority and retain their campaign persona? If you want to stay a vision candidate, you have to deal with the establishment and be seduced by their way of politics. If you want to stay an anti-establishment candidate, you have to find a popular cause that will rally supporters behind you and rattle the establishment, which would mean building a political agenda.
What makes Beto so attractive as a candidate is that he could be a counterexample to this instability. Obama was elected president, but hindsight shows he solved the instability by not being that anti-establishment; he was tapped into allies in Chicago, and his campaign novelty was building a professional, tech savvy management team.
Beto O’Rourke’s solution is that his Senate campaign is so distinct from what past models have been. A recent Politico long-form on Beto’s field operations shows how deliberately unprofessional the team was, dedicated as they were to scaling up the operation by training as many volunteers as they could. As long as Beto commits to replicating his Senate strategy, his presidential campaign has a natural inertia against capture by the consultant class; volunteers spread too quickly, and they try to raise money so quickly that the grassroots form a bulwark against the temptation of PAC money.
Beto’s ramshackle but also off-the-cuff campaign has given him a unique vision to present to voters: a man who understands common morality. The content of his viral speeches is a case in point. An even more remarkable example, to me, is when reporting late in the campaigned showed Beto tried to flee the scene of his DWI as a college student. A scandal that could drag down most politicians for weeks ended up ignored by national media (much more so than, say, the scandals reported on Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema).
It is possible right wingers were galvanized by this news, and that the media response is different in a presidential campaign. But I appeal to Occam’s razor and say this incident is a signal: people forgave Beto’s past transgressions, because he speaks plainly and has good soundbites. In contrast, they forgave Ted Cruz less because he speaks in riddles and has overtly machiavellian ambitions.
Does what Beto did seem simple? Contrast his appeal with Howard Schultz’s disastrous PR campaign to define himself as a unity candidate, or Tim Ryan’s bizarre plot to capture the “yoga mom vote,” as a sign.
Preferences for an AV candidate
A campaign by an AV candidate is destined to be scrutinized all the way through. For an AV candidate to be credible, it almost has to have a ramshackle operation and a candidate who repeatedly rises like a phoenix against attacks by ideologues. Even if there is one leading AV candidate in the race, the part with the biggest risk is getting the campaign past some tipping point.
Beto O’Rourke will be attacked by more leftist supporters of AG candidates, with online publications already revealing his waffling on collective bargaining and PAC donations. Seth Mandel’s tweet above suggests attacks from EV candidates, who will trash Beto for his lack of realism and relative myopia — what does a man from El Paso know about the Deep South or the Midwest?
The easy solution is to say: there is critical mass of support among Democrats for any well-known AV candidate. Then, despite the attacks said candidate will gain the support of people we thought liked EV or AG candidates the most. In truth, they were looking for an AV candidate, but the field was not offering them any.
The problem is that this claim is not supported by the data. Consider a recent national CNN/SSRS poll of potential Democratic primary voters. The survey asks for primary candidate preferences, but also asks how importantly the voters weigh seven different candidate qualities. Using similar methods as in my first typology post, I classify six of the seven qualities according to four possible ends of the two axes. With a national primary sample, I also look at crosstabs in quality weighing by two major demographic divides among American voters: male/female and non-college/college.
The analogous table I made using Iowa primary voter data showed a smaller fraction of voters care critically about whether a candidate is establishment or not compared to whether the candidate espouses agenda or vision. This does not hold in the CNN/SSRS poll. A wealth of explanations are possible — statistical noise, Iowa voters is not representative of national voters — but there is no strong signal of a silent AV majority among potential voters.
Non-college Democratic primary voters — who gets painted as Trump-sympathetic, anti-establishment types — do seem to care about one anti-establishment quality more than college voters. However, they do not seem to care more about the vision quality of a candidate “representing the Democratic Party’s future” than college voters. Where they differ with college voters are their increasing intensity for agenda qualities.
A similar trend is seen in a UMass Amherst poll of presidential leadership qualities of New Hampshire Democratic voters. Voters with high school degrees and those with income less than $40,000 care about the vision quality of “changing how things are done in Washington” the most in their respective crosstabs, but within those subsamples no more than 15% treat it as a top quality.
Across the income and education distribution, about a quarter of people care the most about the “electability quality” of “Best Chance to Defeat Trump.” The variation is that up to 45% of the best-educated or wealthiest voters care the most about electability, while poorer or less educated voters care more about agenda qualitires.
There are clear risks with using candidate quality questions, not standardized across polls, to measure voters’ preferences for ideal candidates. Voters internalize the qualities of their favorite candidates rather than using them to guide candidate choice, for one. In other words, none of these results show that my typology captures stable groupings existing across time and not just something ad-hoc I made up for the 2020 Democratic primary.
But, with respect to the Democratic primary, I could summarize what we learn from the quality questions in two ways:
- What we think of as parts of the party that are anti-establishment — less educated and poorer voters — respond such that they are disproportionately in the AG quadrant. This would be correlated with support for Bernie Sanders, and rephrases his supporters’ intensity for his bid.
- The rest of the party is not so concerned with the differences in EV, AV or EG as long as a candidate can defeat Trump — the electability quality.
Beto O’Rourke, I argue, is fundamentally different from candidates like Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris. His AV qualities reflect a style that emphasizes how relatable he is and how he appeals to common sense, which excites volunteers and small donors. But there is no consensus that this style is what best defeats Trump, and no great argument yet for the claim apart from “Beto sounds like Obama.”
Political reality will mean other candidates will seize on Beto’s late-entry and less refined policy pitches and try to smother his candidacy early on. Beto O’Rourke will be “untested” one day and “unqualified” the next, not to mention someone who never won statewide.
The path looking forward for Beto probably has to come from attracting voters prioritizing electability. He can do this by inspiring fear from Trump: gathering donations, attracting large crowds and contrasting his character with the incumbent president. If he is focused on the case that his AV qualities make him the kind of candidate Trump does not know how to face, he wins the presidency. If he does not, I think he sinks before Super Tuesday.
This is the second of (hopefully) a series of articles using a two-axis typology to analyze the 2020 Democratic primaries as well as the 2020 presidential campaign. The goal is that this typology makes more sense for this cycle than classifying candidates based on “ideology” or “appeal to party segments,” and using it means we can more scientifically track changes in public opinion and campaign strategies as the election comes closer.
In another article, I consider another type of candidate that is not talked about enough: the establishment/agenda (EG) candidate. I note that early EG candidates represented ideological views in the Democrats’ minority, but a candidate with an EG candidate’s temperament plus a progressive platform could be strong. I correlated this new typology is with ideology, in terms of a candidate being “liberal,” “moderate” or “conservative.” I track the discourse in these first weeks of the Democratic campaign and argue pundits are starting to see the campaigns would rather converge on their policy stances and differentiate themselves on leadership qualities formalized in my typology.
