Voting Against Your Own Interest: Not Just For Republicans Anymore!
Biden’s Victories, Exit Polls, TV, and Electability Gaslighting
The title of this post is mostly a joke — presuming to know someone else’s interests better than they do is a condescending, dick attitude. Unless, maybe, you know because they told you?
In a minute I’m going to show a bunch of exit polls in which the same voters who propelled Joe Biden to victory said they agreed with Bernie Sanders on the issues most important to them. But first, in order understand why that happened, and also to make clear that I’m not saying these people are dumb, we must acknowledge that everyone has varied, sometimes conflicting, interests, and that the number one issue for the vast majority of these people is beating Donald Trump.
The long and short of what I’m about to say is this: the reason so many Democratic voters chose a candidate who isn’t even pretending he’ll give them the policies they want is that they’ve been told, over and over, by institutions they’re supposed to be able to trust, that he is the most electable.
Electability claims are ultimately unverifiable assertions. That doesn’t mean no one should make those arguments, and I personally have argued that Bernie Sanders is more electable than Joe Biden against Donald Trump. But unless one argument demonstrably has very little merit, the major media’s responsibility is to present both arguments equally — not to overwhelmingly favor one and then call it news.
For every reason that Bernie Sanders may not be electable (he’s a socialist, his plans are expensive, he makes moderates uncomfortable), there’s an equally compelling reason that Joe Biden may not be electable (he’s vulnerable to accusations of nepotism and corruption, his record on war, trade and social security is bad, he’s the exact kind of establishment candidate that lost in 2016 and 2004). For every poll suggesting Biden’s chances against Trump were the best, there was a poll suggesting the same about Sanders. And for every case made that Biden would benefit from his association with Barack Obama, there’s a case to be made that Obama won in the first place by campaigning not as a moderate, but as a transformational candidate.
Nevertheless, the media questioned Sanders’ electability constantly, far more than they did Biden’s, including by a more than 4 to1 ratio during the debates prior to Super Tuesday. MSNBC repeatedly misrepresented his poll numbers. Pundits and moderators consistently framed his policies as unrealistic, emphasizing potential negative impacts while minimizing or erasing positive impacts, and declined to challenge the feasibility or examine the costs of the more corporate-friendly policies championed by Joe Biden. And of course, they just mentioned him a lot less.
The message from the major media for the last year can be summarized thus: if you think Bernie Sanders is as electable as Joe Biden, you’re not being rational; and if you think we in America can have things like universal healthcare, tuition-free public college, high wealth taxation and adequate climate action, you’re not being rational.
That messaging is certifiable gaslighting. Because thinking those things is not irrational at all.
Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world! And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.
-Paddy Chayefsky, “Network,” 1976
The most compelling reason to believe that this sort of gaslighting meaningfully contributed to Biden’s victory is the extraordinarily stark age split between Biden and Sanders voters. Of all the cultural differences between the young, who voted overwhelmingly for Sanders, and the old, who voted overwhelmingly for Biden, the most glaring and consequential is where they get their news and worldview. The young get it from the internet, which, for all its faults, is not a one-way conduit of information manned by corporate spokespeople. It’s a far more democratic forum for ideas, and one where perspectives unpopular with entrenched power can at least survive. The old get it from TV.
To be clear, I’m not hating on Baby Boomers. For much of their lives, TV news wasn’t as corporatized and corrupted as it is today. And the generation below them, mine, still feels reasonably comfortable telling those younger than us, millions of people who will have to navigate the destruction wrought by centrist climate policy, that they can’t have a fracking ban. It really makes me ashamed. The young are about to be kicked into an ocean of adversity and pain, and the old, who will be dying or dead by then, are tying a stone around their neck.
The reason for media bias against anti-corporate candidates is obvious. Major media companies are giant corporations, and they will never, ever give fair play to any perspective that does not nurture a worldview advantageous to corporate power. To do so would be to undermine their own financial interests, and they don’t do that. They serve those interests, and that necessarily entails suppressing some perspectives while elevating others.
Here are 3 other deeply flawed perspectives elevated over this election cycle, transmitted directly into the brains of anyone getting their news from TV:
1. Radicals don’t get much done, it’s incrementalist moderates who really bring the change.
This idea actually does require the suspension of rational thought. Just ask the abolitionists, the Suffragettes, the Freedom Riders, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, 1980’s AIDS activists or those who are today risking jail time in order to physically stop corporate ecocide from killing millions of people. Ask the unionists who were getting beaten up by strikebreakers so we could have things like an 8 hour workday, a minimum wage and a coffee break. Ask Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s hard to think of a major civilizing advancement in the interest of average people and opposed by entrenched power that was not popularized and actualized by those considered radical. Moderates, whether they know it or not, function to serve power by keeping popular movements at bay, pacifying the population by saying “we’re almost there so just wait a little longer,” and generally running interference while confusing the issue of which team they’re on. After delaying progress and then making the concession on behalf of power (presented as a victory speech on behalf of the newly enfranchised), they finally and loudly take credit for it. To believe moderates are more effective than radicals is to believe that the Civil Rights Act would have come sooner if only we’d had more people telling Martin Luther King to be patient.
Countless moderate liberals today think that if it were 1965, they’d be marching with Martin Luther King. The truth is they’d probably be doing what they’re doing now: making morally inconsistent pleas for civility from the sidelines, directed not just at those who are fighting against civil and human rights, but also at those who are fighting for them.
The problem of moderates as obstacles to progress, unwitting though they may be, was articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Not incidentally, Sanders surrogate Nina Turner referenced this quote on CNN, only to have Biden supporter Hilary Rosen whitesplain to her, with Chris Cuomo’s help, that Turner, a woman of color and professor of African-American history, doesn’t understand what King meant.
2. The electorate exists on a simplistic left-right spectrum, and those in the center will never like ideas originating on the far left or the far right.
I’ve written about why this concept is flawed in another post. Suffice it to say here that the myth of swing voters being allergic to ideas like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college has been obliterated by at least a year of polling. Maintaining faith in that myth, however, is important for companies getting rich off of sick people and student loan debt, so its propagation in corporate media continues unabated. Many swing voters are, in fact, averse to words like “socialist” or “revolution,” which tend to confuse rather than clarify understanding, and those words are duly served up. To be fair, though, Bernie Sanders started using the word “revolution,” not the media, and there are legitimate criticisms to be made of his campaign’s failure to expand its base beyond those comfortable with language like that.
It’s worth mentioning quickly that even if you accept this flawed model, center is not always better, because some center positions are unpopular. Trump attacked Hillary Clinton’s centrist positions on war and trade from the left, something he will do again against Joe Biden.
3. People being rude online and similar violations of decorum are more important than the human cost of policy.
Millions of Americans lack healthcare, work for starvation wages, are drowning in debt, are racially profiled and imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, have their tax dollars siphoned to support an illegal occupation in which a technologically advanced army repeatedly assassinates defenseless poverty-stricken children, and face the unimaginably catastrophic consequences of corporate ecocide and climate breakdown, but the real injustice is mean comments on the internet. Tellingly, few pundits have a problem with the epithet “Bernie Bro,” which dishonestly misrepresents Sanders’ base as privileged white males and totally erases the millions of women and people of color who support him because they understand his policies. That the term is often wielded by identity-obsessed liberals, many white and privileged themselves, is an irony that is reliably lost. It’s true that some Sanders supporters are actually mean, but the consequence of obsessing over them as a grave threat to civil discourse is that people now find themselves accused of meanness for pointing out another candidate’s record and literally nothing else.
Of course, with regard to what is sufficient decorum, it matters who’s talking. When Joe Biden insults people, accuses them of lying, threatens to fight them, or tells them they should vote for Trump, it isn’t a big deal. The goalposts are basically on water skis.
Pearl-clutching over civility is usually a smokescreen. Its purpose is to conceal the moral transgression of opposing a platform which embodies the modicum of humanity and justice the pearl-clutchers claim to support. In a way, it’s understandable. When you identify, as we all do, as a decent person, it’s unpleasant to side with policies that are more inhumane than their alternatives. Even if you think you’re only being practical. That’s probably why many Democrats misremember their own position on the invasion of Iraq.
The point here is not that anyone who buys into these media perspectives is a bad person. It’s that if they came to understand the ways that such a worldview ultimately serves power and delays the progress they want (assuming they actually do want it), then their energies might be put to better use. They might go much farther in shrinking the cornucopia of needless human suffering in the world.
Without further ado, here are the exit polls. They are from Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, South Carolina and Texas, all states Biden won. They indicate that voters in those states, overall, care most about health care and income inequality, want Medicare For All, and think the US economic system needs a complete overhaul, but also think Joe Biden has the best chance of beating Donald Trump. There were some questions about free public college and social security, the answers to which also indicated that Sanders’ proposals and record most aligned with overall preferences. But all states did not ask those questions, so I didn’t include them.
To be clear, on some questions, the results among Biden voters differ from the aggregate, and indicate that most of those people do like Biden’s policy positions and voted in alignment with their preferences. (On others, they differ from the aggregate but do not indicate that — Biden voters who care more about climate change than inequality, for example, would still be better served by Sanders’ policies; given their records on civil rights and the disproportionate harm to people of color caused by private insurance, expensive education and a low minimum wage, the same could be said about race relations). So, to be very clear, I’m not saying every person voted against his or her own preferences. I’m saying enough of them did to be significant.
(At the risk of getting into the weeds: I think it’s fair to look at the overall results — in light gray across the top — and draw the conclusion. However, if you want to figure out the percentage of people who voted against their preference on an issue, you can look at the percentage of a top line answer that indicates a Sanders preference (X%), then go down that column and look at the percentage of those people who voted for Biden (Y%), then take the second percentage of the first (Y% of X), and that’s the percentage of people who voted against their preference on that issue. I’m not a mathematician or statistician, but I believe that’s how that math works. If I’m wrong I hope someone will correct me.
So, for the Illinois M4A question, 61% support and 32% oppose. Of the supporters, Biden took 45% and Sanders took 50%. So, most people who support M4A voted for Sanders, but 45% of those who support M4A voted for Biden and against their preference on that issue. 45% of 61% is 27.45%. So, 27.45% of all voters voted against their preference, in Biden’s favor, on that issue. On the Michigan “economic system overhaul” question, 43% gave the answer that aligns most with Sanders’ proposals. Of that 43%, 42% voted for Biden. 42% of 43% is 18.06%. So, 18.06% of all voters voted against their preference, in Biden’s favor, on that issue.
Of course, it goes the other way too, and some people who favored Biden’s positions voted for Sanders. But those numbers are consistently significantly smaller.
Finally, voting is complicated, you’re never going to get a candidate who agrees with you on everything, and you’re always going to have to prioritize issues. The contention I’m making is not merely that people had to prioritize issues, which is normal. It’s that one of those issues, electability (the most compelling for people and the one most chose to prioritize) is a fraud, sold by self-serving corporate interests with chimeric assertions that Sanders is unelectable while Biden is “safe.”
The Issues that Matter Most to Voters In All 6 States are Health Care and Income Inequality:
Voters in All 6 States Want Medicare For All:
Voters in All But One State Think the US Economic System Needs a Complete Overhaul, or Have a Favorable Opinion of Socialism:
(The “economic system” question was not asked in AZ or TX. In TX they asked the “socialism” question, included below):
Most Voters Prioritize Beating Trump:
Most Think Biden Has a Better Shot Than Sanders at Beating Trump:
(This question was not asked in SC):
Marveling at Republicans voting against their own interest is a favorite pastime of educated, middle class liberals. Maybe now they can marvel at themselves.
