3 Zombie Myths About Winning Elections that Need to Die

For decades, political operatives, candidates, and other observers have acted like they could they could buck an unfavorable partisan environment by focusing on local issues. Or like the state of the economy would be a major factor in determining incumbent candidates’ success. Or like their only path to victory was to raise as much money as possible.

And all that may have even been true — once.

These days, politics doesn’t work like that. Here’s why it’s time to kill off these three zombie myths before they get another chance to eat our campaigns.

#1 — Politics Is No Longer Local

All politics is local,” former House Speaker Tip O’Neill was famous for saying. It’s a charming notion of retail accountability and democracy-as-it’s-supposed-to-work to think that, at the end of the (election) day, voters back home don’t care as much about matters of national policy as they do about concrete stuff you’re doing to improve their daily lives. Got to take a controversial foreign policy vote? National partisan environment working against your party? That’s OK, just make sure the money for that new highway segment back home comes through, and people will still vote for you.

But it’s not true. At least, not anymore.

Now voting is driven to a much greater extent by partisanship and national trends than bread-and-butter results. Just pick your proof:

• The incumbency advantage has declined rapidly since its 20th century peak. That is, the edge in performance that a typical incumbent candidate enjoys at the polls over a typical non-incumbent candidate from same party is lower today than it’s been in ~50 years. That advantage was always thought to come from having a history of occupying the office and developing local relationships over time by bringing home the bacon for your district. Now voters see candidates from the same party as more interchangeable.
• In 1985, 114 members of Democrats’ House majority represented districts won by Ronald Reagan (R) in the 1984 presidential election. No wonder they worked together. But in 2013, just 16 members of Republicans’ House majority represented districts won by Barack Obama (D). No wonder Congressional Republicans went full scorched earth against him. Voters these days are drawing less of a distinction between who they want to represent their town and who they want to represent their country.

Source

• Statistically speaking, “Today one can better predict the winner’s vote in a congressional district using the district’s previous presidential vote than its previous House vote.” Furthermore, “Gubernatorial outcomes increasingly track presidential results.” Ditto in state legislative races. National party brands are taking over.

I personally saw this effect in action when I was consulting on Senator Mary Landrieu’s Louisiana reelection campaign in 2014. Landrieu (D) saw an unfavorable national partisan environment and opted to run a race focused on reminding voters about all the home-state projects she’d won funding for. But going transactional couldn’t save her from the wind at Republicans’ backs in the South. Incidentally, commercial brands often encounter a similar dynamic: the most successful and prestigious brands create relationships with their customers that are much more than transactional.

And when you think about it, this transition from local/transactional forces driving to more values- and identity-based forces makes sense. In decades past, the differences between the parties might have largely boiled down to relatively transactional matters anyway — a different approach to taxes or defense spending or environmental regulation. But as the Republican Party focused more on white identity politics, the Democrats adopted more heterodox identity causes, and the stakes for choosing between the parties became a more existential matter.

And it’s much harder to vote against your identity than it is to swing your vote based on transactional benefits.

#2 It’s No Longer the Economy, Stupid

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign adviser James Carville popularized an iconic phrase: “The economy, stupid!”

Not!

In other words, an incumbent president’s reelection bid lives or dies by the state of the economy. And indeed, the economy might well have helped Clinton beat George H.W. Bush. It used to be a highly significant factor in elections.

But don’t count on the economy saving or sinking Donald Trump.

These days, voter perception of the president is much less tied to economic indicators than it used to be. Look at this plot of consumer sentiment against presidential approval rating. Before Obama, consumer sentiment had a much stronger correlation with presidential approval ratings than it has since.

What’s replaced the economy as a predictor of voting? Partisanship. Check out the chart below on the right for proof that it’s no longer perceptions of the economy driving perceptions of candidates — now it’s perceptions of candidates dictating how people view the economy:

And it’s likely this trend will last beyond Trump, because of two current trends:

1. Economic prospects are improving more for people with college degrees than without college degrees.
2. Whites with college degrees are sorting themselves more heavily into the Democratic Party.

If whites with college degrees continue trending into the D column, then Democratic and Republican voters won’t just see the president’s performance differently according to their partisanship — they’ll also literally experience the economy along partisan lines as fortunes for college-educated folks diverge from those of non-college folks.

Now it’s the partisanship, stupid.

#3 Money Doesn’t Talk Like You Think

You’ve probably heard that old saying, “Money talks, bulls**t walks.” People in politics tend to take it as gospel. But in 2016, money talked like Hillary Clinton. Bulls**t walked right into the White House.

Source

In politics, fundraising is the most concrete, publicly visible metric people inside and outside a campaign both have to go by, so it’s not totally crazy that cash ended up being a sort of lingua franca of the industry. After all, other metrics have their limitations, too: polls can be off, who knows how much volunteer organizing a campaign is really doing, and votes won’t be counted until it’s too late. But fundraising totals are reported publicly, and a dollar is indisputably something you can spend to make people like you.

Money can be exchanged for goods and services, like opinion research, bumper stickers, and advertisements.

But if money is such a great predictor, how come Hillary Clinton out-raised Donald Trump by nearly double in 2016 and still lost? And for that matter, why are there literally dozens of scholarly and anecdotal examples out there of the lesser-funded candidate winning? And why do these examples stretch across eras, span the globe, and range from top-of-the-ballot races all the way down to the bottom? Just a small selection:

• Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio each benefitted from $150MM+ in combined spending (campaign + independent expenditures) just to make it to February and March, respectively, in their 2016 presidential primary against Trump. Trump still hadn’t even spent $70MM by the end of June.
• In the 2017 Alabama Senate special election primary, Luther Strange and his supporters outspent Roy Moore 5:1 on advertising, only for Moore to beat Strange by 6 points.
• “In fact, Bonica said, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to vote a split ticket because they liked your ad.”
• “Our analysis, based on all run-off municipal elections in Israel between 1993 and 2008, shows that candidates’ share of the vote is not substantially affected by their campaign spending.”
• “Using elections for the state high court bench between 1990 and 2004, we demonstrate that candidate spending in judicial elections has diminishing marginal returns.”
• “Incumbent spending raises the incumbent’s share of the vote only when he or she faces high levels of spending by the challenger.”

So it’s not that money doesn’t matter per se. It certainly seems to matter a great deal when it comes to the favors donors get back from politicians, for one thing! And campaigns do have expenses they need to cover.

But all the evidence points to the need to spend campaign money smarter, not just in greater quantity. Just like the fixations on the economy and bread-and-butter local results, the fixation on fundraising is a zombie myth about politics that needs to die. And the sooner the better.