Joe Biden’s Call for Unity Doesn’t Have to End in Catastrophe for Democrats
Joe Biden, like Abraham Lincoln, is making it clear these days that the closing argument for his presidential campaign will be a call for unity. And why shouldn’t he? Unity polls well, and it’s a neat aspirational vision for a country that feels increasingly torn apart.
“The closing argument is that we need to unify the country,” said Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist and architect of the speech. “He won’t represent just Democrats or Republicans, he’ll represent everyone.”
So what if all the savvy insiders make fun of him for believing in a long-gone fantasy world where Republicans would actually collaborate with Democrats on the project of productively governing our great nation in good faith. So what if Republicans are already telegraphing in very obvious and unmistakable ways that they’re preparing to destroy his presidency from day one. Voters consistently tell pollsters and message researchers they like unity and working together to find solutions. Shouldn’t Biden follow the lead of decades’ worth of Democratic campaigns and run on a concept that voters say they want? Even if he’ll never be able to deliver on collaboration with Republicans, it’s gotta be better than running on a platform of more partisan bickering, right?
The trick with running a campaign on unity is how you use it. Sometimes Democrats win on it, and sometimes they don’t. But they haven’t been running on unity the way Lincoln did. The key to using unity successfully, especially in an age of polarization, is to start using unity less as an olive branch and more as a cudgel.
Unity is a highly problematic concept in an inherently adversarial political process. An infamous California conundrum shows why.
In California, Prop. 13 is mostly known for fixing property taxes at low rates and helping kick off a nationwide “tax revolt” at the end of the 1970s. Less well known is that Prop. 13 set a ⅔ majority threshold for raising any and all taxes.
With California Republicans obdurately refusing to ever raise taxes on anything ever, this created decades of horrendously dysfunctional budgeting for the state. Revenue is one of the key levers budget setters have to pull, after all.
Things have gotten a little more rational in recent years as Democrats have achieved supermajorities in the state legislature and no longer need Republican buy-in to budget. But throughout those years of dysfunction, the idea of removing or reforming that ⅔ requirement never really gained any traction. Why? Because polls consistently showed that voters supported it. And after all, what voter wouldn’t?
The subtext of any poll question asking whether you support that ⅔ requirement is effectively whether you would like the bickering factions in your legislature to please get along or not. And of course voters want people to get along! No one wants to see their parents fight or sit at a table next to the couple that came to the restaurant to argue. When kids fight, they get a timeout. By gum, if those legislators can’t find a way to get along, just require them to work it out!
Once you see this dynamic for what it is, it shows up everywhere. In my career as a political consultant, just about every race I’ve worked on has featured at least one poll that shows some form of the idea of working together to get results, working across the aisle with Republicans, or putting aside differences etc. is pretty popular. This finding shouldn’t be surprising, but the real mistake Democrats make is when they think they should then campaign on a promise of compromise — or worse yet, govern on it.
The first problem with Democrats campaigning on promises to work with Republicans is that it undercuts the core value proposition of their political brand and hands the edge to their opponent. After all, if voters want someone who will work with Republicans, they can just vote for the actual Republican candidate. This brand confusion also makes moral clarity around the GOP’s descent into naked white supremacy and authoritarianism harder to call out. Imagine saying, “Elect me because Republicans are undermining the vote and supporting racist terror militias — and I pledge to work with them hand in glove if elected!” It may be #2020, but making sure voters know clearly and definitively that you are not the party of overt racial hegemony is still an electoral advantage in most districts.
The second problem is that, no, you can’t work with Republicans. You may be perfectly willing to work with them, but Republicans aren’t returning the favor. This is the first lesson Barack Obama should have learned in 2009 when he got zero Republican votes on his stimulus bill in the House. Instead, he proceeded to water down his health care reform bill over the course of protracted negotiations in an effort to get Republicans to sign on — only to end up with zero Republican votes again. And take your pick of examples of Republicans refusing to compromise from current events in 2020, like say Republicans disregarding their own precedent of denying a vote (and even so much as a hearing) to President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland during an election year by turning around and ramming through an election-eve vote on a new nominee from President Trump.
The third problem with how Democrats have approached the challenge of “working across the aisle to get results” is that they’ve focused too much on the “working across the aisle” part and too little on the “getting results” part. Without getting too sidetracked, this is the part that killed Obama’s brand (and effectively killed the rest of his presidency): he promised change, then went into office with giant majorities in the House and Senate and didn’t get things done. Things didn’t change, as people could judge themselves from the results.
And getting things done, it turns out, is about the only thing voters can successfully evaluate — at least if you define “success” as something that will make voters actually change their minds. Extensive research has shown that, at least among the voters who change their minds during elections, policy doesn’t matter. Personality/credibility matters in some circumstances. But what swings voters consistently is whether they’re seeing results from incumbents or not:
“Voters do pass the relatively easy tests of judging politicians on performance. When people think a politician has performed well — perhaps by boosting economic growth or winning a war — they become or remain supportive of that politician. Likewise when people perceive a politician as having desirable character traits relevant to performance, such as honesty, they become or remain likely to vote for that politician.
“But voters fail the policy tests. In particular, I find surprisingly little evidence that voters judge politicians on their policy stances. They rarely shift their votes to politicians who agree with them — even when a policy issue has just become highly prominent, even when politicians take clear and direct stances on the issue, and even when voters know these stances.”
So everyone likes “working across the aisle to get results.” But over the years, it’s become evident that working across the aisle without getting results doesn’t make people want to keep voting for you — while research has shown that getting results without necessarily working across the aisle does make people like you.
Where does that leave unity as a campaign concept?
No politician in the history of America has staked more of his campaign and his administration on the theme of unity than Abraham Lincoln. Heck, he even named his side the Union. That, of course, would be his side in the Civil War. That’s because Lincoln was so committed to unity that he was willing to literally kill his opponents with rifles and canons to get it. That’s a far cry from the holding-hands-around-the-campfire version of unity that Democrats usually turn to these days; call it unity as conciliation. Obviously war is never a great option when you can avoid it, but it’s important not to overlook that this extreme example of conflict — an event that made Lincoln one of the most revered leaders in the country’s history — was fought in service of unity.
Few Americans would regard George W. Bush as any kind of great leader these days. Yet Bush’s side did win out in the 2002 midterm elections (when typically a president’s party would lose seats in his first midterm election) and again in 2004 largely by calling for unity by accusing Democrats of undermining it. In other words, we’re going to unify the country with MY unity, not their unity.
And of course the happy resolution of California’s dilemma that I described above ended not in the two sides coming together, but in California Democrats all but running Republicans out of the state.
So should Democrats like Joe Biden mount a bloody Civil War to cement the nation’s unity? Should Democrats strip their opponents of any claim to patriotism as part of a cynical partisan ploy? Certainly not.
But unity doesn’t have to mean compromise, either. If Democrats complete their projected sweep of this fall’s elections, they would do well to remember that results beat style points. And Democrats are more likely to get results if they press their agenda by eliminating the filibuster, expanding the Supreme Court, and using their power to enact their own priorities than if they waste time trying to find common ground with the party that’s looking to destroy them.
Will Bunnett is a principal at Clarify Agency.
