With Trump Self-Destructing, Do Swing Voters Matter?
Yes, because relying on turnout alone is just too risky.
To ensure Biden wins in 2020, Democrats need to mobilize our base. We also need to persuade every persuadable voter we can find.
Many Democrats believe that Biden will win in November by turning out the base and that his campaign doesn’t need to bother trying to persuade swing voters.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because that was Hillary Clinton’s strategy in 2016. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer infamously opined, predicting that Democrats would win not only the White House but the Senate.
Clinton, buoyed by polls that turned out to be wrong, was overconfident of her prospects in the must-win states of Wisconsin and Michigan. Her overconfidence inspired her to shoot for longshot wins in Arizona, North Carolina and Florida, all of which she lost. By summer, union leaders and local Democratic Party activists in Michigan were sending frantic SOS messages to the Clinton campaign warning that the polls were overly optimistic and that on-the-ground base support for Clinton was lackluster. Women, millennials, people of color, union households — Clinton wasn’t reaching out to them and they, in turn, were feeling increasingly chilly toward her.
According to Politico’s post-mortem:
Most importantly, multiple operatives said, the Clinton campaign dismissed what’s known as in-person “persuasion” — no one was knocking on doors trying to drum up support for the Democratic nominee, which also meant no one was hearing directly from voters aside from voters they’d already assumed were likely Clinton voters, no one tracking how feelings about the race and the candidates were evolving. This left no information to check the polling models against — which might have, for example, showed the campaign that some of the white male union members they had expected to be likely Clinton voters actually veering toward Trump — and no early warning system that the race was turning against them in ways that their daily tracking polls weren’t picking up.
Trump, meanwhile, doubled down on swing states, visiting Michigan and Wisconsin 19 times (to Clinton’s six) during the campaign’s final hundred days and scooping up significantly more union voters than Romney had in 2012. These are the notorious white blue collar voters who supported Obama, then flipped to Trump and are up for grabs this year.
So…what should those of who are determined to oust Trump do? Should we replay Clinton’s strategy of relying on favorable polls, mobilizing base voters and ignoring swing voters? Or is putting all of our eggs in that basket too risky?
Before the pandemic upended life as we know it and wrecked the economy, I would have said that flipping swing voters was crucial to winning. But given how elderly white voters, a key segment of Trump’s base, have turned against him, I’m less certain of that now. That said, there are still some reasons to go beyond a pure base mobilization strategy:
Let’s look at the polls: Biden has a 10% lead nationally and solid leads in Michigan (+7), Wisconsin (+6.4), Pennsylvania (+5.6) and Florida (+6.2). (In July of 2016, Clinton had 6.6% lead over Trump). Sounds pretty good, right? But there are some important caveats to consider:
· Sabato’s Crystal Ball (which had an almost 100% accurate prediction rate for the 2018 mid-terms) suspects that Biden’s lead is artificially high. Sabato learned a hard lesson in 2016 when it predicted a Clinton landslide and is clearly being far more cautious about polls this time around.
· In July, 1988, Michael Dukakis had a 17-point lead over Bush [cough cough]
· Vox’s Mathew Yglesias notes that “if Trump could cut his national polling deficit down to 5 or so — which could be easily enough achieved by reminding right-of-center voters who are currently undecided that they have fundamental disagreements with Biden on policy — he’s be within ‘normal polling error’ range” in Pennsylvania.
Trump doesn’t seem too inclined to go after undecided voters but that could change when and if his campaign staff convince him that he cannot win without them. We need to be out there talking to them too because we need to not just win but win big, win with a mandate for radical change. Matt Morrison, Executive Director of Working America, AFL-CIO, puts it like this:
Donald Trump cannot remain in office — period. The math and morality say that we must not simply beat Trump but must also repudiate Trumpism — the man and his enablers. That means we cannot settle for a small win (already not assured from a base-only strategy, as 2016 proved decisively). We must turn every stone to change minds and ensure we win from Scranton to Scottsdale. Morally, we win hearts and votes by listening and helping more people connect to progressive values and the candidates who advance them.
Win hearts and votes we can. Huge numbers of Trump voters voted for Democrats in the 2018 midterms, propelling Democrats to victory in dozens of races they probably couldn’t have won without those votes.
In addition to landsliding our way into the White House, we need to win down-ballot races. While it may well be that Trump has rendered himself unelectable, that doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will suddenly start voting Democratic all the way down the ballot. We need to make the case that the country needs progressive policies to protect public health, get people back to work, stabilize the climate and tackle the racial and economic inequalities that are killing people and imperiling democracy.
There’s a lot that can go wrong with a base mobilization strategy. Even if Biden has a strong ground game, there are things that are by and large beyond the campaign’s control: The pandemic could keep many voters at home. Polling locations could be closed. Absentee ballots could be filled out incorrectly or lost in the mail. The GOP could successfully disenfranchise millions of voters. And Joe Biden, whose enthusiasm gap is notorious, could fail to inspire the base to get out and vote. Already, ominous echoes of 2016 are emanating from Michigan, where disillusioned black Democrats are warning of coldness toward Biden and predicting a Trump victory. Joe’s got the wind at his back, but it’s only blowing at about ten miles an hour.
Last but not least, if Biden wins, a sizeable number of voters are going to be upset. It’s not far-fetched to worry that Trump will claim that the election was rigged and incite them to violence. Will they heed his call? Well, that in part depends on how they believe they will fare under a Biden administration. That makes all of us liberals and progressives de facto ambassadors to voters on the (hopefully) losing side of this election. If we haven’t even bothered talking to them by the time Election Day rolls around, they will be susceptible to whatever wild ideas and left-wing demonization that Trump and far-right media peddle.
And if Trump wins, then our efforts to communicate across the divide can help depolarize our horrendously divided nation. If our adversaries see us not as the enemies Trump has made us out to be but as decent people whose well-being matters, they will be more likely to speak out against whatever atrocities an emboldened Trump has in store.
What this means for you and me
We can’t control what strategies the Biden campaign adopts, and it will likely be constrained by the ongoing need for social distancing. But we all have friends and family members we can talk to. And most of us have social media accounts where we can post things that either inflame partisan hostility or give fence-sitters a reason to see us as the good guys.
We need to reach out to every possible voter, regardless of what party they’re in or who they voted for in 2016. No matter how far ahead Biden appears to be, complacency is a risk we can’t afford to take.
About the Author
Erica Etelson is a former human rights attorney, a voter outreach activist and the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide (New Society Publishers 2019).
