In a weird way, I think the mainstream American voter is a lot like me. I grew up in San Francisco, and have lived all but three years of my life in the Bay Area. And I had no idea that the SF Giants had a pretty good season until they were a few games into the playoffs. Am I, like, “Go Giants!”? Sure, yes, why not. But I don’t follow them, and I know nothing about their players except that one of them has a big hipster beard. I’m pretty much oblivious to the team and, for that matter, all of professional sports.
Well, that’s exactly how a massive chunk of the US electorate is about politics! They aren’t paying all that much attention, and the extent of their attention is pretty shallow. Maybe they favor a home team (Dems in “blue states”, Repubs in “red states”), and maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ll show up to vote, and maybe they won’t. If they’re the somewhat rare “swing voter”, they might be convinced to vote for one candidate or the other for the most inane of reasons (“have a beer with”, random gaffe, etc.)
Meanwhile, there’s been a longstanding assumption in the pundit field that those who aren’t actively left or right politically are therefore centrists. Middle-muddle politics are supposed to appeal to them. Thomas Friedman is supposed to speak for them.
But no, that’s not how it is at all. Yes, there are committed progressives on the left and committed conservatives on the right. Despite establishment whines about how a few percent of them peel off and vote for the likes of Ralph Nader thus tipping the scales, for the most part, people who are dialed in politically vote strategically, which typically includes coming around to support their party’s nominee against the greater evil on the other side (you’re a Daily Kos reader, correct? And you voted for Hillary Clinton, correct?) In between the left and right, though, people aren’t centrists.
What they are, the mass of people who aren’t actively progressive or conservative, is politically unengaged. They aren’t paying much attention. Their understanding of issues is shallow. And centrism is the last thing that’s going to ever win them over:
- A low-information voter who usually supports Republicans by default can only be won over (if at all) by Democrats who have an aggressive agenda.
- Someone who leans left, maybe really dislikes Republicans, but who is flaky about showing up to vote, can only be dragged to the voting booth by Democrats who are exciting and populist.
- And the “swing voter”, who is oblivious to political realities and impressionable, is going to be most impressed by a Democrat whose proposals are ambitious and exciting.
Trump got this. He won “the center”, that is, the politically unengaged, by engaging them. He promised “yuuuuge” changes, so much winning “you’ll get tired of winning”, and so on. It was hollow bluster, but it was more than Hillary was doing to stir up America’s vast all-important boredom constituency.
Democrats can play that game. What Democrats need to do, urgently, is to finally bury the DLC. The DLC, officially, was already dead, which should have been a clue to the Dem establishment that a DLC candidate (albeit struggling to sell herself as a progressive incrementalist) would fail (or at least could fail, yes I know about Comey, voter suppression, media stupidity, and so on) in 2016. Democrats can play it better, because Democrats have a stronger claim on the kinds of policies that will help rather than hurt regular Americans. We should win, and we can win.