The short answer seems to be ‘not much’, although much lip service is given to it. During election season, voters will often say that what they are concerned about are major issues like the economy, inflation, immigration, and so on. Reporters will often ask them about these things and it makes both reporters and voters look like serious people who are not swayed by superficial matters. But the replies elicited are often generic and do not suggest that the voters are looking for specific proposals in order to make up their minds. They seem to be looking for candidates who view as important the same things as they do.
I am becoming convinced that issues are not that important in people deciding how they vote, while acknowledging that the word ‘issues’ covers a lot of ground. My suspicion is that people decide who to vote for based on a whole host of intangible feelings or general perceptions, like which party or candidate seems like they would do things that the voter would generally agree with, especially on emotionally charged issues, which party they have generally voted for in the past, which candidate they like/dislike/fear more, and so on. At this stage, the genuinely undecided voter is a rarity and is usually a low-information voter who may well not vote at all or vote more or less based on a last-minute impulse.
In an interview that political scientist Rachel Bitecofer gave to The Daily Show a few years ago but for which I cannot find the clip now, she said that most people who say they are undecided at this late stage are not really so. If asked whom they are leaning towards, will give you a name and that is usually the person they end up voting for.
Back in 2020, Bitecofer explained what really drives voter intent.
In this conversation, Bitecofer explains that, contrary to idealistic theories of folk democracy, the American voter is largely unsophisticated, knows few specifics about public policy and makes decisions based on emotions and partisanship. She also explains her theory that there are not many true “swing voters.” Moreover, she argues that the Democratic Party is wasting time and energy trying to recruit “right-leaning” independents to support their candidates.
The current election provides a natural experiment on how salient specific issues are to voters. We had the sudden switching of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris that took place when Biden dropped out on July 21. It is only within the last week or so that Harris has begun to articulate some specific policies of her own regarding housing and tax credits for small businesses. But long before that, when she had said nothing to differentiate herself from Biden, her poll numbers were already dramatically better than his.
In May, we had Trump ahead by five points across the battleground states. Right now, we have Harris ahead by two, so it’s a big seven-point swing. And we show outsized gains for Harris among young and nonwhite voters, and women, and we show smaller gains, but still some improvement, for Harris among men and white voters.
…Now, what’s interesting is that, compared to 2020, Harris is still slightly underperforming where Biden finished among young, Black, and Hispanic voters, even though she’s doing better than he was three months ago. We have Harris doing a little bit better among white voters and older voters than Biden did in 2020.
…It’s definitely not what we would’ve guessed two or three years ago. If you told me that Harris, a Black and Indian younger woman, was not going to have any material advantage over Biden among Black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 election, that would’ve surprised me. I do think that we need to see this race settle out a bit before we can say why that’s true and whether it’s going to last. I really do think it’s conceivable that Harris is riding an extraordinary wave of momentum that inflates her numbers just a little bit among swing voters across the board, and that might come back to earth.
This article also comments on the rise of Harris despite not distinguishing herself from Biden on issues.
In an attempt to understand how widespread and sharp the Democratic rebound has been since Biden dropped out of the race, we dug into the crosstabs of what the highest-rated pollsters have found during this extraordinary period in American politics. With each demographic group, we measured the swing between pollsters’ final, pre-dropout survey with Biden in the race and their most recent, post-dropout survey featuring Harris.
While Harris has closed the gap at the topline level — in national polls, the race is essentially a dead heat — Harris has made eye-popping gains with traditional, core Democratic base voters while also appealing to independents, which is an incredibly difficult needle to thread, especially for a candidate whose favorability ratings were 15 points underwater before replacing Biden.
Harris has registered gains across a wide range of demographic categories, but the improvement has been especially pronounced among young voters, non-white voters and women voters. Taken together, the numbers suggest that the Harris swap has largely repaired a fraying Democratic coalition, has repaired the party’s image presidentially among independents, and has dragged the election back to a tossup, at the minimum. In short, she has managed to do something that every candidate can only dream of: appeal to her base without turning off swing voters.
What I draw from these results is that issues matter a lot less than what voters say. Voters seem to be reacting viscerally rather than analytically. They may be feeling that Harris brings with her energy and enthusiasm that Biden could not project, and thus has a better chance of winning. People tend to be enthused by the prospect of winning and this, more than issues, may be why Harris is doing so much better than Biden.
This is not to say that issues do not matter at all but that voters’s perceptions of where the candidates stand on issues that they are emotionally invested in have been baked in a long time ago. They know that Harris and the Democrats will seek to provide a more liberal social safety net, will support LGBTQ and women’s reproductive rights, and will protect minority rights, while creepy Trump and the GOP will seek to benefit the wealthy, deport immigrants, ban abortion, and discriminate against the LGBTQ community, especially the transgender community.
The lesson to be drawn is that what matters at this stage is not trying to win over voters from the other party or who say they are undecided but instead focus on identifying those who are leaning towards you and make sure they are registered to vote and encourage them vote early or make sure they go to the polls on election day. This so-called ‘ground game’ is more likely to provide rewards than trying to finely tune policies that seek to persuade the mythical undecided voter.
“…The lesson to be drawn”. I’m gonna stop you right there. The Democratic party does not do “lessons”. The legacy party bosses will do as they have done before. Did they adress the electoral college after Al Gore had the election stolen from him? Did they take measures to abolish the gerrymandering of districts? The whateveryoucall it when you need a supermajority to pass a vote in the senate?
Issues have mattered less with Trump in politics. With Trump in the election it’s reduced to support/oppose Trump. Only a few major issues matter and only for convincing people who already are right/left to get out and vote. Abortion for instance isn’t going to change which side anybody is on, but it is convincing a lot of women who otherwise avoid politics to vote. The same thing can be seen with build the wall back in 2016 for right wing types.
JM @2: … it is convincing a lot of women who otherwise avoid politics to vote.
And Trump does not like that.
Thom Hartmann/TNR: Trump’s Latest Scheme to Steal the Election: Let Congress Do It
With polarizing candidates issues matter very less. For the US, in general terms, the 2 party system more or less determines that a specific issue doesn’t matter much -- Even if Trump was not such a polarizing candidate and even if it was true that Trump is less inclined to start /interfere in other wars (one of his sole attribute that is better than the average democrat -- however that is nullified because of his temperament and susceptibility to his sycophants and admiration for fascist dictators) and even if that quality mattered greatly to a voter , you still couldn’t vote for him because of other parts of the conservative policies that he does support. Representative democracy always had this issue -- For issues to be important we need direct democracy in some form.
OT
I always wonder how you square posts like these with your views on choice/free will.
Deepak Shetty @4: We can make choices regardless of whether we make those choices in a way that can be called ‘free’. You can model a group of individuals that make choices based on inputs plus some noise factor. If the outcome looks similar enough to the outcome of individuals making choices in real life, what would it tell you?
What if the main issue is that one of the candidates is a convicted felon, fraud, and sex offender with advanced dementia, who is primarily running to avoid jail? Also, abortion rights.
I don’t know where this political scientist got the impression that Harris is under-performing.
One must compare apples to apples, if your comparison is to be statistically valid. The final election results are not known, so any underperforming is entirely due to flawed methodology.
I am weary of various pundits and pollsters acting like the 2020 election wasn’t a decisive victory for Biden, and characterizing this years as a dead heat.
Who the hell are they polling? Trolls on Twitter?
birgerjohansson @1: The best one can do about the electoral college is to get as many states as possible to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Possibly granting statehood to Puerto Rico might help -- they should have 4 electoral votes, but I’m not sure which way they’ll end up going.
As for redistricting, see Who Controlled Redistricting in Every State. It looks like the best Democrats can do in states where a Republican-controlled legislature does the redistricting is to get the state court to intervene. I am not sure how feasible this is.
A Canadian Prime Minister once infamously claimed that “Election campaigns are not the time to be discussing policy.”
Why don’t we inject a little empirical evidence into this?
There have been various schemes devised to forecast American presidential election outcomes. One of these is Lichtman’s “Keys to the White House”, which is purely heuristic rather than anything you’d call an actual model. Also, it works. It’s the most accurate forecasting scheme that we presently know of for this.
So, what do the thirteen “keys” actually measure?
Turns out, it’s not issues, per se.
Most of the keys (foreign policy success/failure, domestic policy success/failure, short-term and long-term economy, party unity, and third-party challenge) amount to various measures of “is the government screwing up?”, either directly (first six) or indirectly (primary or third-party challenges point to dissatisfaction with the status quo among the base and “swing” voters, respectively). Another, the “candidate is the incumbent President” key, amounts to “if the government isn’t already screwing up, is it likely to start?” — better the devil you know, in that case. The “major policy change” key dings a do-nothing government a point, while the “party mandate” key is a measure of longer-term dissatisfaction than the primary and third-party challenge ones, so another “is it screwing up?” test. The final two are the two parties’ leaders’ charismas.
So, that this works so well to predict outcomes points to what voters actually care about.
They care about the candidates’ charismas, and lean toward the more charismatic one, all other things being equal.
They don’t like a do-nothing government.
But most of all, the swing voters (who are mostly swinging between “vote my party” and “stay home” rather than between the two dominant parties) punish the governing party if it has screwed up, and reward it with another mandate if it has accomplished things without screwing up.
The upshot is: they care about “the issues” to precisely the extent that “the issues” factor into their judgment as to whether it has accomplished things and whether it has screwed up while trying. Mostly the latter.
@anat
Well , that is not the commonly understood meaning of choice. But in any case the theme of this post is what voters say, what they do , how they reason and make choices.
That I was working for Hari Seldon 🙂 ?
In any case that speaks more to predictability rather than the degree of freeness
@ ^
Off topic (again) but nobody has ever been able to explain to me how these things are different.
What test would you use to distinguish that which is unpredictable from that which is “free”? If there is no such test, on what basis can that which is unpredictable and that which is “free” be said to be different?
I’m sure that’s part of it, but they may also have been thinking (correctly in my view) that Biden is already markedly cognitively challenged, could not feasibly perform the functions of president until 2029, and so should not be running for president -- and as a result, feeling that the Democratic Party was insulting them by putting him forward.
Deepak Shetty @10:
Yes. People believe they make certain choices and believe they know why they make those choices. What experiments show us is that most(?) choices are made subconsciously and our conscious minds do not know how we came to make them. The reasons we give to our choices are after-the-fact justifications that our conscious minds come up with. Thus voters may claim they make their choices based on issues, but analysis shows other factors being involved. We are emotional animals with a little bit of rationality tacked on, and that rationality is not in the driver’s seat. This is a humbling thought which I am working on making peace with.
@KG, 12:
That’s unfair. If there was a Republican president, possibly. If Biden was VP to a President who’d already served two terms (and had embarrased them), again, possibly.
But he’s THE PRESIDENT. The Democratic party haven’t “put him forward” -- he’s literally doing the job. And by all rational accounts, doing it a hell of a lot better than the previous and possibly next guy, and pretty much as well as any of the last half dozen.
Good on them for pulling him back though. It seems to be working.
sonofrojblake@14,
No, the Democratic Party still had the choice to nominate him or not to continue doing the job. Admittedly, it’s both rare and difficult for a party to deselect a sitting president who can legally run again, but given Biden’s age, leading Democrats should have been impressing on him at least from the halfway mark that he should announce he would not run again. Anyone could have worked out that if he did, and won, he would be 86 at the end of his second term. It’s not ageist to say a man in his mid-80s should not be doing the most powerful, and among the hardest jobs in the world, it’s just realistic. And while Harris has done well, she does have the problems that she can’t move far from Biden’s policies, and hasn’t actually been chosen as presidential candidate in primaries. The polls have moved back toward Trump over the last week or so, suggesting that the initial excitement over her candidacy is fading. Let’s hope she wipes the floor with Trump tonight -- but the MSM will no doubt continue “sanewashing” him in any case.