Elections in
America have moved from being contests about persuading people to vote for you
into contests about getting supporters to the polls. What it means to identify
as a member of a political party is to vote for its candidate. In 2012, 92% of
Democrats voted for President Obama and 93% of Republicans voted for Mitt Romney,
according to the exit polls. A presidential candidate needs at least 90% of partisans
to even be in the ball game. (This does change somewhat in a multi-candidate
field, allowing the winning partisan number to drift below half.)
Hillary
Clinton has some problems on the furthest left of her party, which might not be
fixable and may cost her a considerable number of votes. But if you are looking
for big names to add to that defection rate, there really aren’t any. Beyond Cornell
West supporting the Green Party’s Jill Stein, basically no one who was a high-profile
Sanders supporter is aiding her effort.
When it
comes to Donald Trump, however, the number of Republicans who are either
outright backing Clinton or refusing to support Trump is growing nearly every day.
While each individual endorsement is not particularly important, together they
send a clear signal that Trump is not an ordinary Republican and supporting
Clinton is socially acceptable.
College
educated white women constitute the key group now helping Clinton and expanding
the Obama coalition. Every Meg Whitman who says she is voting for Clinton and
every Susan Collins who says she can’t vote for Trump helps to further solidify
this voting block behind Clinton. One of the more interesting things to watch is
that so far Trump has not hit either of them. Most likely that’s not because he
wouldn’t want to. It may be that his staff kept both statements from him. The
statements appeared primarily in print rather than on twitter or the internet so
it is plausible Trump doesn’t even know what was said.
Trump needs
to figure out a strategy for effectively shutting down or punishing defectors.
Without such a strategy, defectors will continue to normalize supporting
Clinton or opposing Trump amongst a subset of voters he can’t afford to lose. In
the modern era of polarization, defectors are a giant thorn in Trump’s side.
0 comments:
Post a Comment