Fewer And Fewer People Are Seeing Themselves As Democrats Or Republicans
Zach Shrewsbury is the progressive Democrat running for the West Virginia Senate seat where his opponents will probably be current conservative political powerhouses Joe Manchin (D) and Jim Justice (R). That’s some steep hill to climb! Yesterday he told me that “If the Democrats ever want to win back rural America they have to actually engage in the long serious conversations that working class Americans need. People want to be heard and want their issues addressed and they don’t care what party does it at the end of the day. I’ve had a lot of success in talking to rural voters because I listen and help craft solutions while amplifying the problems. Rural America doesn’t hear from Democrats; they only hear from the Republicans on Fox News or local media whose only talking points are socially charged fear mongering issues as they dodge any serious conversation to address infrastructure, jobs, schools and so on.”
He just officially launched his campaign this month but he’s been working on contacting voters for a year. Please consider helping him continue doing that here. “Democrats have to engage in the long conversation,” he continued. “The candidates themselves have to go door to door not just send a surrogate. People want to be heard and working class America is suffering. Get out and do the work and quit playing it safe in the city bubble. Change and victory will never happen if the party continues to surrender in rural America and allow the right wing to espouse their views unchallenged.”
Yesterday, another Zach, Politico reporter Zach Montellaro suggested Democrats would do better in rural areas if they follow Kansas Democrat Laura Kelly’s example and hold off on the identity politics and social issues a bit and concentrate on voters’ economic concerns instead. She was elected governor twice in a state where Trump won both times. Hillary took just 37.7% in 2016 (and won 2 counties of the state’s 105) and Biden won just 41.5% (and 5 counties). Kelly won 9 counties in 2018 and 8 in 2022.
Hillary Clinton (2016)- 427,005
Laura Kelly (2018)- 506,727
Joe Biden (2020)- 570,323
Laura Kelly (2022)- 499,849
Kelly emphasizes that Democrats need to lose by less in rural areas if they want to win statewide in rural states (like Kansas, Montana, West Virginia) and in states with strong urban bases and strong rural bases (like Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida…). Montellaro wrote that “Kelly’s playbook is in some ways the antithesis of the national political moment: Avoid culture war fights, focus on local economic issues, and spend a lot of time talking to the wheat and soybean farmers you know mostly won’t vote for you. The latest test of Democrats’ rural efforts comes next week. Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear also needs to run back a win in a red-leaning state and is facing down a similar challenge that Kelly did two years ago: Republicans in the state are relentlessly trying to nationalize the race, invoking Biden and hot-button cultural issues to try to drag down a popular incumbent… In Kansas, Kelly improved on Joe Biden’s 2020 blowout loss margin in every one of Kansas’ 105 counties. She overperformed most in rural areas of the state, giving her just enough cushion to squeeze past her Republican challenger.”
By emphasizing toxic identity politics plus the kinds of divisive social issues Fox and Hate Talk radio hammer away at 24-7, Democrats have missed opportunities to identify with working families on economic and personal financial issues. It’s been nothing short of catastrophic, especially in the Senate. Part of the problem, Kelly said, is how Democrats get dragged into constant culture war fights like transgender rights or abortion policy. “She still cares about these issues, she said, but avoids them on the stump, even when Republicans sought to bog her down in them. ‘When you go out to rural Kansas, they are not talking about all of the divisive social issues,’ Kelly said. ‘What’s on their mind is are you going to fund my schools? Or are you going to build my roads, fix my roads?’ The most frequently aired GOP ad during the midterms was one that said Kelly ‘opposed common sense efforts to ban men from competing against girls in high school sports.’ Kelly has vetoed anti-LGBTQ bills, both before and after the 2022 election, and she supports abortion rights. But she didn’t make any of that central to her campaign. Recalling her time as a state legislator, she said she might ‘vote in a way that might spark some flames, but I would never be throwing them.’… [Her reelection effort touted] a budget surplus and fully funding schools— a central plank of her campaign that she said resonates with rural voters.”
After talking with Shewsbury, I decided to go back and re-read a the 2019 cover story by Kirsten Weir in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Applied Psychology, Politics Is Personal. After Trump’s 2016 victory political psychologists had a lot of research to jump into. One, Dr. Christopher Federico, a political psychologist at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota, told Weir that Trump’s election may have been an anomaly in many ways, but it wasn’t the “unexpected asteroid strike” it’s often made out to be. “Trump’s election was the culmination of a trend, more than some radical unexpected disruption that occurred on November 8, 2016. It resulted from a long period of evolution in terms of how and why people in the U.S. identify with different political parties.”
Weir wrote that “Polarization may be the defining feature of American politics in 2019. It’s not just politicians fighting across the aisle. The general public, too, shows growing antipathy toward those in the opposite political camp. In 1960, only 4% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans said they would be disappointed if their child married someone from the opposite political party… By 2018, 45% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans reported they’d be unhappy if their child did the same.” I bet those numbers are a lot higher today.
Weir noted that a lot of political polarization and hostility can be traced back to “the modern media environment,” in other words, companies after profits. ‘Once there were three networks that saw it as their responsibility to cover the news events in an objective way. Then people realized they could cover the news in such a way that they could turn a profit,’ says political psychologist John Jost, PhD, co-director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. Today, we have partisan cable news networks and clickbait ‘news’ websites that feed off of political disagreement. ‘They’re making money by energizing polarized audiences,’ Jost says. Though the media arguably turns up the volume on partisan conflict, that doesn’t explain why American voters sort themselves so readily into opposing groups.”
But that’s far from the whole answer. Leonie Huddy from Stony Brook University, and Alexa Bankert from the University of Georgia wrote about how “Social identity theory holds that a person’s self-concept is based on their membership within a group, whether one’s group is defined by a religious affiliation, political party, gender, propensity to support a particular baseball team— or, sometimes, all of the above. As soon as you identify as a member of one group or another, it influences how you think about the world. ‘You like members of that group more than others. You want things to reflect favorably upon your group. You’re biased toward believing things that reflect positively on your group,’ says Federico. ‘Once you’re a member of a group, all kinds of group processes related to social identity kick in.’ In the United States, political affiliation is a strong driver of political behavior, as Huddy and Bankert describe. On the positive side, they write, citizens who identify as strongly Republican or Democrat are more likely to vote and participate in politics. On the other hand, when partisan citizens become angry about politics, they are less influenced by information and less likely to support bipartisan politicians who reach across the aisle to find compromise— a stance that can drive politics in a more extreme direction. One feature of group identity is that people want to protect and promote their own groups. As a result, partisan identity makes us more accepting of information that supports our beliefs and more critical of information that contradicts them. Most psychologists agree that people engage in this tendency, known as motivated reasoning or motivated cognition.
Researchers are beginning to understand the nuances of the ways group identity influences our political choices. Before the 2016 election, Briony Swire-Thompson, PhD, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues asked participants to rate their belief in factual and inaccurate statements Trump made during the campaign. As motivated cognition would predict, Republican participants were more likely to believe the statements if they were attributed to Trump, and less likely to believe them if they were presented without attribution. The opposite pattern was true for Democrats. But Trump voters didn’t accept their candidate’s statements blindly. When inaccurate statements by Trump were presented along with notes that indicated they had been retracted as misinformation, Trump supporters were less likely to believe them— at least initially. After a week, however, participants began to “rebelieve” the misinformation, reverting to their initial assumptions, the authors found. Ultimately, being told the statements were inaccurate had no effect on participants’ voting preferences (Royal Society Open Science, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2017).
Motivated reasoning can help explain how people on opposite ends of the political spectrum can have such different views of the world. Another theory, known as system justification, describes people’s tendency to defend and justify the status quo— even when it means supporting politicians or policies that appear to be at odds with their own self-interest.
“People are motivated to defend and justify aspects of the status quo because they are part of the status quo,” says Jost, who developed the theory with Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, PhD (British Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1994). System justification seems to have played a role in support for Trump, Jost says, with people motivated to support a traditional American way of life—a theme made plain in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.”
To explore how system justification may have factored into Trump’s success, Jost and colleagues analyzed responses from a nationally representative sample of Americans surveyed shortly before the 2016 election. The researchers found that justification of economic and gender-based disparities in society was strongly associated with support for Trump. But after adjusting for economic and gender-related variables, system justification overall was associated with support for Hillary Clinton. In other words, Trump’s victory seems to not only represent a rejection of the status quo of liberal government that existed under President Barack Obama, but also an embrace of the traditional social systems that maintain disparities in wealth and gender, the authors conclude (Translational Issues in Psychological Science, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2017).
“There are interesting differences in what aspects of the status quo people want to change or to preserve,” Jost says.
For decades, political psychologists have explored why we are drawn to the views and values of one party over another. Examining data from more than 200 such studies from around the world, Jost and colleagues explored the relationship between political ideology and multiple categories of motivation, including dogmatism, personal need for order and structure, and tolerance for uncertainty. Across studies, conservatives score higher than liberals on tests of dogmatic thinking and cognitive rigidity. To a lesser degree, conservatives also have higher needs for order and structure. Liberals tend to have a higher tolerance for uncertainty and a greater need for cognition, which researchers measured with statements such as “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours” (Political Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2017).
Jost’s research also suggests that a preference for authoritarian leadership styles is associated with Republicans— and with support for Trump in particular. Since at least the 1960s, research has shown that voters who prefer authoritarian styles are more likely to favor Republican presidential candidates, and 2016 was no different. But Jost and his colleagues wondered how that preference might describe voters who favored Trump over other Republican primary candidates.
They found that Trump supporters scored higher than other Republican supporters on two particular facets of authoritarianism: authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance (that is, a preference for group-based social hierarchies). These voters were more likely to support statements asserting that the country needs more law and order and that some groups are naturally inferior to others (Womick, J., et al., Social Psychology and Personality Science, Vol. 10, No. 5, 2019).
Over the past three decades, Americans who are high in authoritarianism have increasingly shifted into the Republican Party, Federico says. Many left-leaning authoritarians have responded by becoming less politically engaged, he and his colleagues found—paying less attention to politics and choosing not to vote, for example (The Journal of Politics, Vol. 79, No. 3, 2017).