American politics isn’t about information, it’s about ideology
In the ongoing saga of “what are swing voters going to do in November?,” the Guardian is conducting a series on three counties in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan that flipped from Obama to Trump. From Howard County, Iowa:
The voters who migrated from Barack Obama to Trump in the county on Iowa’s border with Minnesota were among nearly 8 million across the US who switched parties four years ago. In swing states such as Iowa they were decisive in delivering the White House to the Republicans.
Shaffer is confident that Trump can win their support again. He argues that what the president’s opponents see as his negatives — his litany of false claims, Twitter battles and impeachment — will only strengthen a presidential campaign again built around the image of the outsider fighting the system.
These people didn’t vote for Obama because he represented progress, they voted for him because, during a time of high cynicism and low morale, he represented reconstruction and good feeling. He promised everything and required nothing. Except decency. The problem with decency is that it isn’t really politics, it’s presentation. Veneer. It doesn’t confront you with a deeper understanding of social problems or a deeper understanding of the potential of democratic solutions. As the years drone on, decency isn’t as inspiring as it seems. Once people have their fill, they want power. The most incredible part of this article is its reminder that, in a coveted reversal of how American politics typically functions, swing voters wanted Trump when Trump didn’t even want Trump:
One problem Shaffer won’t have to face this year is the indifference of a Trump campaign that never really seemed to believe it could win four years ago. In 2016, the GOP county chair struggled to get hold even of basic campaign material to meet an unexpected demand for Vote Trump yard signs that were an early indication he was going to do better than predicted.
“I had to go to a local sign store and have them design a sign and pay for it,” he said.
The countless hours and dollars that the Obama campaign spent on ground game were an afterthought for Trump. Why did he enjoy such a luxury? My theory is that people vote based on ideology which means they vote based on assumptions about reality and imaginations about world they want to live in. Voting is, at bottom, an emotional and idealistic enterprise. Policy matters, but it’s interpreted through a lens of normative beliefs that may or may not have any factual basis. Identification with someone who desires the same reality and conveys the same sense of urgency about that reality coming to fruition is what electoral politics is all about. Shaffer, the Howard County GOP chair, continued to discuss voting for Trump, despite being “disturbed” by his racism, in terms of having similar feelings about “the system”:
Shaffer agrees that many voters are looking for less confrontational leadership and acknowledges that Trump is not the man to calm things down.
“That’s going to be the battle. Trump thinks the system’s a problem whereas Buttigieg or Biden are going to say the system can fix the problems. It’s a whole different way of looking at how to solve problems,” he said.
Which has left Shaffer torn because both appeal to him in their way. He, like many Americans, wants to see politicians work together but he also wants significant changes to the system.
In the end, the only thing that was able to shift the perspective of one potential swing voter drawn to the ideological force of Trump’s promise to re-assert power and reactionary conception of what it meant to change the system was a stronger ideological force — the fact of her blackness:
In 2016, she toyed with voting for Trump because she liked his promise to shake up the system and his business-oriented policies.
“When Trump first came on the scene, I’m like, hell, yeah,” said Gosch who moved to the county capital, Cresco, five years ago for her husband to work in his family’s plumbing business. “Then he started talking about the wall and calling all Mexican people criminals. And I’m just like, wait a minute, I’m brown.”
Gosch, who is mixed African American and Aborigine, is struck by “how emboldened people are because the president is emboldening” of racism. Her children are biracial and she describes them as looking more Latino than black. After other pupils saw Gosch at the school gates in Cresco, a 97% white city, they started racially abusing her daughter who is now 14.
