« Cars | Main | On the Road Again »

June 12, 2006

MinMaxing Politics

Steve Benen, who stood in for Kevin Drum while he was on vacation last week, closed out his week by noting the appearance of six separate articles in the Washington Post with some advice for Democrats as the November elections approach. With so much advice, it's unsurprising that much of it is contradictory, and the assessment of the Democrats runs the gamut from believing they're in better shape than they realize to thinking they're about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again. I personally hope that the Democrats will be able to at least take the House, as regular readers are aware, but I think that their chances are slim based simply on the degree of gerrymandering that has taken place in House districts over the past 25 years. Last week's race in the California 50th District was illustrative of that: the former representative is in prison for graft. So many Republicans ran to replace him that the initial election saw the man with less than 20% of the vote going on to the runoff, and he barely slipped past a challenger of ho-hum credentials and an unfortunate tendency to misspeak on the rostrum. But the district is designed to be Republican, and so it came through in the end. These are the kinds of problems the Democrats are going to have to overcome over and over again if they're to take the House, and if they fail it will hardly be indicative of their snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

What makes politics particularly tricky is that there's no good way to maximize gains. How many issues go into a political campaign? Dozens, if not hundreds? For national elections, there are questions on national security, economics, civil liberties, pork, immigration, and many other topics. And every voter weights those categories differently. If you decide to campaign as strong on national security, you lose voters among the civil libertarians. Push for a hard line on immigration and you may alienate as many voters as you gain. The quest for 50%+1 votes is a constant struggle to calibrate your positions to appeal to the broadest possible slice of the electorate without undermining your core beliefs. And even after the election is over, it's difficult to know what the deciding factor was. In the 2004 Presidential election, values voters cited their strong showing in exit polls as proof they had returned President Bush to the White House. But national security voters could have a strong claim to that title as well, for there were many voters who preferred Kerry's domestic policies but believed President Bush was the better candidate to fight the war. Ultimately, it was a combination of those factors that secured President Bush's victory, as it is in every election, and finding that balance is as much a matter of luck as of skill.

I'm reminded of these kinds of problems from the opposite direction in reading Jim Henley's assessment of Russ Feingold as a Presidential candidate. His position as gutter of the First Amendment might normally make him wholly unacceptable to a libertarian, but let's face it, McCain-Feingold is law today thanks to a whole host of culprits, not least of which being the current occupant of the White House, and Feingold is otherwise strong on civil liberties. Just as politicians seek to tune their positions to appeal to the broadest slice of the electorate, voters must calibrate their desires with the facts on the ground: unless you're the guy running for office, you have to vote for someone who will do some things you don't like. So you look for the guy who will do the least damage, or who is best on a particular issue you consider most important. (And you keep your eyes out for another danger: that the party you're hoping will resolve some of the problems you've seen over the past five years doesn't instead continue those policies and compound them with their own bad ideas.)

Certainly I could give the Democrats plenty of advice. And it would be rock-solid, as far as it goes: if they followed it, I would vote for them for sure. However, in a country of 100 million voters, they probably can't afford to go too far in any one person's direction. (Which is why interest group politics is so important these days.) What I can't do is give them advice good enough to guarantee them success in November, and I suspect none of the six authors in yesterday's Post can do so either. But it does promise to be an entertaining few months leading up to the election.