Member Newsletter
I’ve had a few of you take me to task recently for writing so much about polls. I’ll take that under advisement, though I hear from many readers that they like those posts. The reality is that most political people follow polls closely, even if they wish they didn’t, and they want insights into just what they mean and how to interpret them. But today I want to discuss something a bit different, albeit still somewhat adjacent to polls. That is, what’s with the Democrats’ tendency to freak out, even in the face of the most limited kinds of disappointing news in polls or other markers of campaign performance?
We’ve discussed this phenomenon from various perspectives in recent years. But, big picture, why does this happen? Why do Democrats freak out like this?
Maybe it’s not everyone. Maybe not you. But there’s no question that as a national community, as one of the country’s two large political factions/coalitions, this is a thing. I’ve observed this in various ways going back roughly 25 years: regardless of the eventual outcome of a campaign, Democrats are almost always worried they’re going to lose the race while Republicans are all but certain they’re going to win. This is a consistent pattern more or less unconnected to the objective indicators. The same reality is embedded in campaign fundraising emails. Most Democratic ones could be summarized as “all hope is lost; send money for us to have any chance” while most Republican ones are essentially “send more money for us to destroy the bad people.” We see it in campaign tactics. It’s pretty common, especially at the presidential level, for Republican campaigns to claim they’re headed for a runaway victory as a way to overawe and demoralize their Democratic opponents. Again, it would simply never work for Democrats to try the same for reasons that are probably obvious.
I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this year there are some additional and more rational reasons for concern. One is simply the stakes of this election. Trump already showed us who he was as President and the current version of the man is more focused on vengeance and more prepared, largely through a more built-up cadre of lieutenants, to exact that revenge. There’s also the unforgettable fact that Donald Trump has twice over-performed the polls. Why would we think it couldn’t happen again? But with all of this, over the last four or five days a very fractional shift in campaign polls convinced a lot of Democrats that Kamala Harris had botched her campaign and was headed toward defeat. By way of comparison, consider that the Trump campaign spent almost the entirety of the 2020 race behind by between five and ten points and it never seemed to occur to Republicans that they’d lose. 2016 was at least a bit similar. There’s clearly a difference between these two groups.
We all know this pattern. But what’s at the root of it? I don’t think we’re imagining or exaggerating it. I’m not sure this pattern applies to Democrats individually, certainly not all of them. But it certainly applies collectively, the way doom and gloom ricochets around the Democratic interwebs and the press generally, leading to these collective freakouts. It’s real. And the cause, I think, is right in front of us.
Republican Party authoritarianism didn’t start with Trump and it’s not even precisely rooted in ideology, though obviously the two are closely related. Forty years ago Americans with authoritarian views about politics were fairly evenly divided between the two parties. Then that started to change. Authoritarian Americans began to migrate into the Republican Party. Those with non-authoritarian political views migrated into the Democratic Party. There’s very good political science research on this — starting with the pioneering work of Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler. They literally wrote a book about it. The importance of this fact for the rise of Trumpism is pretty clear. But we’ve focused less on what that means on the other side of the ledger.
This change led to a Democratic Party that is deeply identified at home and abroad with civic democracy and the rule of law. This is an, above all, rules-based way of thinking, a process-based way of approaching and litigating societal problems. People in the Democratic political coalition also tend to be more empirically minded. That is almost certainly why higher levels of educational attainment have become such a predictor of political identity in the U.S.
Of course, not everyone lives up to these concepts, either individually or collectively. Democrats have unquestioned beliefs in need of questioning, sacred cows and so forth. But as broad ways of understanding themselves and looking at the world there’s little doubt that these capture the defining characteristics of the two dominant political communities in the United States — one centered on power and certainty, another centered on process and … well, doubt.
When we talk about civic democracy, a rules-based order, empiricism, the one thing that unites them all is doubt. The basis of civic democracy is the recognition that it’s not always clear who will be right and the sobering realization that your group won’t always be in power. Again, contingency, doubt. Empiricism and the scientific method have a whole paraphernalia of tools and methods of thinking behind them. But the fundamental premise is that all knowledge is contingent, subject to more information.
To many of us these are just wise, enlightened and proper ways of approaching the world. You won’t get any argument from me. But we don’t gravitate toward certain ideologies over others based merely on rational analysis. They appeal or don’t appeal to people with certain mindsets which are based on experience, upbringing, certain kinds of acculturation. Those worldviews in turn shape ideology, “mindset,” political identity and so forth. It’s no surprise that the kind of electoral/political sorting we’re describing would create one community with an overflow of these tendencies just as Republicans have an overflow of focus on power, certainty and even violence. What this all comes down to, I believe, is that this tendency to catastrophize and prepare for the worst is simply the flip side or the underbelly of the same traits Democrats are proudest of, the ones most central to how American Democrats understand themselves and what they value. It doesn’t lead to it inevitably. It may not lead to it individually. But it creates enough of a tendency to explain why as groups the two political coalitions operate as they do.
At one level it is what it is. You can’t take the good without the bad. But on an individual level it should be a spur to develop a bit more resilience.