Four Big Myths about the Election (Part II)
These wrong assumptions about the electorate distort our understanding of American politics.
This is the second installment in my series about what many people get wrong about the presidential election—and the country as a whole. Last week, I tackled two myths, arguing that it is a mistake to believe that demographic change will necessarily help Democrats, and suggesting that the class polarity in American politics may be inverting. Today, I tackle two more myths: the idea that there are barely any swing voters, and the oft-repeated mantra that America is one of the most polarized countries in the world.
Myth 3: There Are No Swing Voters
The Myth:
“Americans have had four years with Trump and four years without him. Everyone knows by now exactly what Donald Trump stands for, and they either support it or they don’t support it. The idea that at this point, in 2024, there’s anyone alive of legal voting age who is unsure whether or not they’re going to vote for Trump is absolutely absurd. No one is truly an ‘undecided voter.’”1
The Reality:
There are millions upon millions of partisans in the United States. These voters strongly support the red or the blue team, passionately identifying with their political party, and finding it inconceivable that they might change their mind. They provide the most reliable voting blocks for both Democrats and Republicans, and are vastly overrepresented among primary voters, in the ranks of political donors and activists, and among journalists. The majority of my friends and acquaintances fall into this category—as is likely the case for many Americans who have a graduate degree from an elite university and live on the coasts.
For those who, like me, live in such a partisan bubble, it can be inconceivable to imagine somebody who is genuinely undecided. Fifty years ago, Democrats and Republicans were not that far apart on many important ideological questions. In Congress, for example, Democrats and Republicans frequently used to vote the same way as members of the other party. Today, it’s extremely rare for members of either party to vote with the other side. The opinions, political styles and cultural allegiances of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump could hardly be more different. How can anyone hesitate between the two?
A big part of the answer comes from America’s electoral system, which effectively forces voters to make a binary choice between two different parties or candidates. It is aggravated by the primary system which hands control over who represents each party to a small and ideologically extreme fraction of the overall electorate.
The views and preferences of some Americans happen to align reasonably closely with one of these two choices; but millions of others feel that neither represents their ideas or their interests, making it unsurprising that many of them are truly conflicted about who to support. At the same time, swing voters don’t tend to be unsure of what they think about either the Democratic or the Republican candidate; in many cases, especially at the presidential level, they have strongly negative views about both.
This qualitative interpretation is backed up by numerous studies which consider indicators such as the number of Americans who changed which party they voted for in the presidential elections from one cycle to the next. And while the precise criteria that pollsters and political scientists use to identify swing voters vary, the headline findings tend to align reasonably well: On a loose interpretation, about 30 percent of voters consider themselves swing voters: they tend to say that they are politically moderate, tend to have negative opinions of both major party presidential candidates, and tend to claim that they are undecided about who to vote for until very close to election day.
Closer analysis reveals that about half of this electorate is not genuinely persuadable: While they don’t love either of the candidates, they acknowledge that there’s one of the two that they can’t imagine voting for; asked about past voting behavior, it turns out that, if they vote at all, they reliably supported the other candidate’s party. Let’s call them “fake swing voters.”
But the other half of this electorate is different. These voters say that they really are open to voting for either candidate. Their past voting behavior tends to tell the same story: these are the kinds of voters who may have voted for Obama in 2012, for Trump in 2016, and for Biden in 2020—or, for that matter, for Romney in 2012, for Clinton in 2016, and for Trump in 2020. While there is some disagreement about the exact quantity of these voters, all serious studies suggest that their number is significant: the New York Times says that they make up 18 percent of the electorate; KFF puts their number at 16 percent; Data for Progress, using a methodology designed to exclude more “fake” swing voters, puts their share at 14 percent. These are real swing voters—and their vote remains decisive.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 48.2% and Donald Trump 46.1% of the vote. In 2020, Joe Biden won 51.3% of the vote and Donald Trump 46.8%. In each of these elections, the electoral college was even more close-run: both times, less than a hundred thousand votes across a few key states made the difference between victory and defeat. With elections this close-run, it is of course important for political parties to mobilize their base. But if a few percentage points make or break a candidate, and around fifteen percent of the electorate is genuinely up for grabs, it’s obvious lunacy to dismiss the importance of swing voters.2
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Myth 4: America Is One of the Most Polarized Countries in the World
The Myth:
“America is deeply and dangerously polarized. Two blocks of Americans implacably oppose each other. Every election pits these two halves of the country against each other. This puts the United States in the company of countries like Kenya, Lebanon, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Since such persistently and perniciously polarized countries have rarely healed without a major catastrophe, the prospects for a return to relative normalcy are slim.”
The Reality:
There is no doubt that America is polarized. Nor is there any doubt that this is a serious problem. The extent of mutual distrust and hatred between the parties helps to explain why Washington is so dysfunctional; how core political norms have given way to constitutional hardball and a lack of mutual forbearance; and why political violence, from an unprecedented attack on Congress to recent assassination attempts on Donald Trump, now looms over the country as an ever-present threat.
Most Americans have strong views about which party or political personality is most to blame for the current state of affairs. (So do I.) But even those who disagree about the precise causes of the phenomenon should be able to recognize the cost it now exerts.
And yet, comparisons to the kinds of perniciously polarized countries that opinion writers and political scientists alike have started to make over the past years are fundamentally misguided. What characterizes “deeply divided societies” like Kenya, Lebanon or Bosnia-Herzegovina is not just that levels of partisan animosity are very high, with supporters of one political grouping strongly disliking supporters of another political grouping; it is also that supporters of one political block tend to share stable identity markers that barely change over time. They are defined by ethnic, religious or cultural characteristics that persist over long periods, ensuring that a voter’s allegiance in the polarized political system is very likely to be passed on to their children and even their grandchildren.
In many cases, these lines of political division map onto a whole universe of social or even governmental institutions. In Lebanon, laws governing education and marriage are determined by leaders of the country’s constitutive ethno-religious communities; the laws that apply to you vary depending on whether you are Shia, Sunni, or Christian. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, there are separate fire departments made up of mainly Catholic Croat or mainly Muslim firefighters, each serving one of the two historically-divided communities. By some accounts, in some places, they will not respond to a fire in the other community.
America simply is nothing like that. Yes, the levels of partisan animosity are dangerously high. But Americans continue to sustain a shared set of political and social institutions. They have corporations and schools and fire departments that serve both Democrats and Republicans. More importantly, the lines of political division are constantly in flux. A significant number of individual Americans change political allegiances over the course of their lives; one study shows that 9 percent of Americans did so over the two-year span from 2018 to 2020 alone. Similarly, most Americans have at least some close associates who vote for a different political party; according to a 2018 survey, 43 percent of voters said that “their friends and loved ones represent an even mix of both Democrats and Republicans”; only about one in five said that they almost exclusively associated with members of one party. That “crazy uncle” at your Thanksgiving table whose politics are fundamentally different from yours is a well-trodden cultural trope in part because so many Americans are confronted with some version of him at regular intervals. He simply would not exist if America really was a “deeply divided” society.
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Polarization in America is real and it is damaging. Increasingly, I get the sense that it doesn’t just pose political problems; it hangs over the country’s culture like a menacing cloud. But that makes it all the more important to insist on an accurate assessment of it. To compare America to some of the most deeply divided societies in the world—and to conclude from that overwrought metaphor that the country cannot be reconciled, or is about to slide into civil war—is a fundamental mistake.
(If you want to know more about why I believe the prospect of civil war to be vastly overhyped, check out the inaugural mailbag episode of my podcast—a new monthly feature in which I answer reader questions—and be sure to subscribe to my podcast.)
The four myths I have discussed in this piece add up to a conventional narrative whose overall shape dominates political thinking about America. But that conventional narrative is fundamentally wrong. Next week, in the third and final installment of this series about the U.S. election, I will explain what new picture of American politics emerges once we reassemble the changed puzzle pieces.
This is all the more true because swing voters are, for purely arithmetic reasons, twice as valuable: a partisan whom you manage to mobilize gains you an additional margin of one vote; a swing voter who considered voting for your opponent gains you an additional margin of two votes.
On a separate note, swing voters aren’t just an important force in politics; they are also rather different than journalists who do acknowledge their existence like to imagine. Left-leaning journalists tend to believe that undecided voters are young, non-white progressives who believe that mainstream candidates are too moderate for their tastes. Meanwhile, more centrist journalists tend to believe that undecided voters are older and affluent Americans who crave a candidate who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative. (Tellingly, the one thing that both of those imaginary groups have in common is that they would most likely be recruited from the ranks of high-information voters with strong ideological preferences.) But for the most part, swing voters don’t tend to fit either of these descriptions: studies consistently show that they are disproportionately young, non-white, and politically moderate. In terms of ideology, they tend to skew left on economics but right on culture.
The partisans are blind to their own faults. My Democratic Party friends invited my wife and I to a « meet the candidate » soirée during the last election. I believe that they wanted NPAs there. I liked the candidate. She had an engineering degree and shared many of my most important concerns. She seemed sincerely open minded and willing to listen. I immediately thought « I can vote for her. »
During her presentation she explained that she needed 100% of Democrats and 50% of independents. She went on to explain that independents were concerned about defunding the police, trans ideology in schools, inflation, the environment (water,air, uncontrolled growth), immigration and so forth.
The Party ideologues angrily shouted her down. None if these things were real anywhere and the only real threat was Trump and evil Republicans. I kept all of my questions to myself and this nice, thoughtful woman retreated to Republican bashing. Her target audience never had the chance to hear her ideas. I wanted to get away from those people as fast as possible. She got creamed in the election.
I am sure that the same thing happens in majority Democratic districts.
The parties are filled with corrupt ideologues. They pass bills to enrich themselves and their families at the expense of their country and communities. Partisans only see problems on the imaginary « other side. » They deny reality, especially their own faults.
I miss the WWII generation. Now, we are all victims of the partisan spoils system controlled by private political parties. The Democratic Party prevented me from voting in the primary by giving me a preordained single choice. The last Republican challenger dropped out before the primaries in my state. Normal people with executive experience are demonized by our major news outlets that speak with one shallow voice. Nothing good can come from this.
I prefer the French system to our own. At least I could have voted for any number of competent candidates at least once. Joining a party today means aligning oneself with the anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, and increasingly antisemitic forces.
I may be wrong, but I don’t hear many comparisons of our problems to Kenya, Lebanon, or Bosnia-Herzewhatever. It was interesting to learn of these, but I think mostly we compare Now to Before. And I think the shift is not so much on policy as in what your science calls affective polarization — seeing the other side as immoral or detesting them.
The Democrats view of Republican immorality did this: 35% (2016), 47% (2019), 63% (2022). While the Republicans reciprocated with 47% (2016), 55% (2019), 72% (2022). Where’s that going?
OK, the super-polarized countries are characterized by ethnic, religious or cultural divisions, to me that sounds pretty familiar: Attitudes toward Blacks & Jews, Born-agains, and a 60-year culture war.
While I agree we are nowhere near Civil-War levels, I would have liked to hear more about how CRT/Identity Politics (our side of the culture war) is stoking this.
Personally, I’m not so worried about where we are as where we are going. My political epiphany came in 1972 (50 years ago, when you say we were not so polarized). After 8 years of Black Power (proto-CRT), McGovern admitted I opened the doors to the Party and 20 million people walked out (40% of Dems were lost); talk about swing voters.
I think you’re right, that affective polarization was not as bad. I love learning from Persuasion, but I do wish we were building that fighting community you talked about at the start.