Persuasion and Partisanship
When is it okay to abandon your party in an era of existential-threat rhetoric?
This morning’s dog-walk listening was the latest FiveThirtyEight politics podcast, available in video form here:
As you might well expect, this was mostly about Raphael Warnock’s victory in the Georgia run-off where he won re-election to the Senate. This gets Democrats a 51st seat, which means VP Kamala Harris can spend a little more time with her family and less time waiting around the Capitol to break tie votes.
As befits 538, this discussion is fairly wonky and stats-oriented, which is why I listen, but even here there was a little bit of a pundit staple that I find a frustrating. Warnock’s victory is unquestionably good for Democrats and the coutnry as a whole, but left-leaning commentators are never ones to take good news lying down, so there was a nearly instant surge of “Yes, but why was the margin so small?”
Which is to some degree understandable, as Herschel Walker was an astonishingly terrible candidate, with a disreputable past and a dubious present, who looked profoundly unsuited to the role of US Senator. This should’ve been a romp for Warnock.
At least, that’s what I would say, as a lifelong Democrat. But Republicans in Georgia obviously didn’t feel that way, because they voted for him in large enough numbers for the result to still be in doubt on Tuesday morning. To be sure, a fair number of them didn’t find Walker acceptable— enough that he lost on election day by a point when every other Republican running for state-wide office won solid majorities, and lost by close to three points in the run-off. But the number of people who either voted a split ticket or abstained in the Senate race was not large. Which is being held up as evidence of the bone-deep corruption of the Republican party, and evidence that Republican voters are innately terrible.
I find this argument frustrating because it’s unfair to Warnock and his campaign. What he did was actually remarkable: he ran well ahead of every other Democrat standing for statewide office, and deserves credit for that. It’s particularly galling because a lot of the same people who are upset that Warnock didn’t run up a bigger lead spent the days before the election dismissing his efforts at persuading moderate voters, which seem pretty clearly to be the reason he won while Stacy Abrams and her turn-out-the-base stragtegy got housed. If only he had been unafraid to stake out more vocally left-wing positions and not cater to those problematic suburbanites, why he… could also have lost on Election Day and spared us a few weeks of run-off coverage.
But I think it’s also a little unfair to Republicans in Georgia (though only a little). Given the temperature of all discourse around politics these days, where absolutely every vote is presented as THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN OUR LIFETIMES, a last chance to stand up against existential threats to Our Way of Life, it’s a miracle anybody splits a ticket. If you’re being told over and over that The Other Party is implacably opposed to all that is right and good, why would you ever vote for one of those candidates? Or even fail to vote for your party’s candidate, even if he does appear visibly addled?
Now, to be clear, I think that those Republicans are wrong about the stakes, here— Democratic control of the Senate does not pose any meaningful threat to the nation as a whole. I personally think it’s a Good Thing, and that the Democrats will be dramatically better than the Republicans on the whole, but even beyond that, I don’t think there’s any plausible case that letting them run things is going to tip us into disaster. But at the same time, this is absolutely what those voters have been told, and what many of them believe— that a vote for the Republicans is the last defense against chaos and collapse. In light of that, why would you think they would switch, even as terrible as Walker is?
For the record, I’m also a bit skeptical of a lot of the analogous claims from the Democratic side about the existential threat of Republican governance. I find them more plausible than the Republican claims, to be sure, especially after the January 6 attacks, but I think a lot of what’s said is wildly overheated. I would very much prefer not to have the Federalist Society hand-picking judges to run roughshod over everything, thanks very much, but I don’t think the current moment is quite as apocalyptic as is often made out. That said, I have no intention of not voting straight ticket Democratic in every election for the forseeable future.
And at some level, that’s the question implicitly raised by the Warnock vs. Walker contest: Given the stakes of these elections, at what level of scandal would you be willing to abandon your party’s candidate? Is there something that could’ve been revealed about Warnock that would’ve made you say “You know what, that’s a bridge too far, let the Republicans have the seat”?
The obvious response here is to say “Well, I simply would not have run a barking lunatic for the seat…” but that’s cheap and glib. Or if you want to take the manifest awfulness of Herschel Walker out of this, let’s make it about a different candidate. Is there any revelation about Catherine Cortez Masto that would’ve been enough to justify Democrats in Nevada voting against her and tipping the balance in the Senate in favor of the Republicans? Her opponent was far less awful than Walker, basically a replacement-level Republican, but the national-level stakes would’ve been the same. What would the scandal threshold be for abandoning her?
Or if you want to be even more concrete, look at the 2020 Senate race in North Carolina. Democrat Cal Cunningham lost narrowly in a race that was shaken up late by revelations that he had had an affair. If you look at the vote totals, Joe Biden got 115,000 more votes for President than Cunningham got for Senate, and if all those voters had voted Cunningham, we would’ve been spared the last two years of a 50-50 split in the Senate. Some of those non-voters were presumably put off by Cunningham’s affair— was that okay?
(There were also 94,000 more North Carolinians voting for Trump than for Cunningham’s opponent, Thom Tillis, so the scandal isn’t the whole story, here. But you get the point, I hope…)
So, yeah, Warnock’s margin was smaller than I would’ve liked. Walker should’ve been sent packing at the primary stage, and the fact that he wasn’t speaks ill of the folks who vote in the Republican primary. But once that choice was set, in this era of hypercharged partisanship where every election is cast as an existential threat, I’m not at all surprised that a substantial fraction of the general-election electorate voted for party over person. If anything, I’m impressed that Warnock persuaded as many voters as he did, and think that should be celebrated, not disparaged as insufficiently perfect to be good.
I’m really glad this election cycle is finally over, and I can stop being tempted to punditry. If you want to see what I write in the absence of endless elections, here’s a button:
And if you want to offer an example of the exact level of scandal needed to overcome distate for The Other Party, the comments will be open: