John Minchillo/AP Photo
Voters fill out their ballots at the Hamilton County Board of Elections on the first day of early voting, October 10, 2018, in Cincinnati.
One of the disabling assumptions of recent years on the part of media commentators and political scientists alike is the premise of the vanishing swing voter. In this narrative, Republicans and Democrats vote in lockstep as separate tribes, up and down ballot, and there are ever fewer independents. This mirrors and reinforces the hardening of party lines in Congress.
If citizens vote in lockstep and there are few independents, then nothing that Democrats do to improve the lot of the common citizen will win over many voters. It logically follows that electoral politics is mainly a competition to mobilize your base. That’s a worthy enterprise, but it gives up on winning back Trump supporters.
The good news is that the conventional wisdom is substantially wrong. It’s true, at the level of aggregate statistics, that there has been less ticket-splitting over time. But if you unpack the aggregates and look at individual elections for House, Senate, and governorships, the swing voter is alive and well—and worth courting.
That means finding ways to win over both independents and Republicans is a worthwhile enterprise, especially as Trump and his enablers get crazier and crazier.
Incidentally, this does not mean repairing to the center, à la New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, aka the Congressman from Wall Street. His Fifth District is a lot more progressive than he is. Polls show that voters in frontline districts tend to support Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan. In Gottheimer’s own district, 61 percent of voters and 92 percent of Democrats support Build Back Better.
But I digress. Here is some evidence of swing voting from recent elections.
Take the case of the 2018 midterms, where Democrats picked up a net gain of 41 House seats. That means that millions of voters who cast ballots for Republicans in 2014 or 2016 voted for Democrats in 2018. Yes, there was a big increase in 2018 turnout over 2014, and that disproportionately helped Democrats. But there were also lots of swingers.
Some candidates are too far right, even for people who normally vote Republican.
In Illinois’s 14th Congressional District, Chicago’s western exurbs, Lauren Underwood flipped a longtime Republican seat in 2018, by a margin of 156,035 to 141,164 for her opponent, Randy Hultgren. But in 2016, Hultgren received 200,408 votes, beating his Democratic opponent by 20 points. So a lot of people who voted for Hultgren in 2016 either stayed home or cast their ballots for Underwood in 2018.
In New York’s 19th District, a perennially Republican seat in the Hudson Valley, Republican John Faso defeated Democrat Zephyr Teachout in 2016, by a margin of 166,171 to 141,224. Two years later, Democrat Antonio Delgado defeated incumbent Faso, 147,873 to 132,873. Clearly, some voters who voted for Faso in 2016 supported Delgado in 2018.
Just to be clear, this shift is not entirely the result of swing voting. There are other variables. New voters evidently broke heavily for these Democrats. And the Hudson Valley is becoming home to more progressives over time. But it would be hard to argue that it changed dramatically in two years. Unmistakably, despite other effects, some voters moved from Republican to Democrat.
Also, candidates matter. It just happens that both Underwood and Delgado were not just very effective candidates. Both are also African American. And they won in districts that are overwhelmingly white—defying another piece of conventional wisdom that Trump’s America is hopelessly racist.
Not convinced? Consider the case of Alabama’s Senate election in 2017. Alabama is one of the country’s most hardcore Republican states. Yet in 2017, a progressive Democrat, Doug Jones, narrowly won the seat in a special election to fill out the term of Jeff Sessions, who had resigned to become Trump’s attorney general.
Why did Jones win? Mainly because Republicans had nominated a far-right crackpot candidate, Roy Moore, infamous for plastering his courthouse with the Ten Commandments, who was twice removed as Alabama’s chief justice for judicial misconduct. (Republicans did win back the seat in 2020, about 60-40, a smaller margin than in previous Senate elections.)
The point is that some candidates are too far right, even for people who normally vote Republican. And given that Trump is spending the next year trying to oust more moderate Republicans in favor of lunatic fringe candidates like himself, that is good news indeed.
What about the vanishing independent voter? With voters tending to resent politicians in general, Pew finds that 38 percent define themselves as independents. But if you dig deeper, most of those “lean” either Democrat or Republican. Even so, Pew reports, 7 percent are true independents. According to Pew, that number has not changed much in recent years. That’s a lot of voters worth courting.
Now, Biden just has to get some version of Build Back Better enacted, with real benefits for real people—in red states as well as blue ones.
