Part Five: Here’s (Some Of) Why Parties, Politicians and Voters Do What They Do
Let’s say you’re a time traveller from 2016.
Consider Joe Biden.
[He is the framing device for this article - I figured you’d follow along easier if I broke down political motives by using an example.]
You see him run for the United States Senate all the way back in 1972. He’s drawn on his strengths as a candidate - he’s young and talking about change, which appeals to all voters unhappy with the status quo and particularly youth, his positions and demeanour are moderate so he appeals to moderates, and all of this makes him resemble a Kennedy, which voters nostalgic for the surety of the 60s find comforting.
Why does he come to, and remain in, the Senate? He’s driven by many of the nobler motives. He wants to make a positive difference in the world. Politics is somewhere to put his pain to use after the deaths of his family, ensuring the public gets the fair deal he didn’t. He’s a Catholic, compelled by his faith and background to look after others and to be a role model. No doubt, some of his reasons are less admirable. He has an enormous ego sated by all the public attention every time he runs for reelection and as he gets in the news for his lawmaking. He gets to travel the world and receives a fat salary. He’s a mover and a shaker on issues from foreign policy to crime - he has enormous power over the lives of millions.
In a safely Democratic state, i.e there would always be far more voters for him than against him, Biden never had to face a competition after 1972...except in his runs for President in 1988 and 2008, when he fumbled the bag badly as a plagiarist and a bit of a buffoon. Having arrived in 2008, you can see his swan song unfold. Barack Obama wants to be President of the United States, and again we can see the same, core political motives at heart: to do good, to be a first and a role model, to soak up the adulation, because being in charge makes you rich and powerful. And he needs to ensure moderate voters, and particularly moderate white voters, will not be swayed by legitimate arguments or racist insinuations that he isn’t like them, or that he’s too radical, or that he doesn’t have the experience necessary to handle the issues, from foreign policy to crime. So he announces that Joe Biden will be his running mate. “America’s Uncle” spends eight years advising Obama, enjoying all the sweet perks of being #2, and, of course, in 2016, he doesn’t run for President. His son just died; he’s out of step with a party moving to the left; he’s in his 70s. This is the end. He did good, he did bad, and now he’s gone.
And then the time traveler jumps forwards to today.
What the hell happened here?
The simple answer is that, compared to almost any other subject you could be compelled to debate, politics rarely produces logical and efficient outcomes from any perspective. If you’re debating, say, whether developing countries should be able to go ham on the fossil fuels, you’re either gonna end up at “yep, it’s worth the climate cost for human development” or “nope, it’s not”. Pretty binary: you agree with one side and can steer towards the ideal outcome for that side. Politics, however, is throwing what everybody wants at the wall and seeing what comes out in the wash, and sometimes you wind up with a doddering dude in his 80s as the last line of defence against an authoritarian.
What fun!
Let’s break down how this played out. 2016: Democrat Hillary Clinton biffs a very winnable election and Republican Donald Trump becomes President. The backlash is immediate. Millions of Democrats who expected to win are furious and distraught. They don’t want Donald Trump as President, for a host of reasons: they disagree with his policies (e.g they think his tax breaks are unhelpful or even corrupt), they dislike somebody of his character receiving the perks and status that he does, they worry about his everyday governance (e.g an abrasive foreign policy when crises flare up in the Middle East or East Asia), or disliking Trump is simply a way to signal something to the people around them (e.g men thinking “Though there is rising hostility towards the patriarchy due to Trump’s election, I can mitigate that hostility towards me personally by showing I’m not a Trump voter). These are all key incentives for voters.
And everyday voters (and non-voters, too - think non-naturalised immigrants or teenagers, for example) can do more in politics: they can volunteer to doorknock or phonebank for parties, they can donate, and they can even sign up as candidates. This is how, in 2018, Democrats sweep the House of Representatives, their equivalent to our Parliament. Not only are Democrats enthused to show up on the day and vote against Republicans, but they are able to afford ads and reach huge numbers of undecided voters, to persuade them to show up and vote at all. These people vote for Democratic candidates at that, many of whom are high-quality candidates that, under different circumstances, might have stayed away and left these races to lower-quality losers.
Note that this changes nothing about Trump being President! He’s just going to receive fewer laws from the House that he’ll want to sign, and they’ll go on to impeach him twice. But a lot of voters’ political behaviour isn’t actually about what the vote is on. Voters use elections and other rare opportunities for civic engagement - be it referenda, councils and committees looking for public submissions, or growing protest movements - to signal their emotions, vibes, and reactions to events. This is why governments presiding over a struggling economy almost always lose reelection, irrespective of how good their economic policies are or what the alternative is offering; voters take it out on the people in charge that there are new problems in their life that weren’t there a year ago.
Just as voters can often be characterised as drawing links between a and z, even when they are presented with a clear a-b situation, they are often highly unfamiliar with how to solve the problem on an individual level, never mind the aggregate of millions. (This is easily mechanised for - voters are busy with their own lives, voters are uneducated, voters are easily emotionally riled up, voters are misled by misinformation from campaigns, political systems are both unintentionally and intentionally complicated…)
This was the problem presented to the Democratic Party in 2020. In 2016, the party had a clear choice between the moderate Hillary Clinton, who united all the establishment politicians, or the radical Bernie Sanders. There was no way that Clinton was getting a second chance to lose to Trump, and many voters and politicians objected to nominating an open socialist like Sanders. Unusually, voters in the United States get to directly choose which candidates the parties will put up for President, and with Trump’s example proving any old underdog could win, a record 29 put their hands up. How on earth were the millions of Democratic “primary” voters to decide?
The result was an absolute comedy of errors that established many of the core mechanics of politics:
Polling (i.e surveys that roughly estimate public support for different candidates/parties and, therefore, who is in the lead) had many months to play out before voting started. The media, in turn, fixates on the latest poll as the next best thing they can run stories about before the election itself, speculating as to why candidates rose and fell. This dramatically altered which candidates voters and donors considered viable, which both altered the course of millions in donations and also had a snowball effect on candidates’ chances.
Due to all the reasons I laid out earlier, most voters pay very little attention to politics. This meant that the vast majority of candidates had minimal name recognition or support; despite voters having so many choices, very few were researching them. High name recognition is a key currency in politics, and is one of the key reasons why political parties are so important. If you run for Parliament by yourself, nobody knows who you are. If you run for Parliament as the National Party candidate selected by your local branch, it doesn’t matter if nobody knows who you are; they’ll show up to meetings and follow on social media to see who the National Party candidate is and they’ll vote for you even if they don’t know you because of your party affiliation.
This, in turn, fed into a premium placed on reaching the public. Besides the usual methods - running ads, building up a following on social media, and trying to land appearances on traditional media (e.g televised interviews) - this meant the debates in particular were important. Critically, candidates got to compare themselves side by side to others, in a spontaneous format. This is unusual for politics, which tends to be quite micromanaged by well-paid professionals behind the scenes; the media will quickly pounce on any perceived slipups.
Candidates behind in the race resorted to gimmicky attempts to get attention (e.g Kamala Harris accusing Biden of racism over a long-dead issue where their actual policy positions were identical), whereas those ahead tried to keep the ship slow and steady - a metaphor for political campaigns in general. If you’re behind, you need to take risks to change up what’s going wrong; if you’re ahead, you need to avoid risks that could change that. This plays into the centrist versus radical debate, where radicals prefer risks and centrists favour caution. This manifested in the different positions between different candidates, which tend to play out in democracies like ours as internal arguments between members and between politicians in parties. Some, like Sanders, backed Medicare for All, an ambitious left-wing healthcare program; others, like Biden, took a more moderate approach to expanding healthcare.
Yet the party appeared more united than divided. As is often the case, the biggest priority was not who would be the best Democrat, but who would have the likeliest odds of defeating Trump and, thus, replacing a Republican with a Democrat. This created strong incentives against disagreeing too sharply: because a given candidate might wind up running against Trump, any other candidate perceived to have reduced the number of voters willing to vote for them would be held responsible in the event that Trump was reelected. Instead, the 29 engaged in bizarre displays of tiptoeing around each others’ issues and using the debates to praise one another’s character, even as they bickered over wonkish policy details arcane to most of the public. These are key to understanding the political establishment: an individual politician cannot risk being seen as undermining their party lest that party casts them out, and they move in a separate world of deep policy intricacy that inevitably leaves them out of touch with everyday people even if they intimately understand and seriously approach our issues.
All of this explains the final result. Kamala Harris surged off her viral debate moment because voters admired her story as a schoolgirl in the dying days of legal segregation, then sagged because she was fuzzy on the actual issues to try to avoid alienating anybody. Elizabeth Warren rose because she was such an effective critic but fell for the same reason, plus electability arguments that she was too radical. As Biden flailed, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders duelled for the lead, one moderate and one radical but each inspiring and energising voters - yet both performed atrociously with black voters key to the Democratic Party’s numbers compared to white college-educated demographics. And under it all ran an insidious undertone that, after Clinton lost to the unthinkable, a woman or a person of colour could not beat Trump.
Biden had stuttered and stumbled through the race. He was perceived as out of touch, out of time, too old, uninspiring, rambling, incoherent at times…yet a lot of voters and a lot of politicians felt more negative about the leading alternatives (particularly Sanders), and they didn’t know who the many low-profile candidates were, never mind trust in their viability. It was a classic collective action problem: if everybody suddenly selected a random Senator from Colorado, he could be President, but nobody was going to go out on that limb first. So Biden, the man with the name recognition, prevailed. The establishment politicians directed their support towards him as the anti-Sanders, the other candidates dropped out because they didn’t want to pay the price of disunity, and voters facing a binary choice picked their less disliked candidate: for most of them, that was Biden. He won the nomination and, in a hellish year and as an unremarkable candidate, he won almost by default: as the economy crashed and COVID caused chaos, why not vote for a change?
Now the dynamics are reversed, as it’s Biden who’s had to oversee four years of the aftermath, yet he’s still hanging on. And even though there has been no competition on the Democratic side this time, the motives at play are exactly the same. Though voters don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch, they don’t know the alternatives well enough to show up for a change. The Trump alternatives split the vote and attention between themselves. And no Democratic politician is willing to make a run against Biden, because they’d be placing their career at serious risk by doing so, and they’d rather hold onto their current office and bide their time for a future bid. Biden wins; Trump wins; this November, one of them wins. This is obviously not ideal, but this is the outcome the system has produced - the tendency of politics to default to the least bad, to the status quo, and to the importance of beating the other party over optimising internally.
You can see the exact same logic at play in democracies the world over, including New Zealand. Voters will overwhelmingly show up for National or Labour because they’re the known options. They’ll do so sometimes because they prefer specific policies or candidate qualities from the parties, but often because they like the vibes of the one or want to see the other beat. And politicians who want to chase power selfishly, and sometimes maybe even do the right thing along the way, will do everything they can to get a party’s institutional support (even if that occasionally means setting up their own), attract donors and establishment endorsement, and conform to the party line to preserve their own office - until, for the ambitious, the right window emerges to strike and advance. All of which will be used by party members, officials, leaders et al to advance the purpose of political parties: gaining control and using power to effect that party's preferred changes.
How does all of this apply to politics motions? Hopefully you’ve been able to have a good think about that through the article, but here’s the “moral of the story” spelled out if you’re not with it yet. If you need to characterise voters, the two key dimensions are a) how informed and engaged are they?, and b) how vibes versus rational are their motives? If you need to characterise politicians, the two key dimensions are a) how good versus bad are their motives? (Note that, as in all matters, selfish motives aren’t inherently bad for a case; for instance, we won a BP ‘23 debate by leaning into how much Winston Peters’ ego and base cunning demands the limelight and wins him boomer respect. Just be careful.), and b) how willing are they to play ball by the party line versus go off script?
And all of this then interfaces with what I’ve discussed in the past couple of articles: moderating versus radicalising influences, left versus right, and their demographic backgrounds, both as an individual and the community they come from and represent. Through this, you can explain down the line in a case why an actor, be they the average reasonable voter or the politician in question, will do what they do, why their judgement or response is better or worse than the alternative, and why that means your model and your case is the right one to solve the issue. (Draw the rest of the owl, basically.) I’ve given you background; you’ll learn through practice how and where to slot it in.
Let’s cap off your conceptualisation of politics. All of this plays out in an endless cycle. Politicians rise from communities, search for party nominations, go in a circuit of media and campaign appearances to raise their profile and persuade voters, keep trying (often starting off as sacrificial lambs to “pay their dues” and rise up the hierarchies) until they get into office, do their job there, do more stuff behind the scenes with their party members, donors and what have you, get promoted, run for higher office, play a part in political conspiracies so their faction or leader wins out, and then either scandal and botch themselves out of a job, lose an election when the tide runs out on their party, or peacefully see their career come to an end. And this endless cycle, every election, presents the voters with what their choices are to register what they want and how they feel, sometimes very responsively and sometimes not so much. And that’s how 1973’s hot new Senator for Delaware is on the American ballot paper half a century later.
Next time, we will, finally, at long last, come back to home and enjoy an in-depth and, thank goodness, specific, real-world run down on the New Zealand political landscape, in recent times and today.
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