Vibes v Policy

 In his mailbag, Yglesias goes off on the idea that Democrats need to moderate their policy positions in order to win the Senate seats in places like Iowa, Texas, Florida or Alaska. This is because Yglesias is locked into the idea that voters select candidates based on ideology and, especially, policy.

Coincidentally, Morris comes out today with just the opposite conclusion - based not on his priors but on a poll he ran. I'll let him summarize his findings:

In our February poll, we asked voters whether each of 10 adjectives describes the Democratic and Republican parties. Each person was asked to rank how well each word — such as “extreme”, “elitist”, “tough”, and “weak” — described both parties on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the word described the party very well.

The Republican Party’s defining traits in voters’ minds are extreme (60% agree), elitist (57%), tough, (56%) and cruel (51%). The percentage of Americans agreeing with descriptions of positive traits is comparatively smaller: just 41% say the party is competent, 41% say principled, and only 31% — less than a third — say the GOP can be considered empathetic.

The average American sees Democrats in a much different light. The top descriptors of the party are empathetic (54%) and principled (49%). Comparatively few people think of it as “tough” (31%), and nearly half the country calls the Democrats weak (48%) and ineffective (47%). Democrats’ competence rating is 46% — five points higher than the GOP’s — but it’s the weakness and ineffectiveness labels that dominate voters’ impressions and national discourse about the party.

This manifests, I think, in two ways.

The first is the fact that Democrats have for a while now been associated with more feminine values and have run two female candidates for president. Trump won both of those elections, despite the fact that I would rank Hillary Clinton's mental and emotional toughness leagues higher than Trump's. Still, I remain convinced that Trump would not have beaten Joe Biden in 2016 for instance. Or really any male Democrat. Trump benefits from gendered perceptions of "toughness", even though he's the whiniest, most petulant person to hold the office.

The second is that there is an entire online discourse about Democrats not being tough. The algorithm probably boosts this, but Democrats are always "caving" or "losing" in ways that are both real and imaginary. The fall shutdown, for instance, was a "loss", in that Dems weren't able to save health insurance. They DID however amplify the issue of healthcare affordability, which is now a very favorable issue for Dems. Is that a loss or a win? 

The reason why Gavin Newsom or even JB Pritzker is popular is because they fight back. The reason Schumer isn't, is because he does appear to have the same fight in him. 

Right now there is a partial DHS shutdown over ICE. Democrats are "fighting" but the reality of shutdowns is that they rarely work to extort policy concessions. In fact, they got rolled when the Big Beautiful Bill basically funded ICE and DHS in perpetuity. Will they be able to win some concession? Maybe. Possibly. What they are asking for is popular. The structural levers that they have are not strong enough, though, to force through what they want to do.

This, to me, is a massive example of the role of gender on our politics. I think it Maureen Dowd or someone like her who talked about Democrats being the Mommy Party and Republicans being the Daddy Party. Crude, but if you look at the polling, there's some real accuracy there.

Look at the performative masculinity of Pete Hegseth or RFK posting their workout videos or Kash Patel chugging beers with the US Men's Hockey team. Hell, look at the grotesque "Mar A Lago Face" phenomenon whereby women butcher their faces with plastic surgery to reinforce gender stereotypes.

Morris' conclusion is that Democrats don't need to moderate on certain issues, so much as they need to "get tough" with the understanding that there is no magic dial that you can turn to make voters see you as tougher.  My cynical take is that means someone like Graham Platner is a better bet to win in November's Maine Senate race than Janet Mills. I think Mills makes the better Senator, and she is frankly "New England Tough" but Platner has a gravelly voice and voters are kinda stupid.

When we talk about "toughness" we are talking about vibes, not policy. Yglesias may sit there in his DC townhouse and parse white papers, but voters don't. Hispanic and Black men didn't shift to Trump because they believed he wouldn't tax their tips or even that he would save America from trans athletes. They did it because he's a "tough business man" who will lift them up from the precarious edges of poverty.