Swing voters versus change voters

The myth of the swing voter is not the biggest reason the Democratic party collapsed in 2024, but the viability of a swing voter strategy will probably continue to decrease.

In my last post, I said I would try to identify things Donald Trump would need to do if he is going to make a good faith attempt at consolidating power based on the weak political realignment that seems to have emerged from the 2024 election. I’m working on that, but something else occurred to me that seems worth noting in the meantime.

For several decades now we’ve heard about the importance of triangulating to appeal to swing voters. It became really explicit in the Bill Clinton era and has continued ever since. Each cycle, the spokespeople for the parties tell the voters we need to choose a moderate candidate who will take positions in the middle of the very narrow range of opinions allowed by the oligarchy that owns both parties. This theory of politics has facilitated the collapse of the two-party system in the United States into a uniparty that supports the oligarchy on all the fundamental issues, while fielding candidates from two nominally separate factions to fight ever more fiercely over issues the oligarchs don’t care about.

I tried to do some research for this post, but I did not find any analyses that defined swing voters in a useful way. Basically, swing voters are voters who might vote differently than they did last time around. Based on their actions, the party machines appear to envision swing voters as a small and mostly fixed category of mentally disabled people who don’t know what they believe, but who can be persuaded to vote for a candidate by running saturation ads in legacy media formats. I think we can conclude with some certainty that this approach does not produce positive electoral results.

It seems to me it would be easier to reach the pool of potentially persuadable voters in any given election by first looking at whether there are a lot of voters who want change. Even if things are going absolutely great, there is always somebody who just lost a job or is unhappy for some other reason. A challenger should have an advantage over the incumbent with these voters, but the pool of change voters may be larger or smaller in any given election. They may also be very disgruntled or only a little disgruntled. The skill of the challenger in figuring out the issues that matter to these voters can be pretty important if the change voter pool is on the smaller side, but almost any change will do if the pool of change voters is sufficiently large.

For example, there were a lot of unhappy voters in 2012. Obama broke a lot of promises, the only group who experienced a robust economic recovery were Wall Street bankers and their minions carrying out home foreclosures, and a lot of people hated the looming prospect of Obamacare. It probably should have been a change election. So who did Republicans nominate? The private equity guy who invented Obamacare, basically the person Obama aspired to be. You can debate about whether Republican insiders or the Republican primary voters were responsible for choosing Romney, but either way the Republicans botched 2012 by trying to triangulate toward mythical swing voters in an election where credible promises of change would have been more fruitful.

In an election where there is no incumbent, the prevalence of change voters tells you whether you want to be perceived as the candidate of stability or the candidate of change. The 2024 election was unusual because both candidates were quasi-incumbents. Both were tied to previous regimes, so both were subject to the argument that we have had enough of that regime. By the middle of 2024 it seemed clear that many voters were feeling a little grumbly, and support for the actual incumbent (Joe Biden) was trending in the wrong direction. Then the Democrats subbed in Kamala Harris. It was pretty clearly turning into a change election, but at that point the candidates had options about how to approach it.

Nevertheless, Harris definitively refused to appeal to change voters. Harris stated unequivocally that she would not do anything differently than Joe Biden. Instead of identifying issues that might appeal to change voters, Harris went with the central theme of the past two Democratic presidential campaigns: Trump is Hitler. Trump and some of his proxies obliged by responding in kind that Harris is a Communist. If Trump had left it at that and said “I stand on my record from the first term” then the election might really have been close because neither would have been a change candidate.

But Trump did not just stand on his record and say Harris is a Communist, he promised a long list of changes and even admitted he made some mistakes and would do some things differently. You can argue all you want about how credible Trump’s promises are, but by election day it was crystal clear to the change voter pool which candidate represented change and which candidate did not.

Interestingly, the Democratic strategy in the most recent election was not very good, even if you assume it was based on a swing voter theory. Swing voters are not people who believe Donald Trump is Hitler or Kamala Harris is a Communist. By definition, their opinions fall halfway between the party positions. If you want to persuade swing voters, you have to make an argument that a swing voter would find plausible. The Trump is Hitler argument appears to have been motivated mainly by the desire to pump massive campaign contributions out of the committed Democrat base, much of which was pocketed by party insiders, affiliated celebrities, and media consultants.

In short, the Democrats appear to be completely directionless, and appear ill-equipped to figure out any better course of action. If anybody inside or outside the Democratic party is going to put up a credible challenge to Trump’s successor in 2028, they need to focus on defining the Trumpist status quo in more accurate terms than they did this time, and on figuring out how to make a credible promise of change.