What Garance Doesn't Get About Voters

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

This having been the week of John Edwards' tour from the Ninth Ward to Kentucky, the Prospect was thick with commentary on his antipoverty efforts.  I'd been itching to respond to Mark Schmitt's post wishing that Edwards would deal more explicitly with race as well as poverty, but Ezra said it all.  Edwards hasn't shied away from race -- he's repeatedly visited New Orleans, where he launched his campaign with lots of black children standing behind him -- but he's followed the wisdom of William Julius Wilson in keeping the issues separate enough that his antipoverty proposals can't be race-baited to death. 

Garance Franke-Ruta's latest of many attempts to show that the Edwards campaign is in trouble, however, hasn't received an adequate response.  It's titled "What Edwards Doesn't Get About Poverty", though she never says that there's anything Edwards doesn't get about poverty.  Rather, she argues that minority and female voters have good reason to prefer the transformative potential of black and female candidates over a white male whose policy positions promote their interests.  This is interesting, and I'll discuss it more later.  But there are also a bunch of terribly ill-supported assertions in the article, and I'll point those out first.

Probably the most bizarre use of statistics in the piece is this, where Garance tries to argue that Edwards' low poll numbers among poor and minority voters aren't the result of lower name recognition:

But Edwards was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, and has high levels of name recognition in key states; in Ohio, which he will visit later this week, he has 97 percent name recognition.

An Ohio poll?  As if the poll that showed Edwards' low numbers gave extra weight to respondents from "key states".  In 2004, Kerry didn't send Edwards to California, Illinois, or New York -- places where he would've been able to intensify support among large numbers of poor Democrats.  National name recognition polls show Clinton at 98%, Edwards at 80%, and Obama at 75%.  If we assume that the name recognition gaps are especially wide among the poor, given their lower levels of political engagement, we have a good explanation for why Clinton draws so much of their support.  A substantial percentage of poor Democrats don't recognize any name except "Hillary Clinton". 

And then there's this:

the 1960s model of the white, male, liberal political leader -- clean-cut, well-to-do, and operating out of a generosity of spirit -- has been judged wanting.

This must be a very new phenomenon, as poor black and female voters liked Bill Clinton, the politician to whom John Edwards bears the greatest demographic similarities.  John Kerry, who came from a more well-to-do background than Edwards, had fairly good support among blacks and women in the primaries, whereas Carol Moseley-Braun's candidacy went nowhere.  Obama and Clinton definitely have something new and exciting to offer -- more on that later -- but trying to spin this as some kind of negative judgment of white guys is silly. 

If there's a paragraph in the article that sums up all that is ridiculous about it, it's this:

Edwards' anti-poverty platform has so little resonance with minority women in particular that, according to a review of Zogby International polls from January, February, March and May for The Politico in June, Edwards drew support from just 4 percent of non-white Democratic women.

I wonder how many non-white Democratic women have the foggiest idea what Edwards' anti-poverty platform consists of?  In fact, race and gender aren't the important variables here.  How many liberal bloggers can name more than three of his antipoverty proposals?  (There are about fifteen of them, setting aside the health care plan, and you can see them here.)  Trying to spin Edwards' low poll numbers as a considered judgment of his antipoverty platform makes no sense when the media is so bad at letting people know who has policy ideas and what they are. 

And before I start getting constructive, there's the weird comment that "Today's goal, as Edwards' tour shows, is to be noble without being in the least controversial."  No.  The goal is to promote policies that change poor people's lives for the better.  That's why ACORN and the unions -- organizations equipped to look at detailed policy proposals and what a candidate does to advance them -- like John Edwards so much.  While Edwards' health care plan is designed to be something we might be able to pass through Congress, it's the farthest left of the big three candidates, and I'd be very pleasantly surprised if it proved uncontroversial.  (If you want noble but not controversial, you're probably for Obama rather than Edwards.)

Okay, so that's enough of that.  The really interesting part of the article is right here:

for either Obama or Clinton to win a general election, they would have to reorder who has political power in this country in a way that's much more significant that what any other Democrat will be required to do. The people who have flocked to them know this; it is both their challenge and their promise as candidates.

I'm skeptical that an Obama or Clinton victory would require such a reordering of political power -- I don't understand the mechanisms by which that would happen.  A lot of the claims people make about Obama's election transforming politics remind me of the scenes at the ends of video games and bad fantasy movies where the villain dies in a big fight and then his palace inexplicably crumbles into dust.  Sure, it's the way the story goes, but reality doesn't work that way.  But maybe Garance has more to say about this, and if so I'm curious to hear it.  I just don't come to the table with an idea of how an Obama victory, independent of his policy views, reorders political power in a way that moves us significantly forward on poverty issues. I'm willing to learn, though, and if Garance can sell ACORN and the SEIU on her story, Obama should give her a great job. 

I'm doubly skeptical that minority and female voters are flocking to Clinton and Obama with the particular agenda Garance describes.  It's a lot simpler -- people expect others who share their racial and gender backgrounds to be sympathetic to their concerns, and to advocate policies that address those concerns.  This isn't just a black thing or a female thing -- white males do it just as much as anyone else.  But given the regrettable state of policy journalism in this country, people are in the dark about a frightening proportion of a candidate's policy views.  (Remember all those treaties that Bush supporters thought he supported, but which he actually opposed?)  Voters' beliefs about what candidates will do in office are often built on foundations only skin deep.  But presidential candidates are unusual people in unusual situations, and looking at their skins is no way to tell their futures.