"Popular" policies don't win elections

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( How hard should incumbent political parties push to enact programs that register as popular in public-opinion polls? How much should their public comments be pitched to swing voters? There’s been some discussion about those topics on Twitter this week, and they’re good questions. For some samples, I recommend following political scientists [Hakeem Jefferson](, [Meredith Conroy]( and [Corrine McConnaughy](, as well as newsletter writer and my Bloomberg Opinion colleague [Matt Yglesias](, who got the conversation started. My own view is that it’s generally good electoral politics to appeal to the middle. Even during the present period of strong partisan polarization, there still are swing voters. It’s worth going after them, and that means having a good idea of who they are and what they think. Folks on the ideological extremes tend to think that there’s more to be gained by mobilizing others like themselves. That’s not entirely untrue, but that approach can also mobilize the other party while driving away swing voters. As an electoral proposition, the argument for appealing to the median voter is a strong one. But not everything is about electoral politics. We know, for example, that many voters don’t pay attention to much of what politicians say, and have short memories about what they do notice. Even big deals, such as the [major bills Congress is acting on right now](, get ignored; indeed, many voters this summer failed to recognize that the current Congress (and President Joe Biden) had delivered anything to them despite the stimulus checks that they had received. Most voters aren’t up for grabs because of partisan polarization. For the rest, fundamentals such as peace and prosperity, or their absence, tend to be extremely important, either directly or mediated through their opinion of the current president. (That is, if things are going well, people tend to like the president, and that drives their votes). All the rest — policy positions, speeches, clever ads, the candidates’ personalities — only matter on the margins. Of course, elections can be won or lost on the margins! During campaigns, it makes sense to maximize everything a candidate can maximize. But most of it just doesn’t matter much. It’s also not as easy as it might seem to succeed by supporting policies that poll strongly. That’s because even high-quality survey research is limited in value by the fact that most of citizens don’t think much about most policy questions, which makes their views on them not very strongly held. That’s not always true, and some people do care deeply about some political topics. Those least connected to politics, however, are apt to have the least consistent and deep-seated views. So it’s hard for parties to know how views will change as something moves from an idea, to a contested piece of legislation or presidential initiative, to an enacted policy. And asking voters what they think at any stage of that process may or may not bear upon how they’ll feel in the future — or whether they’ll care about the policy if it comes up in the heat of a campaign, when they might be paying attention. Take lowering the voting age to 16, which apparently tests as the [most unpopular proposal]( that some very liberal Democrats have pushed. We could guess that if well-liked Democrats like Biden, former President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders began pushing the idea, it might become more popular among Democratic voters. Would it pick up broad support? I have no idea. But I don’t think polls measuring people’s first reaction when it’s not a live issue tell us much of anything. We could also think about what would happen if age-16 voting actually was enacted. Would it be, like legalized abortion, a policy that remains controversial? Or would it be more like marriage equality, where living with the results of legalization appears to have defused most opposition. It takes political judgment, informed by but not dependent on public opinion polls, policy analysis and more, to begin to have a sense of what may be popular as time goes on. That’s not all. Most political activity is only loosely connected to elections. Some of it is about enacting policy, and the kinds of mobilization that can help make that happen may be different from what works in campaigns. Some of politics is about representation: Politicians make promises and then try to fulfill those promises if they win office, and many of those promises may not be particularly valuable to re-election. Political judgment is needed: Which policies, and which behavior, should be emphasized, and for which of the multiple audiences elected politicians speak to? Which are so central to their representative relationship with supporters that jettisoning them is impossible? And some political activity is about participation itself. Political parties are coalitions, and each group within the coalition will want not just certain policies, but also want to be involved in governing when the party wins. Politics isn’t only about who gets what; it’s also about collective self-government, and that cannot happen without participation. Telling a group to sacrifice active involvement in exchange for some policy goal — even if such a trade-off is possible — misses the point of having a republic in the first place. All these considerations overlap in complicated and ever-changing ways. That makes it awfully hard for a political party to succeed simply by saying popular things and advocating popular ideas. Polls alone can’t guide politicians through the thicket of difficult choices and complex judgments they constantly face. I say this as a political scientist who definitely thinks that aiming for the middle is usually a smart electoral strategy. It can’t hurt to advise parties to remember who swing voters are, and what sorts of things poll well with them. But that’s only a small part of what parties and their politicians need to consider. 1. Melissa Deckman on the [effects of the Texas abortion law](. 2. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Hal Brands on [the U.S. and nation-building](. 3. Greg Sargent on [Democrats and the debt limit](. 4. Fred Kaplan on the Senate hearing [on Afghanistan](. 5. Bloomberg’s  Nancy Cook, Steven T. Dennis and Jennifer Jacobs on [Biden’s choice for Fed chair.]( 6. And Kevin Drum on [Biden’s foreign policy](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( | [Ad Choices]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022