There are all sorts of possible explanations for it. Taranto gives us two useful ideas to start with: One is that the religious leaders don’t actually exercise as much power as we’re constantly hearing. Another is that the religious right is actually far more thoughtful in their political picks than they’re often given credit for. As a variation on that, I’d suggest that the religious right just isn’t as monolithic a group as it’s often characterized. Suggestions that they always act in concert, lurching along like some troop of zombies, forget the myriad regional and personal differences amongst religious, socially conservative voters. ~Peter Suderman
I agree with Peter that there are all sorts of explanations for why some evangelical voters may say they prefer Giuliani right now. One of the explanations may be that there are Republican and other voters ignorant enough to believe that Rudy is himself a born-again Christian and therefore “one of them.” I am really not kidding.
According to Diageo/Hotline’s February poll, 17% of Republicans, 14% of independents and 13% of Democrats say they would describe Giuliani as “born-again” or “evangelical.” If those numbers are reliable (and Hotline’s numbers usually are), that represents a lot of people who know nothing about Giuliani and who instead are probably imposing their hopes (”Hurray, America’s Mayor is an evangelical!”) or fears (”That no-good authoritarian is an evangelical!”) on him. Interestingly, Giuliani does the “worst” of the six big candidates in this area, except for Romney, since roughly one-fifth of those polled think that all of the others could be fairly described as evangelical. Hillary, born-again? 17% of Republicans would agree with that label and 26% of Democrats, who would presumably be better acquainted with Hillary in all her complexity (ha!), say the same. Maybe some Democratic voters think “evangelical” means “she believes in God.” Kudos to the guys at Hotline for thinking to even ask this question about “evangelical” identity, which seems so bizarrely unnecessary to ask for almost the entire field (except for Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo) and yet reveals all kinds of things about the people being polled that we would never know otherwise.
These are poll results that convey the kind of staggering ignorance of large swathes of the voting public that makes me feel vaguely terrified of elections. This is not a fairly technical policy question like, “Does Tom Vilsack want to index Social Security benefits to prices or to wages?” Lots of people might not get the right answer to that one and not be considered fools. But this is simple labeling: evangelical or not evangelical? Even allowing for a broad definition of evangelical, it is very hard to think of any of the six top candidates as being correctly labeled with either of these names. McCain, born-again? 19% of Republicans think so. Roughly one out of every five or six voters cannot figure out this most basic detail for any of the major candidates except for the one whose religion has become a major focus of media attention. Even then, 7% of all voters think Romney is an evangelical! These are people either fooled by his “I share your values” shtick, or they are really not paying attention, which means that their statements of candidate preference at this stage are virtually worthless (except to the extent that we in the chattering classes reify these meaningless preferences into “momentum”).
So, consider that for a moment and reflect on the kind of stupefying voter ignorance that it represents. Meanwhile, let me address these two tropes that have been making the rounds in the Giuliani/Christian conservative discussions. These tropes are 1) support for Giuliani among evangelicals can be explained by saying that evangelicals are savvy, sophisticated multi-issue voters and not the single-issue yahoos they are supposedly made out to be; 2) evangelicals are diverse and won’t all necessarily respond to a candidate in the same way. The first one simply makes no sense to me. The second one makes a good deal more sense on its own, but when it is marshalled in support of the first one it creates problems. Let me explain.
I say the first idea makes no sense to me because I don’t accept the idea that it demonstrates sophistication and savviness that voters are overlooking their core beliefs in support of a candidate whose chief qualification, as far as they know, is, as The Onion might put it, that he was mayor of New York on 9/11 and no one else can say that. This is the height of unserious, celebrity-driven voter preferences. This shows these voters to be not the complex, priority-balancing realists of pundit legend, but easily-led (yes, I really do want to use that word) and gullible people who will chant the name of any politician if they have heard it often enough in a positive context. God help us, but many of these people may have concluded that Giuliani is their guy simply because they have seen him on TV more often than they have seen the others. Yes, I do think it is that bad.
So it would make sense to note the diversity of evangelicals and social conservatives if the evangelicals and social conservatives supporting Giuliani were doing so based on his record as a reforming mayor or based on his (very dubious) promises to appoint “strict constructionist” judges, but if they are supporting him based in misconceptions (i.e., that Giuliani is an evangelical) or simply because of his celebrity the real diversity of these voters becomes almost irrelevant. If anyone is lurching along zombie-like it would have to be the voters who are rushing en masse to the banner of Rudy because they have heard his name somewhere and get a good feeling when people talk about him.
A lot of smart people are working very hard to come up with serious explanations for Giuliani’s early popularity (leadership! national security! tough-guy persona!), but all of these clever explanations rest on a base of knowledge that the actual Giuliani-preferring voters don’t possess. Virtually no one outside of the Five Boroughs knows squat about Giuliani’s mayoral administration in any great detail, and furthermore nobody who didn’t live in New York at the time really cares all that much. I fear we have reached a stage in our nation’s political life where the dynamics of presidential campaigns may be better understood by the sort of celebrity-watching media of the Us Weekly and In Touch variety. As informed citizens with a strong interest in these things, political pundits of all stripes really want to believe that issues, resumes, qualifications and, well, the actual facts of a candidate’s personal history have something to do with whether voters support this or that candidate. It may simply be the case that we are horribly, horribly wrong about so many voters that it renders all of our analysis moot.
9 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 1st, 2007 at 5:51 am
daninardmore
Welcome to mass democracy. Apart from abstract polling figures, it has long been my observation that most of the people I encounter in every day life are abysmally ignorant of issues and candidates. Not to oversimplify history, but back when only free, white, property-owning males over 21 could vote, we got the Founding Fathers. Now that anyone with a pulse–and sometimes not even that–can vote, we get the present glorious system. And not to set up on a pedestal the generation that gave us the “Civil War”, but the Lincoln-Douglas debates were closely attended mostly by farmers and small businessmen. Nowadays most people couldn’t sit still through such speeches, but then the media would obviate their having to, anyway.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:01 am
Christopher Hayes
I’ll venture that the winner in 2008 will be the first candidate to do fairly well on “Dancing With The Stars”.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:21 am
Pyranoir
“It may simply be the case that we are horribly, horribly wrong about so many voters that it renders all of our analysis moot.”
I fear this may, in fact, be the case. The outcome of so many election results can only be explained by this Politician as Celebrity model.
Now, I’ve only begun recently to follow politics with any regularity (Eunomia being one of my primary sources), and I can STILL barely keep up with the ebb and flow of power in Washington. When so much power is centralized at so high a level, it becomes exceedingly difficult to stay informed. The decisions being made on the Federal level have so many layers of bureaucracy between those who make them and those who implement them that there’s almost no real connection between who I vote for, informed or not, and what actually happens to me. Even on the broadest of policy issues — immigration or tax reform, for example — there is no guarantee that being informed will actually help, or that the guy you vote for who is 100% on the right side of one issue, won’t be 100% on the wrong side (or be forced to compromise in that direction) of another issue. There’s just too much power at too high a level spread among too few people to make the mass of voters feel engaged or empowered.
So they vote by celebrity, or sound-bites, or hair size, because, to some extent, it makes just as much sense as voting by the issues, in terms of actually having one’s will enacted. Look — it took the Daily Kos folks just three months to realize that the Democrats they helped elect into the majority in Congress, largely on a platform of ending, or at least setting a timetable, to end the war, can’t even come together to do this. How many different proposals are out there now? How many of them are even binding? How many groups of Democrats have now turned against each other, in some cases using the same “Support the Troops” rhetoric that was used against them by the Republicans for so long?
Don’t get me wrong, I think the level of ignorance is absolutely stunning — Hillary as an evangelical? What, I ask, the hell? — and I have a lot of problems with the “virtues” of a mass democracy, but I’m not sure if our present situation is one that could be solved, or even really addressed, simply by having a well-informed electorate?
March 1st, 2007 at 10:36 am
daninardmore
A country of 300,000,000 and growing is too big to be a free republic of self-governing citizens. It inevitably will be an empire/oligarchy with sham elections. The bright side of the Balkanisation of America through uncontrolled immigration may be that it hastens a Soviet-style breakup of the empire into independent sections that do a better job of looking out for their own true interests.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:52 am
Grumpy Old Man
It’s not much better on the local level.
In CA a lot of the decisions are made by boards and commissions appointed by various local and state officials. It’s entirely impenetrable.
Lawyers and politicians “create problems to sell solutions,” as the Brazilians say.
I’m not sure it was ever much better.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Pyranoir
“The bright side of the Balkanisation of America through uncontrolled immigration may be that it hastens a Soviet-style breakup of the empire into independent sections that do a better job of looking out for their own true interests.”
I never really considered that before, but I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Daniel Larison
Perhaps it would work that way, but another alternative is that the empire uses the masses of immigrants as its shock troops to police the locals. With their attachment and loyalty firmly tied to the state, they might be less likely to turn against the state, whereas the natives would remain under the illusion that the state existed to serve them and could decide to try to change how things were run. Mercenaries make for better servants of emperors (at least until one of their commanders decides that it is his turn to seize power), while the subjects have other loyalties that might come into conflict with those of the state.
Unfortunately, the post-Soviet experience suggests that many of the new breakaway states will not enjoy any marked change from the bad, old ways of doing things, but they will simply enjoy a new dispensation under the rule of equally miserable political bosses. We, too, could enjoy our own Berdymukhammedovs and Nazarbayevs. As amusing as the name Berdymukhammedov is, I don’t think that would be a desirable outcome.
Nonetheless, I am (obviously) entirely in agreement with as much radical decentralisation as we can possibly have. The post-Soviet arrangement simply saw the old party bosses in the different republics retain their control, which would be like a break-up here where the establishment of the national party elites as the rulers of the new states. Democracy does not function in large, consolidated states except as travesty, and it seems likely that representative government cannot long successfully operate on the scale of even some of the original larger states. If we want real self-government, our polities would probably ultimately need to be on the scale of counties, rather than states, and the focus of political life would be within the city district and the small town rather than the imperial city. Obviously, we are a very long way away from that.
Government becomes impenetrable and impossibly complex because people require it to do as much as we require of it. There are better and worse ways of managing this baffling complexity, but an even better solution to much of it is to devolve many of these activities to entities other than public authorities. There are certain unavoidable corruptions that come with government. No serious decentralist pretends that local and county government is not full of stupidity, venality and corruption–undoubtedly it is, and sometimes quite a lot of it (see Chicago)–but that it is far better to keep as much control over the stupid, venal and corrupt as possible, and this can only be accomplished by keeping them as close to the citizens as possible, to make them as accountable and answerable as is reasonably possible.
The thing I have never understood about the position of the rationalising centralist is that he takes for granted that a Daley administration, for instance, is full of crooks, but has relatively limited power to do harm, but he somehow thinks that as more power over ever-larger swathes of the country is concentrated in a few hands the proportionately greater the resistance to corruption there is in the office-holders. He must believe that, or he has committed himself to creating and maintaining a system that not only breeds more and more gross corruption, but also a system whose corrupt governors wield even more destructive instruments of coercion over a much wider area. This is why “reformers” who always want to appeal to the center and come up with a “national” standard for this or that drive me mad–by doing this, they probably will not eliminate whatever evil they are trying to eliminate, but they will destroy the bulwarks that provide some shelter to the people against the injustices of the newly empowered central government.
March 1st, 2007 at 3:43 pm
daninardmore
No doubt life in many of the “independent sections” of which I spoke would be unpleasant. The Southwest plus California would be indistinguishable in social and political culture from Mexico, the Northeast would still be the lunatic asylum it already is, etc. The Rocky Mountain states, Alaska, and parts of the old Confederacy might be somewhat better. But I agree with Daniel that the ideal polity for self-government doesn’t really extend beyond the county level, and we are many generations from that. I hate to think of the kind of country my 20-year old daughter will most likely be growing old in.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:27 am
Christopher Hayes
Mr. Larison,
This is the most I’ve seen you say in one place about what you’d rather have for government. From a historical perspective, is a change to smaller polities more likely to come from a combination of events, like the Soviet breakup, or a single event, like the division of Germany after WWII? I just haven’t read enough to even venture a guess.