Why the Republican nominee's latest gaffe may matter more than political scientists think
By M.S.
JOHN SIDES, a political-science professor at George Washington University, thinks Mitt Romney's embarrassing fund-raiser video is unlikely to affect the race much. He adduces two graphs that show that in the aftermath of Barack Obama's "cling to guns" comment in 2008, basically nothing happened. This year, meanwhile, Mr Obama's "private sector is doing fine" and "you didn't build that" gaffes had no discernible effect in the polls, and Mitt Romney's comments last week on the Libya attacks don't seemed to have stopped his recovery in the aftermath of the Democratic convention. Mr Sides concludes:
The best case for saying that “gaffes matter” is that actual voters are persuaded to change their minds because of the gaffes. If they don’t, then it’s tough to argue that “gaffes” are really “game-changers.” And, in fact, usually voters don’t change their minds.
I have a love-hate relationship with Mr Sides' commentary. In general, he argues that political campaigns and candidates' personalities don't matter anywhere near as much as people think they do, or as the media says they do. This is no doubt true. And as a political scientist, Mr Sides exercises a commendable influence in insisting that claims of this sort be grounded in evidence.
But I'm not a political scientist, and I can't help but think this is a somewhat bigger deal than Mr Sides thinks it is. Part of the reason I can't help but think that is that I just spent a few weeks covering another election that also turned out to be a close contest between left and right: the Dutch elections last Wednesday (covered by my colleague here), in which the centre-right Liberals beat the centre-left Labour Party by about 27% to 25% in one of the most unpredictable and fast-changing races political observers had ever seen. And the thing about that campaign was that it was almost entirely about the campaign and the candidates. Obviously the Dutch and American elections are completely different because of the multi-party structure in the Netherlands. But nonetheless, when you watch an election where the campaign and the media coverage determine everything, it pushes those elements to the foreground and makes you think about how they influence American presidential elections, even if they aren't as decisive.
To sum up what happened in Holland: In the final two weeks of the campaign, Labour, which had been polling at about 12% and was largely written off, suddenly caught fire after its new leader, Diederik Samsom, won several televised debates by coming off as the honest guy, eschewing extremes and telling it like it is. This is the sort of thing that happens frequently in Hollywood movies but essentially never in real life. Mr Samsom had already run a savvy ad campaign which broke Dutch tradition by presenting his wife and kids as an integral part of his public persona, and the combination, as well as solid in-the-streets campaigning, allowed him to suck huge numbers of votes away from other left-wing and centrist parties and come within a hair of the premiership; Labour will probably wind up as the junior partners in a Liberal-Labour coalition government.
The key to this story is that it was basically a process of elite cathexis. The media and the relatively small group of high-interest voters who watched the first candidates' debate decided that Mr Samsom was the clear winner. From there, Mr Samsom's Cinderella-story rise became a story the media wanted to tell, as it sold newspapers and held eyeballs; more and more voters took the signal that Mr Samsom was a winner; and this created a bandwagon effect, especially on the left, where voters were choosing between several parties (notably the far-left Socialists) in the hopes of finding one that had a chance of becoming the largest party. By the time I interviewed voters on the morning of the elections, many of those who voted Labour could no more explain why they were choosing Labour over, say, the Socialists than they could explain why they were wearing Nike sneakers rather than Reeboks. Elite actors, high-information voters or "early adopters" if you prefer, had made decisions over the previous few weeks that filtered through to low-information voters as a sense of brand identity.
The American binary presidential-election system is very different. What happened in the Dutch elections more closely resembles the multiple-player dynamics in American primaries, and Mr Sides' brilliant analysis of the Republican primary process over the course of this year was much closer to what I've just described. But while American presidential elections are much more static and are largely frozen by party loyalties, at the margins, a lot still depends on the recommendations of elite actors who signal behaviour towards the fringes of the partisan agglomerations further down. And what's striking about Mr Romney's flailing on-camera mess this week is that he has lost a major chunk of his elite, particularly in that part of the conservative commentariat that still has lines of communication open to liberals. Mr Samsom won because of elite cathexis; what Mr Romney is seeing now is elite defection.
Key centrist-Republican signaller David Brooks turned furiously on Mr Romney in his column Tuesday, writing that the statements suggest he "doesn’t know much about the culture of America", "has lost any sense of the social compact", "knows nothing about ambition and motivation", and that his comments are "a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney." Ross Douthat wrote that "by branding himself as a generic Republican with no particularly unconventional ideas of his own, he’s managed to associate himself with all the party’s Bush-era failures, while imitating none of its success."Conor Friedersdorf said the comments encapsulate the dynamic of the flawed campaign, in which "the base of the conservative movement develops a message that plays well internally, and inexplicably thinks it'll be persuasive to the general electorate if only it is trumpeted. Mitt Romney slavishly conducts himself as the base wishes. And the talking points turn out to be as unpopular with swing voters as you'd expect." Bill Kristol called them "arrogant and stupid". And so forth.
This is a long way of saying that I think this is the mechanism I'd identify, if Mr Sides were to demand that I explain how I think this incident can change voters' minds. Few voters haven't yet firmly made up their minds, and I think many of them are not going to be any better able to explain how they made their choices than those voters in the Netherlands were on election morning. In the weeks before the election, those voters are going to be susceptible to signals from elite figures and media organs about whether Mr Romney is a solid candidate who can deliver what America needs. But at this point, a very important fraction of the centre-right elite is unwilling to send those signals for him.
