Republican Identity Politics, Internet Edition

I find this post from Ezra Klein about the Republicans' failed effort to improve their image among young voters through aggressive internet and social media outreach very interesting in that it ties into a long-standing theory of mine. The basic idea is that Republicans, faced with their massive deficits with all non-white voters, and the fact that non-white voters are rapidly becoming a larger and larger part of the electorate, and therefore faced with the consequence of those two facts, that unless they stop losing non-whites so badly they will shortly stop being able to win, respond by looking around for candidates to run who belong to the demographic group in question. They don't look at their policies and ask why no minority voters seem to like them, and then consider changing those policies. They go for the token candidate. So, they run Alan Keyes against Obama in Illinois in 2004, and there's a whole crop of new Hispanic Republican candidates. Except the thing is, it doesn't work. A Romney/Rubio ticket would not have done materially better among Hispanics than Romney/Ryan, as best we can tell from the polling. Mutatis mutandis for women, or any other major Democratic-leaning demographic group.

My understanding of what causes Republicans to adopt this flawed strategy is that they honestly can't figure out why Democrats win these groups so consistently. Identity politics, they're convinced, is entirely a matter of identity. Democrats make black people or Hispanic people or women or whatever convinced that their identity makes them special, and so they vote for Democrats. Democrats are people like them, in other words, and Republicans are people not like them. This is somewhat similar to nineteenth-century ethnic politics, which does appear to have had a large element of real identity politics to it: the Democrats were the party of ethnic groups X, Y, and Z, while the Republicans were the party of ethnic groups A, B, and C. Except this isn't what explains modern Democratic dominance with various traditionally downtrodden groups; rather, Democrats owe that advantage to their support of policies that would improve the lives of the traditionally-downtrodden as a class, and would make them less downtrodden going forward. Republicans oppose such policies. It's very simple: a substantial chunk of the American electorate has traditionally been hit with factional policies against their interests, and so they vote factionally for the party that takes their side in the factional war over policy.* Republicans misunderstand this, at their peril, and so they try to counter it through identity politics rather than by moderating their factional policies.

Thus with the internet-based struggle for young voters. Republicans see Democrats leading among the young, they see the young being very heavily involved with this "internet" thing, so they naturally assume that Democrats must be winning youngsters because they're more tech-savvy. The solution, apparently, is Chuck Grassley's Twitter feed. (No, wait, actually that's the best thing ever and should never, ever go away.) But they're wrong; the key to winning young voters is to adopt policies young voters like better. This isn't exactly the same as the racial or gender case, because factional policies, i.e. those that attempt to take resources from one group and reapportion them to the group making the laws, aren't as big a component of the generation gap. There's some stuff, to be sure; I think you could call the Republican approach to entitlements one of these, although of course they always try to frame their deficit hysteria as a pro-young-people policy, and there's education stuff etc. But mostly it's just that we youngsters don't share previous generations' prejudices very much, and Republicans being the party of those prejudices, we tend to dislike them. And no amount of tech savvy or social media outreach will ever change that.

So, Republicans set out to convert the young through the internet, but ended up turning the internet into just another medium through which to reach their original constituency of middle-aged and old people. Surprise, surprise. If they ever want different results, rather than doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to work on this group, finally, they should consider adopting some less hateful policies. The results might surprise them.


*Okay, so, there was a fair amount of factional policy-making going on even among various white ethnic groups, with all sorts of anti-immigration laws and such, in the nineteenth century. But it's my impression that pure identity politics, where a certain group voted for one party or the other simply because that's how that group voted, was a pretty real thing back there, and I really don't think that has much relevance for Democratic dominance of all the not-white-straight-Christians groups today.