The Economist - USA (2019-11-23)

28 United States The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019

2 him, instead of admitting most of them

while rubbishing his accusers, he might

look as starkly exposed as Nixon was.

Where does this leave his defenders?

Probably not close to deserting him: most

Republican voters are still with Mr Trump.

For committed partisans, the ambassador’s

testimony left a chink of plausible denia-

bility. He claimed not to have been aware

until recently that the president’s interest

in Burisma was linked to Hunter Biden. De-

spite having had much direct communica-

tion with him, Mr Sondland also did not

claim Mr Trump outlined the quid pro quo

to him personally. Even as he spoke, mean-

while, those he had implicated rushed to

knock him. Mr Trump suddenly claimed

not to know him terribly well. Mr Pence’s

office denied the account was accurate.

Yet defending Mr Trump has undoubt-

edly got harder. An underhand coercion ex-

ercise that Republicans have variously

claimed did not exist, or had been exagger-

ated by vindictive liberals, or was carried

out by rogue officials, appears to have been

extensive and directed by the president.

That might seem to leave his defenders

with only one cogent fallback: Mr Trump’s

suspicions against Hunter Biden and Uk-

rainian election-hackers, however sketchi-

ly based, were sincere enough to warrant

his pressure on Mr Zelensky. Yet Mr Son-

dland also made this hard to maintain. The

Ukrainians did not need to actually launch

any investigations, according to Mr Son-

dland. “He had to announce the investiga-

tions,” the ambassador said. “He didn’t ac-

tually have to do them, as I understood it.”

In the absence of any powerful debunk-

ing of his testimony, there may be only two

arguments left for Mr Trump’s defenders to

marshal against his accusers. The first,

which may take the form of any manner of

distraction or conspiracy theory, is: Go

whistle. Most Republican voters love the

president, don’t care about Ukraine, and

their elected representatives are not about

to disappoint them. This is probably good

enough for most House Republicans.

The other argument is a slightly loftier

version of the same, and goes like this. Mr

Trump, an unconventional president, was

ill-advised, even wrong, on Ukraine. But

the allegations against him, though par-

tially proved, are insufficient to justify his

impeachment and removal, an unprece-

dented step—especially in an election year.

Indeed to remove Mr Trump, the Republi-

can senators who are already settling on

this line will suggest, would be undemo-

cratic. Call this the “Merrick Garland argu-

ment”—or, go whistle in McConnell-ese.

The advantage of both arguments for Mr

Trump’s defenders is that they are impervi-

ous to further revelations. Their weakness

is only that they might seem to leave future

presidents free to suborn foreign policy for

personal gain without fear of sanction. 7

A

theory of elections in America has

taken root among pundits, especially

on the left. It holds that partisan polarisa-

tion has pushed voters so far to their ideo-

logical sides that swing voters play little

role in elections. In this view, winning is all

about turning out the base. The New Repub-

lic, a left-leaning publication, has gone so

far as to advise Democrats to nominate

more progressive candidates that can stoke

turnout among the progressives in their

party. Such advice is wrong-headed. Public

polling and political science provide ample

evidence that moderates fare better than

ideologues in American elections.

For much of the past century, scholars

and politicians alike have believed that

courting swing voters is the quickest path

to electoral victory. Under this “median-

voter theory”, posited in the American con-

text by Anthony Downs in “An Economic

Theory of Democracy” in 1957, voters cast

ballots for whichever candidate best

matches their ideology. Downs’s followers

today believe that the moderate middle is a

better place to be than the far-left or far-

right because it puts candidates closest to

the largest number of voters.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump may

have succeeded partly by taking more mod-

erate stances on government spending and

foreign policy than Republicans who came

before him. According to The Economist’s

analysis of survey data from the Co-opera-

tive Congressional Election Study (cces), a

65,000-person poll overseen by Harvard

University, voters thought Hillary Clinton

about twice as ideologically extreme as Mr

Trump, relative to their average position

(see chart). Voters may have rewarded Mr

Trump for ditching orthodox but unpopu-

lar conservative talking points.

Recent developments have laid bare the

problems with the median-voter theory,

though. The country has experienced a rise

in partisanship, diminishing the number

of people in the moderate middle. As the

parties have separated ideologically, vote-

switchers have declined in number. Ac-

cording to the cce, a combined 7% of voters

switched from voting for Democratic to Re-

publican presidential candidates, or vice

versa, between 2012 and 2016 (5% of them

were Democrats and 2% Republicans).

If there are few swing voters, some an-

alysts argue, then elections must be pri-

marily about catering to the parties’ ideo-

logically extreme bases. In such a world,

politicians win simply by turning out as

many voters from their side as possible.

But while the median-voter theory has its

problems, this new hypothesis is unfound-

ed. So-called “mobilisation theory” posits

that an extremist nominee could increase

turnout among its party’s voters. It fails to

account for the effects that political ex-

tremity has on turnout in the other party.

According to research from Andrew

Hall and Daniel Thompson of Stanford, ex-

tremist candidates for the House of Repre-

sentatives between 2006 and 2014 did in-

crease turnout in their own party, but they

galvanised the other party’s voters even

more. The authors suggest that nominat-

ing an extremist candidate increases turn-

out for the opposing party by between 4

and 10 percentage points more than turn-

out for their own party. Such candidates

pay a tax on their extremity at the ballot

box, because they drive opposition voters

to the polling booth. 7

WASHINGTON, DC

Why a left-wing nominee would

probably hurt Democrats

The turnout game

Everything in

moderation

That moderate Mr Trump

United States, 2016 presidential vote

By voters’ self-described ideology, % of total

100

50

75

25

0

More liberal ← → More conservative

Voters’placementofcandidates’ideologies

Voters’ political ideology

Sources: Co-operative Congressional Election Study, 2016;

The Economist

↑

Trump

↑

Clinton

Votedfor

HillaryClinton

Votedfor

DonaldTrump

Other

Bland is grand