Why do people vote against their economic interests? Some grist for that mill.
Given my leftish/populist leanings, I often find myself scratching my head at why people don’t vote just like me. I would be similarly puzzled if I had conservative leanings. It’s just a function of human nature I suppose.
With that caveat out of the way, let me say that I continue to be impressed by the degree to which voters vote against their economic interests. This occurs at both ends of the spectrum: Wealthy folks with lefty leanings vote for more taxes, and blue collar workers across the land pull the lever of politicians that will vote to throw them out of work when they’re not supporting policies that will decrease their real and inflation adjusted earnings. Weird.
This hard-to-understand pattern shows up every voting cycle. Thomas Frank famously, at least if you read this sort of thing, puzzled about this in his book, What’s the Matter With Kansas.
Quoting from the New Yorker . . .
If that looked like a lot of words and you didn’t read it all, the gist of it is that the nice folks in Kansas, presumably representing the broad "Joe and Mary Six-pack" vote, are suckers for push button issues, and are willing to look the other way as their wages and jobs disappear as long as they feel a proper sense of moral outrage. It’s not that the left is immune to this sort of emotional nose-ringing.
Peter Beinart, TIME columnist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, reminds us that the traditional blue-collar coalition mutinied the the Democratic party at least twice over similar pushbutton issues, also in favor of a politician and platform that was completely inimical to their economic interests.
More recently, author and columnist David Sirota raises his eyebrow over the latest attempts by the Republicans to rerun a losing play from the Nixon play book to agitate against "right-to-work" laws.
A half century ago, Richard Nixon spearheaded his party’s national congressional campaign in the face of a recession like we face today. Then Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, he decided the GOP would champion anti-worker laws pioneered in the segregationist south as a way to defeat Democrats. Specifically, he rolled out "right to work" ballot initiatives to weaken the labor movement. These measures ban contracts that compel employees benefiting from union representation to contribute union dues.
When the 1958 election came, Nixon’s blame-workers-first initiatives bombed, and Republicans lost 48 congressional seats, handing the party "its worst year ever," as historian Rick Perlstein recounts in his brilliant new book, "Nixonland."
"Right-to-work wasn’t popular with a general public that understood how a strong labor movement had rocketed millions of voters into the middle class," Perlstein writes.
Fifty years later, conservatives are ignoring history’s teachings and resurrecting Nixon’s failed strategy in a place that could decide a close presidential election.
Here in Colorado, one of the most contested "swing" states, a group of zealots is hoping a "right to work" ballot initiative will drive up GOP turnout and help John McCain keep nine electoral votes in the Republican column.
The strategy is bold in its desperation. Right-wingers are betting that Colorado citizens will vote to cut their own pay. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, employees in right to work states make between 4 and 8 percent less per year than those in other states.
Already, a poll shows 56 percent of the state opposes "right to work" laws. Even one of Colorado’s most influential business groups has said it has "no desire" for such irrational measures. But the right is not in a rational frame of mind.
Colorado conservatives are reeling after Republicans lost both the legislature and governor’s mansion for the first time in more than four decades. The local Republican Party is so unhinged that it hired a buffoon named Dick Wadhams to save it — the same Dick Wadhams who most recently made headlines running Sen. George "Macaca" Allen’s 2006 re-election campaign into the ground, effectively ending the Virginia lawmaker’s political career. Clearly, these are dire times for the right, and despair tends to deify the Nixons and the Wadhamses by embracing irrational extremism — whether YouTube-amplified racism or worker persecution inherent in "right to work" schemes.
The decision to play a bold, or "extreme" card is not difficult to understand. Here in the closing days of the most unpopular President in modern times, mired in a war without end, staring down the barrel of a rout in the House of Representatives, and with the economy free-falling through an undeclared-recession, why not throw a couple of Hail-Mary’s.
The fact that right-to-work apparently failed a half century ago doesn’t mean that people won’t vote against their own economic interests this time. From a purely mechanistic point of view, the decision to vote against your economic interests is easy to understand.
In a world of competing values and the need to make trade-offs, purchasing power can be swamped by other values. Two politicians who were successful playing the economics card were Ronald Reagan ("Morning in America,") and Bill Clinton ("It’s the economy stupid"). Whether or not the Democratic candidate will be able to, or even want to, ride that horse again in the face of the expected onslaught from the 9/11 party remains to be seen. "Right-to-work" seems like a losing gambit. Are the big four, guns, gays, and abortion, and now immigration, that tired out?
Tags: RobertFrank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, Red State, Blue State, Lefty, Populist, Peter Beinart, Council on Foreign Relations, Right to Work, Richard Nixon, David Sirota, Decision Making, Decision Quality
