Opinion The presidential campaign is not real life
“The U.S. presidential election system — with winner-take-all states and the electoral college — warps the political process and even the way people see their own country. I would prefer the United States move to a national popular vote to choose its president. But even if that never happens, it’s critically important that Americans not understand the country based on our weird, distorting presidential campaigns.
The most obvious problem with our system is that we end up portraying states and even entire regions as politically monolithic. All states but Maine and Nebraska are winner-take-all in presidential elections: The candidate who finishes in first place gets all the electoral votes. So Texas and the rest of the South is firmly red, you learn from political coverage. But 5.3 million people in Texas voted for Joe Biden in 2020, more than the total he received in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont combined (4.9 million).
The 3.3 million New Yorkers (state not city) who voted for Donald Trump are more backers than he had in Indiana and Kentucky (3.1 million) put together. Trump won about the same amount of votes (around 1 million) in Oklahoma and Los Angeles County.
Yes, big cities and states have lots of people, and many of them back the nondominant party where they live. Duh. But these red-blue stereotypes seep into our perceptions more than we admit. When I moved from D.C. to Louisville a few years ago, I repeatedly had to explain to my friends and professional contacts who lived on the coasts that my life had not dramatically changed. I was still surrounded by people who hated Trump; a coffee shop was a four-minute walk from my new home. Kentucky is not one land mass of Republicans, but instead many small masses of liberals and even more masses of conservatives.
Follow Perry Bacon Jr.
I suspect Republicans in California and New York are similarly sick of hearing their states described as entirely Democratic.
There is a real red-blue state policy divide, because Republican politicians have almost no power in states such as Massachusetts; same for Democratic officials in Tennessee. But American voters are less divided by the state they live in than other factors, such as urban versus rural, Black versus White and evangelical versus nonevangelical.
The second problem caused by our state-by-state, winner-take-all system is that the interests of a few swing states become the center of presidential politics and therefore national discourse, while tens of millions of other Americans are ignored because they live in the wrong place. No offense to their residents, but Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin aren’t special. There are people in the 43 other states who wish Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would campaign where they live, instead of making another stop in the Atlanta or Philadelphia areas.
We are in the middle of a presidential campaign in which fracking is being discussed more than education, an issue that affects way more people, because Pennsylvania is a major hub of natural gas production. If Kentucky were a swing state, candidates would end up talking about coal too much.
Michigan and Wisconsin are among the states with the highest percentages of people working in manufacturing, which in part explains why presidents and presidential candidates are constantly touting the creation of new factory jobs, as opposed to focusing on hospitality and other industries that employ millions of Americans.
A third problem is that we link regions and states to one another based on their voting patterns in presidential races, as opposed to more logical and stronger connections. The best way to understand the United States in 2024 is that we have more than a dozen booming metropolitan areas (think Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, New York and San Francisco) that companies and people are flocking to; other metro areas that aren’t seeing such economic gains (Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis); and many rural places and states that are struggling.
You could also think of the country by race and region: New England and Appalachia are disproportionately White; the Southeast has more Black residents than other parts of the country; the Southwest is heavily Latino.
But in presidential elections, Wisconsin is connected to Pennsylvania, because they are both swing states, even though Wisconsin has more in common economically and culturally with Minnesota and Iowa. When I lived in D.C., no one thought their trip on Amtrak to Philadelphia was an adventure to the Midwest. It drives me crazy to read about the “Rust Belt” (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) and “Sun Belt” (Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.) Do Arizona and Nevada have much in common? Not really.
I assume we will keep our current system for the long term. Change would be controversial, and a constitutional amendment would be needed to get rid of the electoral college. So it’s vital, particularly in these last weeks before the presidential election, to remember that the America of the campaign trail, the debates and political news is not the real America. You are normal if you don’t have strong views on fracking or the best way to woo rural voters in Wisconsin. No one in Atlanta or Charlotte talks about their life in the Sun Belt.
Follow the campaign, vote for your favorite candidate — and then forget basically everything that was said about America during election season by the politicians and the people who cover them.“
No comments:
Post a Comment