Liberalism and campaign rationalism
The left needs to stop thinking about campaign messaging as an exercise in education.
Matt Huber, writing in the New York Times, argues that for a “shift among progressive Democrats on the campaign trail” that de-prioritizes climate change and focuses on affordability. Later in that piece, he writes that “If Democrats reclaim the House and Senate, their first priority must be to materially improve workers’ lives, rather than propose a grand vision of an energy transition.” The article is predictably taking some serious heat from the left, but I think this is mostly because everyone is conflating these two statements.
As a matter of campaign strategy, Huber’s argument is hard to contest. The great challenge of climate change has always been that while most Americans agree that it is happening, and while a plurality will even say that they “worry a great deal about it,” hardly anyone wants to make it a priority. Even at its peak of public concern in late 2021 only 16% of Americans considered it the most important issue, according to YouGov; today, that number is down to 5.8%. So while there is, as Huber’s critics insist, a good amount of consensus that climate change is a problem, the public just doesn’t think we should focus on it.
The economy, in contrast, remains the primary concern for most Americans. Huber is right to note that focus on this issues is significantly class driven, with more concern about climate change among the better off and more concern about the economy among poorer voters, but this point is probably overstated; even among postgrads, for example, concern about prices is currently 7 points higher than concern about climate change.
Faced with this reality, the liberal-left is faced with two choices — and ideology seems to be playing a major role in which response one prefers. Because while liberals and the left both get that campaign messaging is about winning votes, both have very different ideas for how this is done.
In liberalism, democracy isn’t just a mechanism for society to make decisions; it’s also a forum for rational deliberation. Candidates, in their campaigns, lay out their proposed agenda, and then the public evaluates the agenda that you laid out in your campaign and decides whether or not to support it. This is why debates play such a major role in the process of American elections, and it’s also why politicians are expected to stick to the policy agenda they outlined.
So liberalism’s rationalistic approach to campaigning has direct consequences for how we deal with climate change. If you want to do something about climate change, then you need to run on the issue and persuade voters that they should make it a priority. This is true whether they’re disposed to make it a priority or not; one does it not because it is convenient, but because this is what you have to do to uphold the process of rational deliberation. In that light, polling on what voters actually care about doesn’t really matter except as a way of gauging how well your persuasive efforts are going. It should not dictate what you campaign on.
The main problem with this perspective, of course, is that American politics do not actually operate as disciplined exercises in rationalistic deliberation. Because both our system of campaign finance and our mass media are dominated by capital, capitalism shapes everything from the political options we are offered to the campaign strategies they pursue. Today political campaigns largely rely on flooding propaganda rather than rational persuasion, trying to saturate voters with inflammatory or demotivational messages by pouring millions into ads, particularly near election day. The rich prefer a discourse dominated by flooding tactics because the success of flooding is a direct function of how much money one can invest into it.
In the campaign environment capitalism has created it is utter suicide to try to rely on rationalistic strategies while the opposition is shouting you down. That is why in the long term the left’s goal must be to simply dismantle capitalism so that flooding stops being a useful strategy. In the short term, however, our goal in an election is simply to get as many votes for left-wing politics as possible — and nothing more. Elections may be an opportunity to educate the public and set up a thorough referendum on competing platforms, but for now that cannot be the priority.
For this reason, the left should rely on a very different approach to elections on issues like climate change. You should tell the truth about your position on climate, and you should make it a political priority, but neither of these points imply that you should make it a central issue in your campaign. If voters say that they that what they care about is affordability then that is what you focus on. If they want to know what your plans are for climate change they can visit your website.
This is why I think both Huber’s piece and its critics are fairly misguided. Both are talking as if what someone does in office has to be dictated by their campaign messaging. As a matter of historical fact this is not how democratic politics have ever functioned in the United States, mostly just because politicians flat-out lie. But even without lying, left politicians can assure voters that they will do what the voters want on affordability — and if they’re persuasive enough on this issue then they won’t need to spend a lot of time on the others. This, as I noted a few months back, is precisely how Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia despite backing positions on trans issues that are relatively unpopular in this state: she simply focused on the economy.
Once we decouple elections from the project of liberal rationalism a lot of these apparent conflicts between political necessity and political expedience disappear. If I were running as a socialist presidential candidate in 2028, I would mention in my official platform that I plan to commit trillions to the Green Climate Fund to combat climate change — and I would spend roughly 100% of my public speaking and media engagements talking about affordability. Save political education for public schools and DSA.
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