I like to start my mornings by listening to “The
Daily,” a New York Times podcast that produces new shows every weekday morning.
Last week, “The Daily” ran a show about Missouri Democrats and their struggle to retain power in a once-purple state. Missouri used to vote for a mix of Republicans and Democrats in statewide and national elections. In 2016, however, Democrats lost every statewide election except one, and now hold only 25% of seats in the legislature. Joan Barry, a long-time state legislator, recognized that many Republican-voting Missourians are pro-lifers whose political beliefs align closely with the Democratic party on all issues except abortion. This summer, she suggested that the Missouri Democratic Committee modify their platform to include pro-life Democrats. She “worried that the Democratic Party had moved too far left on abortion,” and hoped the change would bring the party back to the center.
Perhaps Barry is familiar with Harold Hotelling’s spatial model of competition. Hotelling argued that if voters were spaced linearly between two options, candidates would be forced to move towards the middle to gain more votes. This paints a rosy view of democracy as always tending towards a middle ground. If Hotelling’s idea applied to Missouri politics, we would expect that Barry’s move would bring the Democratic Party closer to the center on the abortion issue, expanding the Democratic tent and bringing in more voters. The reaction to the changed platform from Missouri Democrats was swift and scathing: immediately, hundreds of progressives hopped on social media to express their anger. Many vowed to stop contributing financially to the party. Where did Hotelling and Barry go wrong? Hotelling’s model requires that voters would prefer whatever option is “closest” -- even extreme progressives or conservatives prefer centrist candidates who lean slightly to the left or right, respectively. According to our Downes reading, Arthur Smithies improved Hotelling’s model “by introducing elastic demand at each point on the scale” (117). When a party moves too far towards the center, it risks losing or “alienating” the voters at the tail end. This is what happened to Missouri’s Democratic Party. While Barry’s move could have brought in voters with moderate or conservative views on abortion, the change alienated those voters with views farther to the left. Ultimately, the Missouri Democratic Party changed their platform back, suggesting that even a slight shift towards the center lost the party more voters than it gained.
1 comment:
Jordan -- thought provoking post. This isn't a subject we usually hear about or consider! I wonder how you might think a similar scenario would play out in different states with different voter distributions and candidates. The two races that I'm thinking about that might be interesting to analyze would be Roy Moore v. Doug Jones in Alabama, and the upcoming Senate election in Va (Kaine v. Stewart). In your example, evidence suggested that Smithies' improved version of Hotelling's model was more accurate there. I wonder how a move like this would play out in the other cases that I've suggested. Jones/Moore in Alabama was close, within 1.5%. I think that in such a state like Alabama, Jones could have hopped on the pro-life train, and an enormous number of Republican, independent, or write-in voters would have switched their vote to Jones. Alabama is a very red state, but Virginia is a different story. Tim Kaine is Catholic, but surprisingly not a pro-life candidate. It'll be interesting to see how these races could go/would have gone in the hypothetical scenario that the Democrat brought a pro-life agenda into their platform. Of course the bigger question is how do voter demographics and preferences influence their elasticity of voting, and how does it change the spatial model of competition?
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