Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
[M]issouri and Arkansas are conservative states.
Otherwise, Trump-supporting Republican Josh Hawley would not have knocked two-term Democrat Claire McCaskill out of the U.S. Senate in Tuesday’s election. Otherwise Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson would not so easily have dispatched his Democratic challenger. Nor would all four congressional districts have gone Republican, three of them by landslides.
Then the same voters raised their minimum wages. Missouri’s Proposition B got more votes than Hawley. In Arkansas, Issue 5 got more “yes” votes than Hutchinson. Come Jan. 1, almost 1 million workers in those states will get a pay hike.
Idaho, Utah and Nebraska are conservative states, too. Among them are three Republican governors, six Republican senators, and nine Republicans in the House.
All three just voted to accept the expanded Medicaid option of the Affordable Care Act.
Yes, that’s Obamacare, the program conservatives have loved to hate since it passed eight years ago. But 61 percent of Idaho voters, 53 percent of Nebraskans, and 54 percent in Utah decided that one key part of it was right for them. So 300,000 more people are expected to get health care coverage.
Or what about Florida, where roughly half the voters chose conservative Republicans for senator and governor (both races appear headed for recounts) and a majority adopted a constitutional amendment to make it harder for the legislature to raise taxes.
Then almost two-thirds of those voters restored voting rights to most felons after they have gotten out of prison. Support for that wasn’t solely a liberal position; some conservatives campaigned for it. But it isn’t not a liberal position, either.
So maybe the voters in all those states aren’t all that conservative. Or at least maybe they aren’t that conservative about everything.
Neither, it seems, are most people.
In fact, it’s hard to look at the results of referendums around the country, at the exit polls, and at other recent surveys without concluding that whatever they call themselves, when it comes to basic political opinion, most Americans are liberals.
Not left-wing. There’s not much in the election results or the polling to encourage the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. There aren’t many states or congressional districts where the candidate who proposes abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is likely to get elected.
But neither are there many where it’s smart politics to promise repealing the Clean Air Act or abolishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. When it comes to what the government should do to enhance prosperity, protect the rights of workers and consumers, preserve the natural world, and promote equality, a large majority of voters cling to the same center-left outlook that became dominant in the middle of the last century.
They’re for Social Security and Medicare and against cuts to either. They approve of labor unions. Seventy percent think the economic system favors the wealthy too much and
63 percent think it does not favor the poor enough.
Two-thirds of the poll respondents do not want the Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing abortion rights (and a plurality wishes Brett Kavanaugh was not on the Supreme Court). More than 70 percent think it’s important to elect more women and more members of racial minorities to office. Three-quarters think health care is the most important issue facing the country, and most of them believe the “government should be responsible” for making it available. Just about 60 percent believe that immigrants do the nation more good than harm and favor stronger gun control laws.
And they accept the scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer because of human activity, and that something should be done about it. Seventy percent told pollsters that they were very (43 percent) or somewhat (27 percent) concerned about climate change.
That doesn’t mean they’re ready to pay for it, at least not yet and perhaps not in just one state at a time. The decidedly liberal voters of Washington state, who overwhelmingly re-elected Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell and flipped one congressional district from red to blue, rejected by a 56-to-43 percent margin a proposal to put a carbon fee on fossil fuel emissions. By an even bigger margin, Arizonans turned down a proposal that would have required utilities to get half their power from renewable sources by 2030.
These were hardly the only referendums in which voters opted for the conservative position. In North Carolina, a plan to reduce the top state income tax rate was passed. Colorado rejected a plan to keep oil and gas rigs farther from homes and schools. Montanans turned down a plan to guarantee continued Medicaid expansion (the state already has it, for now), perhaps because that ballot proposal included a tax increase.
Nobody likes tax increases, at least on themselves, not even voters who hold generally liberal views.
But in most of these liberal defeats, voters were rejecting efforts to move policy farther to the left. There was almost no effort to weaken the center-left consensus of the last several decades. Even many of the voters who support President Donald Trump (whose approval-disapproval rating is a negative 45-54) share those center-left views on the economy, health care and the environment.
All of which raises an interesting question: if most people hold liberal views, why do more of them define themselves as conservatives?
The two nationwide polls – a standard exit poll by Edison Research and a more complicated survey called VoteCast operated by the University of Chicago’s NORC for the Associated Press and Fox News – reached similar conclusions on many questions, but none more similar than on ideological self-identification: more than a third of Americans consider themselves moderates, 36 percent call themselves conservatives, but only 27 or 28 percent (the meaningless difference between the two polls) say they are liberals.
The answer to that interesting question is complex, probably involving sub-cultural (and perhaps racial) loyalties and resentments, how definitions have changed over the years, and the inevitable aggravation that older voters feel about how things are changing.
The exit polls don’t answer that question, but may provide a clue. Asked whether there was “too much pressure to be politically correct these days,” 66 percent – mostly Republicans but a third of the Democrats, too — answered yes.
“Politically correct” is one of those phrases that means whatever the person using it thinks it means, another way of calling it meaningless. But in this case, perhaps useful. It could suggest that many voters who hold liberal views on bread-and-butter public policy issues just don’t like liberals.
Something for liberals to ponder.
