Jencunas: Trump, Sanders and the Screw-You Voter

Thursday, July 09, 2015

Brian Jencunas, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have more in common than either of them would ever admit. This is obscured by how their different rhetorical styles – Trump is a bellicose billionaire while Sanders is a soft-spoken socialist. Despite this glaring difference, they’re waging similar Presidential campaigns, giving voice to anti-government frustrations while peddling easy solutions to complex problems. Most importantly, neither has any chance of being their party’s nominee for President. Instead, they appeal to a narrow group of “screw you voters,” a term my political mentor Jay Goodman once used to refer to the voters who support Bob Healey during his periodic campaigns here in Rhode Island.

Screw you voters think the government is incompetent, corrupt, or both. They despise both political parties, choosing their partisan allegiance, if they have one, based on which party they hate less. Most importantly, they respond to anger, not issues. Republican screw you voters don’t want to listen to Marco Rubio explain his plans to reform the Earned Income Tax Credit, they want The Donald to remind them that Mexican rapists and greedy Chinese have ruined a once-great nation. Democratic screw you voters don’t want to hear Hillary Clinton explain that a cause of over-incarceration is that prisons are forced into being mental health institutions because the country treats drug addiction as a crime, not just a disease. Instead, they want to hear Bernie explain that prisons are part of a sinister “prison-industrial complex” that conned the government into incarcerating minorities.

To Trump and Sanders, all the nation’s problems can be reduced to a morality play where the government has cheated the average American by failing to implement the simple, common sense solutions to the problems plaguing America. Both use different nouns and verbs in their narratives. Where Trump says our government has failed to stand up to immigrants and foreign governments because our politicians are stupid and weak, Bernie says our government has failed to stand up to billionaires and multinational companies because our politicians (except for him) are owned by the shadowy global elite. For Trump, the solutions are a wall on the Mexican border, somehow paid for by Mexico, and tariffs on foreign imports. For Bernie, the solutions are a large tax increase on the wealthy and a full-fledged regulatory assault on big banks. But while their words are different, both are playing populist Mad Libs, filling in the blanks in their speeches with clear villains and easy cure-alls to America’s problems.

To be fair, Sanders is a more serious candidate than Trump, though that’s a lot like being a better behaved tennis player than John McEnroe. Trump has adopted the Republican Party after spending most of his life supporting Democrats, Bernie has been a far-left socialist for his entire political life. Bernie stays away from the outright hate speech that’s been the hallmark of Trump’s remarks about immigrants, and his speeches attracts large crowds without paying for them.

Still, both Trump and Sanders attract outsized media attention compared to their actual chances of becoming President. To use another sports analogy, they’re like Pacman Jones, the mediocre cornerback who was a constant topic on ESPN for his off-the-field behavior. Trump and Sanders don’t get press coverage because of their brilliant policy ideas or their likelihood of becoming President. Trump gets coverage because outrageous, high-octane rhetoric is good television. Sanders gets attention because the media likes political conflict and desperately needs conflict on the Democratic side of the election. They are happy to inflate Sanders’ chances to get what they want.

Because of their media appeal, both Trump and Sanders crowd out other, better candidates. Whatever other faults they might have, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Scott Walker are more serious candidates than Trump, sharing his anti-immigration, populist messages, without veering into the bizarre rhetoric of The Donald. Most importantly, none have a history of claiming that President Obama was born in Kenya, while Trump embraced the conspiracy theory during his Presidential flirtations in 2012. These conservatives rely in part on Trump’s contingent of screw you voters, which is why they’ve been reluctant to criticize Trump no matter how bizarre his antics become. The longer he stays in the race and in the media spotlight, the more Trump prevents better conservative options from earning votes.

On the Democratic side, Sanders crowds out Martin O’Malley, an unabashed liberal who, unlike Sanders, actually has a record of accomplishments. As Governor of Maryland, O’Malley raised taxes and fought for gay rights while also instituting successful, technocratic reforms like a state-wide system for measuring the success of government programs. He’s firmly to Hillary Clinton’s left, but so long as Sanders is in the race, O’Malley won’t be getting attention or votes.

Despite their ability to command attention, both Trump and Sanders have an insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of their Presidential nomination – screw you voters are a minority of both parties. This is why Trump’s current second-place standing is a mirage. Instead, he’s one of the weakest candidates in the Republican race. He polls in second place now because it’s a crowded field. While it’s true that 12% of Republican voters told a CNN poll that Trump is their favored candidate, polling also shows that Trump has one of the highest unfavorable ratings of any Republican candidate. That’s more important, since it means that as candidates drop out, their voters aren’t backing Trump. His current polling numbers are his ceiling. Once the field narrows, support will consolidate around a handful of candidates, leaving Trump near the bottom with 12% rather than near the top.

For Sanders, his status as a screw you candidate rather than a real liberal alternative is demonstrated by his utter inability to appeal to minority voters, an essential part of the Democratic electorate. All the liberal Democrats who either beat their moderate opponent or at least won more than a handful of states were candidates who appealed to both white liberals and minority voters. That was the coalition that propelled Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and allowed Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson to wage protracted campaigns in 1980 and 1988, respectively. In contrast, Democrats who appealed only to white liberals, like Bill Bradley in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, or John Edwards in 2008, all performed poorly at the ballot box.

When the post-election books are written about the 2016 election, they won’t be talking about the surprising success of Trump and Sanders. Instead, they’ll be talking about how both candidates’ campaigns fizzled out long before they posed a serious threat to their party’s nominee. That’s because screw you voters are loud, but not numerous. A campaign that channels their frustrations can get lots of attention, but thankfully it’s not enough to win a Presidential nomination.