Crowding Out & Partisan Issue Priorities

Our issue prioritization question from our Climate and Energy poll has turned out to be a rich text! In addition to the online chatter when it first dropped, there’s a new G. Elliott Morris post using our crosstabs that I think deserves more discussion.

Background: The data here is a combination of three questions—one asking voters for their priorities, one asking what they believe to be the Democratic party’s priorities, and one asking the same about Republicans. Full question text is available in our crosstabs and toplines, which you can access on our website. (You can replicate all the charts in this post yourself, if you feel like it.)

One thing that jumps out in the crosstabs is that voters basically agree on their top priority, no matter their partisanship. It’s affordability, always. Republicans? Affordability. Democrats? Affordability. Independents? Affordability again. This is in line with other polling, and I think doesn’t really come as a surprise. Americans have been deeply concerned with high prices for a while now.

Of course, the real question is what can each party do to get more in line with voters and thus win more votes. In his post, Morris argues that because Independents are more likely to report affordable prices as a top priority for Democrats than for Republicans, it is actually *Republicans* who are out of step with their focus.

While I agree Republicans are *also* out of step, I think this is missing the biggest takeaway from the data on Independents: They think Democrats have no clear priority. Because Democrats are seen as having a very scattered focus and caring about many issues at once, it crowds out issues like affordability where voters are more aligned with them. Voters care about both positioning and focus, and having their top issue be just one of many priorities isn’t a particularly compelling case for their vote.

Let’s take a deeper look. (Also, love to see people actually using the crosstabs!)

Independents and Crowding Out

Here are our crosstabs plotted for Independents. I want to stress that Independents are not the same thing as swing voters, but since I don’t have a crosstab for swing voters in this dataset, we’ll make do. (Also keep in mind that our sample here is battleground state voters.)

It is true that Independents place higher priority on affordable prices, healthcare, and jobs and wages than they believe either party does. On affordability, they think Democrats are more in line with them than Republicans (but not super close). On healthcare, Democrats are much closer. Republicans are winning on jobs and wages, but again neither party is very close. I’d agree that both parties could stand to focus more on affordability, and that healthcare is a real weak point for Republicans. However, I don’t think this chart looks like very good news for Democrats either.

For me, what jumps out of this chart is how uncertain Independents are about what, exactly, Democrats are focusing on. Definitely not immigration, probably not crime, and definitely healthcare, but everything else is in the same approximate range. This is the same phenomenon we saw in our chart of what voters overall believed: Democrats aren’t seen as having a clear single focus.

Of course, it’s not like having a single focus is necessarily a panacea. Republicans have that focus on immigration, and voters certainly do not care about it as much as Republicans do. Rather, the hazard of the broad priority set is crowding out. Voters are incredibly clear about their priorities: healthcare, prices, jobs and wages. It’s not that they think Democrats don’t care about those things; it’s more that they think Democrats are trying to care about a lot of things, all the time. Voters don’t seem to be persuaded by the idea that you can care about everything at once and still give sufficient focus to each issue. With limited air time, and extremely limited voter attention spans, this broad set of priorities means you’re not spending enough time talking about affordability. It’s something of a curse for Democrats that their compassion and concern for many things (which voters appreciate about them) means they end up pulled in a variety of directions (which voters hate).

I read this “crowding out” phenomenon as the answer to the obvious second question raised by Morris’ post: If Independents are so much more in line with Democrats, why aren’t they Democrats?

Perceptions vs. Reality

Another point made in the post is that because Democrats see the Democratic Party as talking more about affordability, any perception that Democrats focus “too much” on other issues is a mirage created by right wing media. I take two issues with this point.

First, Democratic perceptions of their party are not inherently more accurate than out-party perceptions. Partisans of all stripes are getting their information through a wild mix of media, chatter, and a handful of actual party statements. If you flip this idea around, Republicans are much more likely to believe their party is focusing on jobs and wages, and not focusing on abortion. I’m unclear if that is “more accurate” in any useful way. Also, parties don’t get full control over their image and perceptions even in a hypothetically ideal news environment. Republicans are going to push talking points about issues that are bad for Democrats, and vice versa.

Second, “too much focus on Y” can often mean “doing things I don’t like or care about on Y.” One entirely plausible read is that Democrats are reporting Republicans as focusing on abortion not because they think it is a meaningfully large percentage of statements from Republicans, but because they find any Republican actions or statements on abortion to be too much, due to their policy disagreement. One might have a high tolerance for Democrats offhand mentioning abortion without feeling it was a “focus,” but interpret those same offhand mentions as a huge focus when coming from a Republican. The concept of focus is inherently tied up in issue positioning, and this question is limited in ability to separate the two.

Both Parties Struggle

I don’t think you can look at this data and see a clear win for either party. Republicans are definitely focusing too much on immigration (although, as I wrote in my last post about this, I’m unsure how much that’s current events vs. real policy disagreements). Democrats are trying to focus on everything, and falling behind on the core issues voters care about.

I think I’ve said “affordability” enough times in this post, but the boring conclusion is this: You really cannot ever talk about it enough. It is a clear priority for all voters, and both parties would do well to pay attention. The crowd-out effect means that talking about other issues can reduce your perceived focus on affordability, even if you do talk about it. “Focus” doesn’t necessarily match up to literal time spent talking about an issue. Voters want to see that their priorities aren’t just one of a basket of issues, and since their information is mediated through coverage, even a single mention of a non-priority issue can make it seem like a huge focus. Democrats seem to be suffering from their big-heartedness, but caring about something doesn’t have to mean talking about it. Voters are primed to believe that Democrats care about everything other than their pocketbooks, so Democrats have to work twice as hard to convince them otherwise.