At this point in election season, the political press starts making forays into the wilds of so-called Real America to try to find out what the voters are thinking. It can be an interesting exercise in the hands of journalists who have a feel for more than the usual "breakfast crowd at the diner" type of stories and find some insight that's helpful to understand the cross-currents that shape the electorate in any particular cycle. All too often, however, it's just a series of cliches and conventional wisdom, unfortunately.
We see tons of coverage of Iowa and New Hampshire, for obvious reasons. But when it comes to picking the brains of swing voters reporters always seem to head up to Wisconsin, the quintessential swing state. Back in 2020, just before the election, the New York Times sent a couple of reporters there to take the temperature of voters in the Badger State that former president Donald Trump barely won in 2016 to see what undecided swing voters were thinking four years later. They encountered people like this:
Ellen Christenson, a 69-year-old Wisconsinite, said she voted for former President Barack Obama twice before backing Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, in 2016. Now Ms. Christenson said she was torn between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and “could go either way.”
She said she was upset that Joe Biden hadn't denounced the Black Lives Matter protests strongly enough. As you can see, this is not a person who had what you might call a consistent political worldview.
The consensus formed by such dispatches was that though Biden was leading at that moment, people were moving toward Trump's law and order message. In the end, Biden barely won the state by 20,682 votes, almost exactly the same margin that Trump had sneaked in with four years before.
Twelve years before that, a young up-and-coming journalist by the name of Chris Hayes wrote a fascinating piece for The New Republic describing his experience as a canvasser for the League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Victory Project in the race between Sen. John Kerry and President George W. Bush. His insights from that unique perspective were very astute, ranging from the recognition that most undecided voters don't approach politics rationally, making it very difficult to appeal to them with the usual persuasion strategies, to the fact that a disturbing number of them were "crypto-racist isolationists." Remember, this was 2004, long before MAGA was a twinkle in Donald Trump's eye.
He also found that these folks were very interested in politics although they didn't "enjoy" it and neither did they seem to be able to connect it to their own lives in ways that made sense. Hayes said he saw that the worse things got with the war in Iraq, the better George W. Bush seemed to do with these people. He explained:
I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush’s Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn’t matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better.
He noticed that this same logic applied to other issues, such as health care and the deficit. It's not that they didn't believe John Kerry could actually fix things. They didn't believe anyone could. They blamed politicians in general, so "Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was."
John Kerry ended up winning Wisconsin that year — by 11, 484 votes. You can see why the state is considered such a perfect petri dish to examine the polarization of American politics and the mind of the swing voter.
The Washington Post recently sent two reporters to Door County, which they describe as "the swingiest place in the perennial battleground of Wisconsin," which has backed every presidential election’s winner since 2000. What they found is that voters are "tired of the turmoil" and chaos in our politics and don't see any improvements on the horizon:
The pandemic and inflation have already rattled folks, and the broader political backdrop — the impeachments, Trump’s torrent of falsehoods about the 2020 election, the Capitol insurrection, the band of hard-right Republicans ousting their speaker — has blocked out notice ofwhat both sides cast as accomplishments, such as the billions of dollars poured into updating the nation’s roads, bridges and ports. Even as the economy grows at the strongest pace in two years, and jobs continue to proliferate, signs of progress are easy to miss amid what voters see as screaming matches.
Right-wing pandemonium is drowning out the normal politics these people yearn for. And much like people holding Kerry as responsible as Bush for the debacle of the Iraq war, Biden is being held equally responsible for the nightmare that Trump has created of our political culture over the past six years. This is a feature of right-wing politics and it works like a charm.
It should also have been noted that of all the states in the country, this Wisconsin electorate is not only inundated with national political bedlam, but their state politics are just as crazed. The last few years have featured wild gerrymanders, recalls, radical governance by a legislative minority and more. No wonder they're exhausted.
As the Post reports of Wisconsin voters, "They long for compromise. They want to feel heard and understood. Most Americans, for instance, desire access to abortion, tighter restrictions on guns and affordable health care. Many wonder why our laws don’t reflect that." There is a reason. Democrats back all those things but Republicans block them. Voters may miss that order or operation, however, because they are tuning out due to the disorienting cacophony of right-wing lunacy.
As David Roberts wrote in this excellent analysis on the platform formerly known as Twitter, this article could have been framed as "the right's quest to make politics toxic & to destroy citizens' trust in basic political & media institutions is working" and that would have made it more clear. But in the end, there's no way to ignore what Trump and his henchmen have done, are currently in the process of implementing in the states, and are planning to do in the future. It would be total malpractice to ignore it. But there's something deeper going on here and clearly has been going on for some time.
Trump may have taken it to another level but for years Republican politicians have been cultivating cynicism about government so that they can carry out their toxic agenda without being held responsible for it. They make politics ugly and uncomfortable so that people will see the whole endeavor as something inherently negative and unworkable. In this polarized environment, all they have to do is convince a small sliver of the electorate that this is the natural order of things and they can win it all. The Democrats and the press can't shirk from exposing the right's craven agenda but they need to ensure that in the process they remind people that it doesn't have to be that way.
