It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

[babylonsister]

https://prospect.org/politics/it-dont-mean-a-thing-if-it-aint-got-that-swing/

The American Prospect
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
With apologies to Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington—and contradicting a lot of bad political science—there are still plenty of swing voters. That’s good news for Democrats.
by Robert Kuttner
October 7, 2021

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The good news is that the conventional wisdom is substantially wrong. It’s true, at the level of aggregate statistics, that there has been less ticket-splitting over time. But if you unpack the aggregates and look at individual elections for House, Senate, and governorships, the swing voter is alive and well—and worth courting.

That means finding ways to win over both independents and Republicans is a worthwhile enterprise, especially as Trump and his enablers get crazier and crazier.

Incidentally, this does not mean repairing to the center, à la New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, aka the Congressman from Wall Street. His Fifth District is a lot more progressive than he is. Polls show that voters in frontline districts tend to support Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan. In Gottheimer’s own district, 61 percent of voters and 92 percent of Democrats support Build Back Better.

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The point is that some candidates are too far right, even for people who normally vote Republican. And given that Trump is spending the next year trying to oust more moderate Republicans in favor of lunatic fringe candidates like himself, that is good news indeed.

What about the vanishing independent voter? With voters tending to resent politicians in general, Pew finds that 38 percent define themselves as independents. But if you dig deeper, most of those “lean” either Democrat or Republican. Even so, Pew reports, 7 percent are true independents. According to Pew, that number has not changed much in recent years. That’s a lot of voters worth courting.

Now, Biden just has to get some version of Build Back Better enacted, with real benefits for real people—in red states as well as blue ones.