National Post (National Edition)
Inside the American Mind
U.S. voters are living in different worlds. Tuesday's election is a measure of those worlds
Polling conducted over the last two weeks offered up a curious tidbit. Fully a third of Americans think Joe Biden is so disabled by dementia he is not mentally capable of holding high office.
Most everyone else, on the other hand, wants to elect him president.
How can things seem so different to different people?
It is a lifelong riddle. Schoolchildren learn about perspective. High school students start considering paradigms, how shared ways of thinking change. Maybe in college they encounter the German word “Weltanschauung,” or world view, for the set of basic assumptions and attitudes about what is real and true, or illusory and false, shared among a society or tribe, but not universally.
These are all useful concepts for zooming out on the anthropology of the US voter, who next week makes an unusually momentous electoral decision.
From Canada, it can seem baffling at every level. Americans do not just see things differently than other Americans. They are not just thinking about things differently. People there are living in different worlds. This election is a measure of those worlds.
Harold Clarke is a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas who researches electoral choice in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. With colleague Marianne Stewart, he is running Cometrends, a large representative national survey of Americans, both before and after the election, with a local oversample for Texas, which has emerged in the final days as a potential swing state.
The survey polled 2,500 people online, for a nationally representative sample with a margin of error of two per cent, in the last two weeks of October.
The questions aim to measure qualitative factors about patriotism and politics, about what issues face the country most urgently, and what are the proper limits of democratic protest and presidential power.
A deep societal fault line is clearly evident in the numbers.
Results this week closely tracked other national polling by showing Democrat Joe Biden leads Republican incumbent Donald Trump in voting intention 56-44 per cent.
Because of the intricacies of the Electoral College, however, the race is tighter than that suggests.
“American politics is deeply divided in terms of partisanship and ideology,” Clarke said in an interview. “The other part is the valence politics, the performance part.”
“It's pretty intense this year. The thing is just the intensity of the emotions on both sides, particularly on the Democratic side. The hatred of Trump is really remarkable,” Clarke said. “This is an exaggerated version of the partisan and ideological division we typically see. It's not different in kind, but it's different in intensity.”
Some things are constant background, unchanging despite the turmoil of events. Racism, for example, was identified as the single most important issue by only 12 per cent of Democrats, four per cent of Republicans and eight per cent of independents.
A series of questions on “racial resentment” show reliable partisan effects. Democrats and Republicans look like mirror images when asked how strongly they agree that, for example, police treat minorities with courtesy and respect, or use excessive force.
A similar mirror effect shows up in whether Americans think “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for African Americans to work their way out of the lower class,” or that African Americans should “overcome prejudice and work their way up” as other minority groups have done.”
But those questions “tend to reinforce existing cleavages,” Clarke said. “In that regard, it doesn't really change things. All that stuff 's still there at the individual level, and to some extent it gets reinforced this year because of Black Lives Matter. But that isn't really what's going to determine the election.”
The wild card, obviously, is a virus.
“The pandemic is the extra move,” Clarke said. “COVID didn't kill Trump physically, but it may well have killed him politically.”
Trump's re-election strategy was to rely on a strong economy to carry him through. The pandemic upended that plan, muting his message, affecting everyone. Dissatisfaction with his handling of the pandemic now cuts broadly, the survey project shows, such that even 75 per cent of Republicans list the pandemic as at least a top three issue.
“This is the issue that looks like it's deciding the election,” Clarke said. “He's way down, not just among Democrats but independents. This issue has really hurt him.”
In 2016, Trump won narrowly in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. “Move a few people away from him, and he loses,” Clarke said. This is what appears to have happened.
There are other important divides. The gender gap appears to be shrinking. Women moved away from Trump in 2016, and now men are moving away from him, such that women are 57-42 per cent for Biden, and men are 54-46 per cent for Biden. As Clarke put it, even one man in 20 moving away from Trump could determine a Biden victory.
Race also figures significantly. White people are 56-44 per cent for Trump vs. Biden. Blacks are 90-10 per cent for Biden over Trump. Hispanics and Asians also skew strongly Democrat.
The lines between worlds are also not always perfectly clear. The survey shows there are ideological liberals who intend to vote for Trump, and proportionally more conservatives who intend to vote for Biden. Ideological moderates are a smaller demographic, and they lean heavily to Biden, 70-30 per cent.
But the notion of competing world views offers a unique perspective on how America got here and how division was key to the Trump presidency all along, according to Ronald Beiner, professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
He points to an observation that Steve Bannon, an architect of the Trump 2016 victory, made to Roger Cohen of the New York Times last year, about Bannon's efforts to foster Trump-style nationalist political momentum in Europe: “This is not an era of persuasion. It's an era of mobilization. People now move in tribes. Persuasion is highly overrated.”
“In other words, we don't even aspire to share a common world,” said Beiner. “We simply fight it out, with the most powerful prevailing over the less powerful.”
This is a world view that, as Beiner says, recalls the tough guy Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, who argues that might makes right, that “justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger,” before Socrates eventually refutes him.
“Of course, all the vehicles of Trumpism and Bannonism, not just Breitbart (the news site Bannon once ran), are doing their utmost to discredit possibilities of shared truth, and drive people further apart, into self-enclosed `tribes,'” he said.
Next week's election is more a referendum than a choice, Clarke said. Biden could have been anyone. It is a measure of Trump versus Non Trump, a test of allegiance.
Partly, this is because of the singularity of Trump's character. But, according to this survey project, it is mostly because of the pandemic, and concern over how he has handled it.
COVID looms over all the other issues, dramatically. It is the only thing that comes close to being a unifying demographic force, and its effect does not benefit Trump. It is the single most important issue for 39 per cent of Americans, far ahead of the economy at 16 per cent.
“Biden is a very weak candidate,” Clarke said. “In normal times he would be defeated.”