Winning the narrative after the election

How the 2016 "identity politics" narrative gave us the Biden presidency

Every election is followed by an attempt to explain its outcome. Just this month, for example, we were told that Democrats did well in elections in Kentucky and Virginia because of reactions to the Dobbs abortion decision. Is that true? Possibly, even probably, but what does it mean for elections next year? Will it change how campaigns are run, and how voters think about candidates? How does that narrative about the election change the behavior of voters and parties going forward?

This is a subject political scientist Pavielle Haines and I looked into between the 2016 and 2020 elections. (Our paper has just come out at Political Research Quarterly.) One of the common explanations of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump was her reliance on “identity politics.” As Mark Lilla and others argued, Clinton’s appeals to groups like women, people of color and the LGBT community left white working-class men feeling alienated from and unappreciated by the Democratic Party. They responded by voting for Donald Trump, who was speaking directly to them. A different message focusing on economic gains, rather than the needs of marginalized communities, the argument goes, would have allowed Clinton to win. Regardless of whether this argument is true, it showed up a lot in op/eds, punditry panels, and speeches, and we were curious what affect it might have had on Democratic voters as they considered their choices for 2020.

We ran two waves of a survey in late 2018 and early 2020 among white and Black Democrats. For each wave, we showed half the respondents a fictitious newspaper clipping that said Democrats lost the 2016 election and failed to take the Senate in 2018 because the party focused too much on identity politics and didn’t address universal issues like the economy. The other half of the respondent group was shown a clipping about Democratic disappointments in 2016 and 2018 that did not reference identity politics. We then asked the participants why they thought Democrats lost in 2016 and had them participate in something called a conjoint study, which asked them to choose between two hypothetical Democratic 2020 candidates, randomizing for gender, race and ideology, in a series of trial heats. Here’s an example of one of those trials — people saw ten different versions of this.

The results of the study were telling. Reading the identity politics story seemed to have little effect on white men. It didn’t make them change their preferences for the type of candidate they wanted to see get the Democratic presidential nomination. However, the narrative had a substantial effect on white women. Upon reading the identity politics story, white women became more supportive of the Democratic Party nominating a man in 2020, and more supportive of a nominee who favored a general message about economic improvement rather than a message about addressing systemic inequalities in the workplace and the criminal justice system.

There was a similar effect among Black men, as well; the identity politics narrative seemed to make them less supportive of a candidate who promised to address systemic inequalities, and also less supportive of a Latino candidate. There did not seem to be much of an effect among Black women in our study.

The differing reactions across these groups is notable. The identity politics narrative doesn’t really tell white men anything they don’t already largely believe. White Democratic men were very likely to already accept that interpretation of the election, which tells them that Clinton’s loss was someone else’s fault. For the others, as we speculate in the paper,

For white women, gender is not a central political consideration…. While white women may prefer a female candidate, they do not see it as imperative for the well-being of their group. Black men, with their stronger sense of group consciousness, are more hesitant (but not unwilling) to accept and act on the identity politics loss narrative. Black women possess the strongest sense of minority consciousness due to their intersecting racial and gender categories. Given this, embracing the identity politics loss narrative may be tantamount to a betrayal of their core personal and group identity.

What this paper does suggest, though, is that the identity politics narrative was more than just idle chatter, more than just political observers and journalists trying to make sense of an unexpected election result. It steered the Democratic Party, or at least some of its constituent members, in a particular direction for 2020. It made some Democrats (especially white women and Black men) want a more moderate white male nominee, even among the largest and most diverse field of candidates in its history. It’s not necessarily the reason that Joe Biden got the Democratic nomination that year, but it made the nomination of him, or someone who looked and sounded like him, more likely.

Anyway, I encourage you to check out the paper.