What does Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) want?
That is, what is the thing she is hoping to get from the legislative package her party is trying to finalize? It’s apparent that other Democrats are not quite sure; she met with President Biden on Tuesday to discuss the bill but reportedly is unwilling to get into the weeds on it until a parallel, bipartisan infrastructure bill is passed. So into the general limbo that is federal legislating, we push the uncertainty of what a Democrat wants from a Democratic bill that other Democrats aren’t sure about anyway, in part because it’s still not clear what it looks like and in part because the partisan bill was supposed to move in concert with the bipartisan one. If this is confusing to you, that simply means that you’re fully up to speed on the moment.
The moment highlights a central problem with politics: It is fundamentally irrational, deeply beholden to guessing games about how certain people think other people will react to what they do, and entirely intertwined not with human logic but human emotion. Politics is about heart not brain.
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Yet it is also bounded by pointed efforts to objectively measure what people actually think, efforts that are themselves quickly basted with subjective assessment. So we get things such as this:
The intent of this is clear. The White House wants people to understand that the Biden-Democrats proposal for increased funding for various programs has the support of most of the country. This was how Biden described his vision of “unity” earlier this year: passing legislation that most Americans supported. And here’s an example of such legislation, so pass it!
The problem, of course, is that there's a lot of wiggle room even just around these polls. It's weird, for example, that the White House included that Pew Research Center poll even if it was honest; 49 percent is obviously not majority support. What's more, the results of those polls depend on how the question was asked and who it was presented to. Pew's 49 percent support followed this question:
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“A proposed reconciliation package contains about $3.5 trillion in funding over the next ten years for universal pre-K education, expanding Medicare, reducing carbon emissions, and other projects. From what you’ve seen and heard, do you favor or oppose this package?”
Fox News found that 56 percent of Americans favored the package when phrased like this:
"Do you favor or oppose the bill being considered by the U.S. House that would allocate an additional three and a half trillion dollars toward infrastructure, including spending to address climate change, health care and childcare?”
What’s the difference? Ending with child care? Using the phrase “climate change” instead of “carbon emissions”? The pool of respondents? When the poll was in the field? Margin of error variance?
These are the sorts of things that prompt pollsters to pull out their hair. How do you ask about this, particularly given that it’s probably going to change to some extent over the short term? It’s a bit like asking what the temperature was on a given day; it depends on where and when you measure.
Pollsters ask these questions because it’s useful to understand how the public views what government is doing, however imprecise that measurement may be. Or, really, they ask these questions because they are hired by media organizations, nonprofits and elected officials to gauge how people view them. For news organizations, the intent is to inform an audience about public consensus. For politicians, the intent is to evaluate the extent of political cover they’ll have on a position — or, often, to establish that cover.
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It’s useful to explain that phrase. Politicians are devoutly risk-averse. None wants to be the person who can be pointed to as the sole reason something unpopular passed or something popular failed which is why you’ll often see contentious issues pass with small clusters of votes: Lawmakers, like antelopes, herd together for protection. Polling gives them a sense of the extent of the popularity of legislation — or allows them, in the manner of the White House, to argue that something is popular enough that they ought to be praised for supporting it.
The problem, of course, is that this idea of “cover” is itself subjective. In the case of Sinema, she's not worried about what America thinks about a bill, she's presumably worried about what Arizona thinks about it. And there polling is sketchier. There have been polls evaluating support in her state for the Democratic bill but only sporadically and only within the same sorts of constraints of wording and timing that muddies the water surrounding the White House's argument.
The other problem is that elected officials presumably understand that all of this sort of analysis of how people feel about legislation and where support lies and so on is fundamentally disconnected from how people vote. We spend a lot of time talking about the probable effects of certain decisions made by politicians on their election chances but have to acknowledge that such effects are almost always overstated.
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Decisions made by lawmakers can certainly affect their careers, as evidenced recently by the decision of Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) not to seek reelection after facing abuse from former president Donald Trump and his supporters for supporting Trump’s impeachment earlier this year. But votes on things such as funding packages are generally forgotten in short order or subsumed under other issues as campaigns approach. The nationalization of elections, measurable in both the House and the Senate, stems from voters being very aware of the political conversation that swirls on cable news and presidents, and from being far less aware of details about their own lawmakers besides the parenthesized letter that sits next to their name on a ballot. This is not a generous assessment of the American voter, but the available evidence suggests that it is as generous as is deserved.
Let’s again focus on Sinema as an example. Which of these ads do you think would have the most effect on her campaign in 2024, positive or negative:
An ad touting how she sided with President Biden on a funding package. An ad arguing that she worked independently to craft a better package. An ad attacking her for supporting $3.5 trillion in new spending as deficits surge higher.
The correct answer, of course, is: Who knows? If I’d asked three years ago what the most important issue in American politics would be at the moment, would you have said “the pandemic”? Many things change and quickly. Making efforts to rationally suss out where things go is a fool’s errand in the best of circumstances. But if literally nothing else were to change between now and then or if Sinema were on the ballot in two weeks, it’s still not entirely obvious which of those ads, if any, would have the most effect. That’s probably true even if her campaign has the best available polling in hand.
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What we do know is that a poll conducted in June found that Republicans were more approving of Sinema’s performance as senator than were Democrats. Arizona is a purple state and, while her approval rating overall in that poll was no different from that of her colleague Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), that she is on a course where some Republicans might simply decide not to vote against her in three years, even if they don’t vote for her, is probably some consolation for continuing on the current path.
Of course, there’s also the human element. One thing that is true about politicians is that all of them, every single one at every level at some point or another, has had a vision flash before their eyes of standing on the west side of the U.S. Capitol at noon on some Jan. 20, hand on a Bible. This does not mean that they all want to be president, necessarily; it means, instead, that there is an element of their engagement in politics that is centered on the excitement and energy of being elected. I have to assume that it is fun to be the person at the heart of the deal, that there is something thrilling about walking into the White House to insist to the president of the United States that he’s going to have to do better. It can be politically useful to be that person, sure. But it’s also part of that vision of what being A Powerful Senator is about.
You’ll notice that, with the exception of the polling questions, no part of the preceding assessment focuses on what the bill at issue actually does. No part of it gets into where the money would be spent and what benefits would result. As noted at the outset, it’s not clear which of those details are driving Sinema’s considerations and discussions. What is the thing she sees as important that is not being presented? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pushes back on criticism of the bill by asking which beneficiaries should be stripped of support: Working families? The homeless? This is also honed rhetoric, of course, but it’s a fair question to ask.
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If politics were purely rational, the cost-benefit analysis of legislation for Americans broadly would be the primary motivator for decision-making. Instead, the cost-benefit analysis generally shifts to the elected officials themselves while they and their allies try to present this shift as reflecting objective rationality — and while that shifted analysis is itself mired in assumptions and prejudices.
Government by the people necessarily means governance that is driven in part by human foibles.