Marc Hetherington on NY-23
I asked Marc Hetherington for his thoughts on NY-23. He has done work on the origins of partisan polarization and is a co-author of a textbook on political parties. I’ve previously noted his new book with Jonathan Weiler on authoritarianism.
Marc writes:
The race in New York’s 23rd congressional district exemplifies the disconnect between polarized political elites and much of the American public, which like moderate alternatives when they are available. Movement conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh attacked the moderation of Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee, ultimately driving her from the race and causing her to endorse Bill Owens, her Democratic counterpart. This opened the door for the first Democratic victory in the district in more than 100 years. It seems very likely that, others things being equal, a candidate like Scozzafava would have been the choice over Owens in a two person race. The district choked on the type of candidate that Palin and Limbaugh favored.
In the mid-1990s, so called movement conservatives were seen by some as the salvation of the Republican party. Now, they have become its bane, driving the party farther to the right than many mainstream Republicans will accept. Although they have damaged the Republican brand on issues like immigration, in particular, the party’s victories in New Jersey’s and Virginia’s gubernatorial races demonstrate that candidates who present a moderate image to the public can still prosper, even if they aren’t particularly moderate.
Movement conservatives often trumpet poll data suggesting the conservative label has become more popular during the first year of the Obama administration. Importantly much of this increase is due to the South’s increasing embrace of the label. That is not happening in upstate New York, or in much of the rest of the country for that matter. Douglas Hoffman, the Conservative candidate who Limbaugh and Palin embraced despite the fact that he didn’t even reside in the district, might have been broadly acceptable to Republicans in rural Mississippi or Tennessee but not in an increasingly competitive district like the New York 23rd where Barack Obama won a narrow victory over John McCain last year. By not realizing this, movement conservatives provided Democrats with one of their only bright spots on a night when perhaps they warranted none.
Comments
This presumes the spatial model is correct, and that voters understand and think in these left-right terms. That’s a well entrenched assumption in political science, but may be flat wrong. There are many alternative interpretations of what happened in NY-23 that make no reference to the spatial model or make it’s very strong assumptions.
One of them is that all NY-23 Republicans needed to win was a single candidate to vote for, not two. It didn’t much matter who won the nomination - Scozz or Hoffman — it was the fact that two Republicans were in the race against one Democrat, follwed then by the utter confusion of the final week, that won it for the Democrat.
So the ideological interpretation, though totally consistent with political science orthodoxy, may be total fantasy.
Republicans and GOP-sympathetic independents can rationalize a vote for a Republican against a Democrat, no matter what the candidate’s ideological position happens to be, and they commonly do.
But in this case, the GOP muffed the nomination process so badly, and the national party was so confused as to who it wanted to support, that voters narrowly sided with the Democrat without any ideological considerations figuring in at all.
Posted by: Harry B. Hind | November 4, 2009 12:05 PM
Nice try, Harry.
Posted by: Adano | November 4, 2009 12:41 PM
Well surely you political scientists are not going to leave such ordinary but arguably wrong explanations out there unchallenged? Particularly given the survey evidence for the incoherence of ideology among much of the mass public?
You’re not that mediocre are you?
Posted by: Harry B. Hind | November 4, 2009 01:07 PM
Seems like what we would need to determine is whether Scozzafava would have won but Hoffman would have lost if she (he) had been the only person in the race against the Democrat.
I think Mr. Hind is onto something.
Scozzafava probably took votes away from Hoffman. He would have won, in spite of his political positioning, and the positioning of district voters, if she had not been in the race.
Similarly, if she was the only one in the race, and he had not run, she would have won.
No ideology or silly spatial nonsense needed here.
Ideology probably wasn’t the deciding factor since either of the two candidates could have defeated the Democrat singly.
Posted by: ty | November 4, 2009 01:35 PM
Don’t the facts of this race run somewhat counter to the elite party polarization hypothesis? Party elites, not the primary voters, chose Scozzafava. The voters wanted a much more conservative candidate (i.e. Hoffman).
Posted by: pub | November 4, 2009 02:37 PM
Only for very small values of “wanted.”
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | November 4, 2009 06:01 PM
According to Wikipedia (by no means a reliable source), NY-23, in the last 100 years, has been held by a Democrat for 71 years. If that is true, I don’t know why this meme about NY-23 being a Republican bastion is being bandied about so prominently.
Posted by: Pat | November 5, 2009 03:41 AM
Pat:
District numbers move around after redistrictings sometimes, especially if you’re gaining or losing seats.
The meme says that if you look at the counties in northern upstate New York that are currently the core of NY-23, those people have been represented by a Republican for a loooong time. But those counties weren’t always NY-23.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | November 5, 2009 09:56 AM