Amy McGrath’s Blah-Boring-Beshear-Biden-ish Campaign
Lots of big news on Thursday.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apologized for participating in the Trump photo-op/tear gas/church visit incident. This was, in my view, tremendously important news. What happened outside of the White House that day was so alarming in part because it appeared that the U.S. military was allowing itself to be used to attack protesters on American soil at President Trump’s whim. Mark Milley, the nation’s top military officer, was on-site that day. Milley said yesterday, “I should not have been there” and called his presence a “mistake that I have learned from.” I’m not reading minds here to think Milley will not be participating in future moves like that from Trump and is pre-signaling his potential disobedience. And it’s another sign of the growing distance between senior military officers and the president.
Louisville’s city council, in a 26-0 vote, adopted a ban on no-knock warrants. This is the first of what I expect will be a number of reforms in Louisville that are fallouts from the police killings of Breonna Taylor here and George Floyd in Minneapolis. Mayor Greg Fischer had already enacted such a ban, but this codifies it. He has already said that he will sign this measure into law.
How much change is enough? There are lots of moves by elected officials across the country, including in Kentucky, to take down Confederate monuments. Cities like Denver, Minneapolis, Oakland, Los Angeles and San Francisco seem to be looking at really broad-based changes to their policing practices. At the same time, many officials in both parties, including Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer, seem very wary of efforts to cut police funding and reallocate that money to other government spending. This is the debate happening--should the renewed conversation about racial injustice and inequality result in changes that are important but somewhat symbolic (taking down monuments) or those that are more far-reaching and controversial (fundamental rethinking of policing and other systems in America that tend to have negative outcomes for black people?) The protesters are not really focused on Confederate monuments--they are thinking bigger.
“We don't need our city taking down symbols of white supremacy. We need our city taking down systems of white supremacy,” says Jecorey Arthur, who is running for city council and has been a regular figure at the protests here in Louisville.
Amy McGrath’s Blah-Boring-Beshear-Biden-ish Campaign
Since Sunday, State Representative and U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker has been endorsed by:
Major Media in Kentucky-the editorial boards of the [Louisville] Courier-Journal and Lexington-Herald Leader; the Louisville Eccentric Observer, the city’s alt-weekly; sports radio host Matt Jones
National Progressive Figures/Groups-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign
Lots of people in my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds--so essentially anyone who lives in Louisville and would have voted for Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren if either of them had been a viable candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination for the Kentucky primary. (This is not a large group, i.e.”Twitter is not real life.”)
“We believe this is a time for passion, not pragmatism. Charles Booker is the only one generating real excitement among young people and old,” the Herald-Leader’s editors wrote. “We believe he would move the state in the direction that Kentucky needs to go in the future so it can, at long last, move forward. He deserves your vote.”
The common theme of the Booker endorsements is that Amy McGrath, the presumed frontrunner, is running an uninspiring campaign. (The primary is June 23.) I agree--she is running an uninspiring campaign. I wonder if McGrath herself, her staff and consultants also think that she is running an uninspiring campaign. In fact, I think McGrath’s unexciting approach might be a feature of her candidacy, not a bug. She might be being dull on purpose.
McGrath is running a very classic “median voter” campaign. Basically McGrath and her team are imagining that the Kentucky electorate has some people who are fairly left, some who are fairly right, but a core group of people in the middle who have views that are somewhat in between the two parties. So these voters might be scared off by Medicare-for-all or a universal basic income (ideas supported by McGrath rivals Mike Broihier and Booker) but want more people to be able to enroll in Medicare-style health care and increased money going to people who have been laid off from their jobs because of COVID-19.
This median voter approach is the way many, if not most campaigns are run, particularly among Democrats. Joe Biden is running this way against President Trump. (And is winning so far.) Pete Buttigieg in particular was signaling this would be his approach if he were the Democratic nominee. So were basically all of the 2020 Democratic candidates except Sanders and Warren. And this was the basic theory of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and Andy Beshear’s 2019 gubernatorial campaign---even though Booker’s new tv commercial suggests he is running the playbook of those last two. He really isn’t.
One of the big virtues of this approach is that the political media will end up casting candidates using this median voter approach as “centrist” or “moderate.” Those are more favorable labels, particularly in a general election when you have to appeal to a broad cross-section of voters, than say, “liberal firebrand, “conservative firebrand,” “leftist, “very conservative,” or “very liberal.” On the presidential level, it’s likely that if Democrats had nominated Warren or Sanders, the political media would have covered the general election as, “Americans must choose between a radical on policy and a radical on norms.” (Warren/Sanders would be the former, Trump the latter.) I don’t think such framing would have been accurate or capturing the actual stakes of the election (not following the rule of law is a much bigger problem than having a health care proposal that is too expensive.) But I’m pretty sure this would have been the press framing---so Biden is more “electable” in that sense.
In Kentucky, the Democratic nominee for the Senate will be running in a state where the median voter is probably someone who voted for Trump in 2016. So McGrath’s attempts to cast herself as not reflexively anti-Trump, while annoying to many liberals, fit perfectly with this approach of appealing to a certain kind of median voter. She will be the “moderate” Democrat taking on McConnell, while Booker or Broihier would be the “liberal firebrands.” Her bet is that this election is really about whether Kentucky voters want to get rid of McConnell or not. If they do want to get rid of him, McGrath hopes that they vote for her in part because she has not said anything to offend them. She is essentially hoping to be an anti-McConnell empty vessel.
This was basically how Beshear won last year--his campaign message was basically that he would not publicly insult teachers, as then-Gov. Matt Bevin had.
This is similar to how Obama won in 2008 too. His win in the Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton was probably an illustration of a great candidate combining a great strategy for a victory. His win in the 2008 general election was close to the empty vessel model---it is hard to see any Democratic nominee having lost that election, with George W. Bush being so unpopular and an economic meltdown happening a few weeks before the election.
There are two problems with McGrath’s approach. The first is you have to win your own party’s voters in the primary before you get to the general election---and she may have overdone the blah and left too big an opening for Broihier or Booker.
But if she makes it to the general election, there is another potential problem--it’s not clear this idea of the median voter theory is actually true, even though campaigns often rely on it. Some of the voters who are undecided/swing voters/independents/moderates/centrists do have views roughly in between the two parties.
But most voters don’t have a consistent ideology or deeply-held policy views--and that particularly applies to swing voters. Research by Lee Drutman, a scholar at D.C-based New America, a think tank, found that swing voters have all kinds of divergent views, some on the right, some on the left. So they might swing between the parties not because they are choosing the candidate whose overall views are closest to the center, but rather choosing which candidate is closer to their views on whatever issue they have opted to vote based on that day.
“Anybody who claims to have the winning formula for winning moderate, independent or undecided voters is making things up. Perhaps more centrist policies will appeal to some voters in each of these categories — but so will more extreme policies,” he wrote in a FiveThirtyEight piece last year.
Drutman says there are lots of voters who are economically liberal but socially conservative--essentially they like programs like Medicare and Medicaid and don’t want to see them cut but perhaps don’t like to hear strong criticism of the police and are worried about the growing number of immigrants in the country. Trump appealed to this bloc in his 2016 campaign, basically sounding like he would support big-government programs but also be more conservative on immigration. (He has governed as a more traditional Republican, focusing on tax cuts for businesses and cutting social programs--and this is in part why he is fairly unpopular.)
So Booker and Broihier are running campaigns that might appeal to these kinds of voters. To appeal to voters who might be more liberal on economics, they are casting their more left-wing economic proposals as basically “fighting for the little guy,” and suggesting McConnell is too aligned with the wealthy and powerful. To appeal to voters who might be more conservative in a values or cultural sense, Booker is talking about his family, his faith and church-going and his living in West Louisville, one of the lowest-income areas of the city and also the state. Broihier emphasizes that he lives in rural Lincoln County, works as a farmer and was once a Marine.
They are also betting that their personas and charisma will win over voters who don’t agree with them on all of the issues.
Here’s the thing---it’s likely none of these approaches will work in a general election against McConnell, particularly in a presidential year. The safe bet is Trump defeats Biden something like 57-42 in Kentucky and that most Trump voters also back McConnell, who the president has endorsed. So McConnell beats the Democrat something like 54-46. The reason McGrath makes sense as a candidate is that if somehow Trump and McConnell are more unpopular than I assume that they are, perhaps she is able to win over a lot of independents and even a few Republicans, in part because of her more moderate positions and in part because she has been defined by the media as a moderate.
The reason she doesn’t make sense as a candidate is that Kentucky Democrats nearly always run a Democratic nominee using his median voter model--and with the exception of people with the last name Beshear, these candidates almost always lose statewide races. So some Democrats are hoping Booker or Broihier run unconventional campaigns and perhaps inspire some voters who usually don’t vote at all in elections to turn out and thereby shift the normal electoral math in this state, which favors Republicans.
“If [it’s] going to be a long shot anyway, why not pick someone we can get excited about supporting?” Jones said in a Twitter message last week, describing what he was hearing from the Democrats he talks to. He endorsed Booker a few days later.
Thanks for reading.
This is an occasional newsletter focusing on government and elections but really power in Louisville and Kentucky, helping explore who has it, who is gaining it, who is losing it and why. You can subscribe here.
1. If you have been subscribed to this but don’t think you want to read it in the future, feel free to unsubscribe 2. If you have tips or suggestions for future stories, please email me at perrylbacon@gmail.com 3. Feel free to share this with friends or post online. 4. I am doing this without an editor, so please email me if you see typos and/or errors so that I can correct them.