From: msifry at publicampaign.org Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:34:55 -0500 To: sperry at usinternet.com, dhenwood at panix.com Subject: Re: Ventura MIME-version: 1.0
Steve/Doug:
Doug Henwood forwarded your comments on my Ventura article. I don't
know if he also included the earlier one, which I did for Salon a week
ago. In that piece, you'd see that while I acknowledged his positive
positions on public school class size, corporate welfare, campaign
finance reform, drug decriminalization, the draft, vouchers, same sex
marriage, I also wrote "Make no mistake, on taxation and most social
spending issues, Ventura is no progressive." I also point out in the
current piece that Ventura has expressed doubts about public funding
for child care, college education, and for the living wage. He's a
populist, for the little people, but is pretty turned off to
collective forms of empowering the little people--at least as they've
been practiced by union bosses. What's that about being the product of
historical conditions...?
That said, I read the exit poll differently. You wrote:
>>This is an interesting piece, but there is one rather basic problem
with Micah's use of the exit poll data to show a lefty skew in the
Ventura vote: The one key datum he omits is that according to exit
polls of ALL voters, if Jesse had not been in the race, the Republican
Coleman would have received 47 percent of the vote, Humphrey 39; 12
percent overall said they would have stayed home. (There were several
other minor candidates on the ballot, which is why these numbers don't
add up to 100.) There are lots of ways to spin numbers, I realize, but
exactly how this warrants the conclusion that "Ventura's vote...
leaned distinctly to the left" is pretty hard to see. I mean, Jesus,
if you take out the segment who say they would not have voted at all
in a race sans Jesse, you've got the Republican winning by a 10-12
point margin.
>>It was a profoundly anti-establishment vote, yes, but to try and see
a left-populist angle in Jesse or the majority of his voters is pretty
dicey. Yes, he's against school vouchers and for repeal of the Defense
of Marriage Act, but he also says that most poverty programs should be
replaced by the efforts of churches and private charities. You can
make Jesse the new hero of the left, if you like, but you will look
pretty goddamn dumb in short order. Better to applaud Jesse for the
intelligence and opportunism of his campaign, which has a lot to teach
outsider candidates everywhere; and the voters themselves for their
thorough-going rejection of major party business as usual. But they
weren't voting left. Sorry.
Well, let's unpack the Jesse vote again. According the exit poll, 40
percent of his voters would have voted for Coleman, 30 percent for
Humphrey and 30 percent would have stayed home. That's the basis for
the results you cite (I've got them right before me, off the
Star-Trib's website). They took 30 percent of Ventura's 37 percent
total--that's how they came out with 12 percent of the total vote
staying home, and the rest breaking to Coleman over Humphrey, as you
wrote.
But the key point remains. One-third of Jesse's vote were there only
for him. It's silly to exclude them from the picture. Maybe these
people--unlikely voters who were not picked up in the advance polls,
nonvoters really--skew left? There's a lot of suggestive evidence for
this. First, more generally, a poll of 1996 nonvoters done by Kelly Ann
Fitzpatrick's firm (she's a Republican), sample size 800, found that
people who didn't vote were more likely to self-identify as liberals,
as pro-government intervention, than the average voter. And a lot of
them, nearly half, gave essentially political reasons for not voting
(the candidates don't represent me, they were too alike, etc.).
Of the total Minnesota 1998 vote, 6 percent were people who said they
didn't vote in 1996. Ventura won a whopping 62 percent of them. He
also won pluratilies of the self-identified liberals and moderates,
who made up a total of 68 percent of the electorate. I'm not saying
there's a huge self-aware left vote out there that's been abstaining
until Jesse came along, I'm just arguing that his overall vote, while
based in the center, tilts left. Not right.
Right now the GOP in Minnesota is shrewdly standing there with open
arms, saying "Come home, Jesse, we're with you on taxes and on
shrinking government." If liberals/pwogressives decide to keep
recoiling from this guy, they do so at their own peril.
Micah Sifry
{Doug: feel free to re-post into your discussion group. The feedback
is helpful.}