House '22: Lessons From Down Under Auger GOP Trouble

On What Australia Can Tell Us

In 2017, there was a voluntary turnout postal survey on whether there should be a change to marriage laws in Australia to allow same sex couples to marry. It was a workaround to the original proposed binding referendum - or, sorry, plebiscite, because I will get yelled at for not caring about that actually meaningless distinction - once the Senate wouldn't pass the needed legislation to enable a proper plebiscite. It passed 61.6/38.4, and soon after the Parliament legislated for equal marriage. Sounds like a win, no?

In most ways, it was, even if the campaign was vile and the tactics shitty from the anti-equality side. We won, and Australia came to the right answer on the question. But we also saw results by seat - by electoral divisions - and that data should have told us a lot about what would happen at the next election. And then, everyone has kind of collectively forgotten it exists. And yet, it explains so much of the results of the 2019 Australian election, and the 2020 American one as well.

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The seat of Braddon is on Tasmania's north-west coast, and one of the seats where gay marriage did substantially worse than the national average - only getting 54% support, against that nearly 62% national figure. At the time of the postal survey, the seat was represented by a Labor MP, and then in 2018, that member had to resign - and then run again in a byelection - because of issues around a previously unknown second citizenship (Section 44 of the Australian Constitution, amongst other things, disqualifies dual citizens because of a perceived split loyalty - it was a whole thing for like a year). Having renounced her foreign citizenship, the original member ran again, and despite the fact that the Liberals targeted the seat heavily, managed a tiny swing to her. Within weeks, the Liberals had replaced Malcolm Turnbull with Scott Morrison in large part because of the failures in Braddon and (more importantly) Longman on the same day, amid an expectation that Turnbull couldn't win the next election. And then, in May 2019, Morrison won a shock election win by beating the polls massively, and getting huge swings across a number of seats, including Braddon, where the Liberal share of the 2 Party Preferred vote rose 4.8% (a 9.6% swing in an American context).

Head up to Queensland, which was the other shock of the night, and you see huge LNP increases in their vote in Capricornia (11.7% increase on 2PP, 54% support for gay marriage), Dawson (11.2% increase on 2PP, 55% for gay marriage), and Flynn (7.6% increase on 2PP, 51.5% support for gay marriage), all places that share a demographic profile with southwest Wisconsin or north east Ohio, both areas swinging hugely right over time. The Liberals swapped out Malcolm for Scotty in 2018 because they didn't like Malcolm's moderate, modern, socially progressive views - for those unaware of Turnbull's history, he had been dethroned as Liberal leader in 2009 for cutting a deal with Kevin Rudd for a carbon price, the infamous Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The Liberals supporting the CPRS in the Senate would have given the government the numbers for the scheme, so the Liberal party room revolted, replacing Turnbull with Tony Abbott, a man who doesn't believe in climate change. They got rid of that guy because, in effect, they were sick of him caring about the issues that would make the party more appealing to city and inner suburban seats, at the expense of outer suburban and rural areas. They traded ends of their coalitions, and it worked for them, but they also lost Warringah (75% support for gay marriage) to an independent and lost wide swathes of ground in Kooyong (74% support for gay marriage).

Areas with more cultural conservatives were much willing to vote for their economic interests when the Liberal Party was led by a man that I respect greatly, who affirmatively believes in gay marriage and the need for action on climate. When the cultural question was negated, economic interests took over, and wealthier, inner city areas were Malcolm's best areas in 2016, compared to what you'd expect. In 2019, when the detente on social liberalism ended, those areas snapped hard left, and the areas where Labor had overperformed expectations in 2016 - Braddon, to name but one - snapped back hard right.

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The fundamental question of US politics these days is whether or not the GOP can claw back some of the ground they've lost in places like Southlake Texas, the collar counties outside Milwaukee, Forsyth Georgia, and places like them - places where white social liberals with a lot of money live. If they can, then they would rightly be favourites to win control of not just one, but both chambers of Congress next year. Problem is, it took Malcolm - a well respected socially liberal pain in the ass to Tony Abbott - to get well-off white social liberals to give the Liberal Party a second look, and while it worked, it also cost him huge amounts of ground in areas not at all dissimilar to all the places the GOP have been gaining ground for a fucking decade. Is trading gains in the Wisconsin 3rd to get your losses back in the Wisconsin 5th worth it? No idea, but that's a fun theoretical question, because the GOP have no interest in making that trade.

I know I harp on this all the damn time, but my current 2022 belief - loosely held, up for a lot of change between now and November 2022 - is an increased Democratic house majority and Democrats making net gains in the Senate. I will reiterate this - I am open to changing my mind on this, if anyone can explain to me how the GOP makes up ground. The evidence from the runoffs in Georgia suggests that the GOP won't get the same turnout of low-propensity, culturally conservative Trumpian whites as they did on November 3rd in elections that Trump isn't on the ballot for, which confirms what all the evidence from 2017, 2018, and 2019 says, which means that the GOP needs to win back well-off white social liberals without losing an equal amount of cultural conservatives, right? Well, the evidence from Australia says that the only way you can get the reversion with well-off white social liberals is to move away from cultural conservatism, which is totally possible, right? Wait, sorry, these are the fuckers who put Coney Barrett on the fucking bench, nope, that's not happening, and even if it did happen, the evidence suggests you'd bleed out in Youngstown and the Driftless, which isn't going to solve your problems either.

Magic hand waving doesn't make the GOP's huge math problem suddenly go away just because Bill Clinton got shafted in the 1994 midterms, and some amount of nonsense historical patterns that ignore the huge amount of polarization that exists today and didn't 10 years ago, let alone 30 or 50. The GOP aren't fucked, I'm not stupid enough to think so, but I keep asking somebody, anybody, to explain to me how the GOP are actually favoured in 2022 based on an analysis of voters, not an analysis of history. Elections are a math problem, and I'm looking at the GOP losing turnout amongst their voters, facing the risk of continued swings left amongst white social liberals, and their response is to stick their heads so far up their own asses they can't see shit from a hole in the ground.

Oh, but don't worry, the GOP are 60/40 to win according to the braindead morons over at PredictIt, so I'm sure I'm the one missing something.