The Culture War Killed Incumbency

Why Local Factors Matter Less

In 2008, the most important political battle to me wasn't the Presidency or the Senate or how big of a majority Nancy Pelosi would get as Speaker. It wasn't the nominations, my political awakening, or the race to flip unthinkable states blue. It was a ballot proposition on the other side of the continent, in a country I didn't live in, in a state I had never even been to. Prop 8 - the attempt to reimpose a ban on same sex marriage - was my everything that fall.

I had had feelings for men I couldn't describe before, but it was the early part of 2008 that made me understand what it was. That was the year I turned 11, and the year that my friends started being open about their feelings for women - attractions I felt absolutely of. I was gay, but I couldn't explain it. One night - May 13th, 2008 - I just started writing everything down, trying to piece together my thoughts. By the end of the writing period, I sat up and told myself the truth - that I was gay. I then proceeded to cry myself to sleep, terrified of what it all meant.

Two days later, the California Supreme Court would rule in In re Marriage Cases that Prop 22, the previous ban on same sex marriage, violated California's constitution, meaning that gay marriage was legal, setting off the fight over Prop 8. It was a fight that the proponents of bigotry would win, and one that would destroy my soul. A teacher asked me that fall why I was so out of it, so miserable, in the late fall. I lied, something about my ailing grandfather messing with my mind, which earned a stern rebuke. I remember being told that those things have to stay outside the school gates, to which I politely agreed. "If only I could do that with what was actually fucking with my head," I remember thinking.

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2008 was also a big election for local factors - Democrats won 6 Senate seats in McCain states, and won a huge House landslide built on McCain district blue dogs winning. In 2010, they'd get wiped out, the beginning of the end for the era of less polarized partisanship. For the GOP, they were the initial beneficiaries, as that landslide saw them holding a ton of their Obama-district members (and gaining even more) while getting "their" territory back.

2012 saw some partisanship takeover, with Democrats losing Nebraska, but also some ability for good candidates to win again, as they won in Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Montana despite losing those states Presidentially. Mitt Romney, while being an elite candidate for the suburbs, was a horrible candidate for rural and regional America, so the GOP didn't get the coattails in red states as they wanted. In 2014, however, the mirage was over, and Democrats got blasted out of all their red seat sinecures and the realignment - already visible - was on in earnest. From there, two straight Presidential cycles have seen one state split their tickets - Maine, in 2020 - and the number of off-partisanship Senators is at an all time low.

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2012 was the first election where voters had a difference over gay marriage - Obama was for it, Romney was against it - but even then, Romney was a nightmare of a candidate to appeal to white working class voters who didn't like Obama's social liberalism. He was, however, a perfect candidate to hold the line in well off suburbs, because he was liberal enough on abortion (supporting exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother), and his view on gay marriage was not seen as an albatross to social liberals - after all, Obama had held the view until earlier that year. 2012 also saw the GOP lose two Senate seats - Indiana and Missouri - because their candidates couldn't find good answers to what their policy on abortion was when faced with those hard exceptions. In 2018, both those seats went back home to the GOP.

What happened after 2012 is simple - as Democrats became the party of gay marriage, and the GOP stayed the party against it, the battle lines of politics shifted. Economic lines stopped being as important as social ones, and rich, well off social liberals started voting for Democrats more and more, while socially conservative whites ran to the right. How do we know it was about gay marriage? Well, the exact same thing happened in Australia, where abortion policy is determined by the states and not an active political fight. Only when the right explicitly pivoted to the centre did they have any success, and even then, it cost them their rural, working class flank.

The Australian data is clear - you can either have a fight on economic terms or on cultural ones, but you have to pick. In 2012, Mitt Romney chose to de-emphasize the cultural war to fight on economic terms, and he got his ass handed to him. In 2016, Trump decided to try the reverse, appealing to voters on cultural issues - Make America Great Again was, at its core, a play on cultural nostalgia. "Locker room talk," the defense for the Access Hollywood tape, worked as a defense for many because it appealed to the kinds of voters Trump needed. He didn't tailor his pitch to 39 year old country club types who would find that kind of language odious, but to the 52 year old coal miner who had said many things in his past he wouldn't necessarily be happy to repeat now. It was cultural nostalgia for a time that made more sense - not necessarily when things were easier, but when people felt less like they're hearing a language they don't speak. And when they looked at the Democratic Party, they no longer could see that cultural nostalgia, because Democrats don't view the past the same.

By the nature of Trump's appeal, the electorate in 2016 (and 2020) was necessarily older, whiter, and more culturally conservative, and those voters properly understand that the Democratic Party is not a political party that has any interest in their mission. Quite often I asked what the pitch of a second Trump term was, and the answer was some form of "to trigger the libs" - which, I mean, fair. But what it actually was was to stop Democrats from making the country feel less like the country they know. Culture shocks are hard, and having the sensation that what you thought you knew taken away from you can hurt. Just ask the gay kid who had to see rights for people like him litigated in California at the age of 11 - it hurts.

But at the point at which the two parties stand for two entirely different platforms and world views, incumbency - previously very important because of the less substantial differences - becomes weaker, because you're not just voting for which Senate candidate is better, but which worldview is better. The act of voting for Sherrod Brown in 2006 was an act of preferring him to Mike DeWine - in 2018, it was an act of preferring the Democratic view of the world. The reason incumbency is dying out is because the GOP wants to bring back a country where the comfort of cultural conservatives is more important than the rights of women, gays, and Black people.

Given that is true - and if you disagree with that, Supreme Court Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh say hi - why the fuck would a cultural conservative vote for a Democrat? And, why would social liberals vote for a political party that hates the very idea of what is commonplace - the notion of race, gender, and orientation mixing freely amongst friends and family? I've written this before, but it's hard to justify voting for a party that has endangered Roe and Obergefell when your neighbours are Black and your weekly doubles tennis partners are the gay couple two streets over, and no amount of tax cuts will make that easier for you.

At the end of the day, the Democrats chose their path by becoming the party of social liberalism, and the GOP just responded with the path that was best available to them - going all in on a form of cultural nostalgia where people like me are back in our proper place - out of sight, and out of mind. That was a state that I knew briefly - just old enough to remember when the mainstream Democratic position was that people like me should accept a form of separate but equal treatment, all the legal benefits of marriage, but we can't call it that - and one that drove me to internalize a sense that I was somehow broken because of something I didn't choose and no control over. When the stakes of an election were a difference in income tax rates or where to save money, sure, incumbency mattered. When the stakes are the humanity of people like me, but not just those like me, it's a lot harder to justify voting for a party that is repulsive to you, even if you like your local member.