January 23, 2006
The Abramoff Effect
By Jay
Cost
It seems
that everybody has an opinion on what the Jack Abramoff scandal
means, and everybody thinks that it means something of importance.
This is one of the most interesting elements of this whole drama.
Most scandals that affect one party more than another usually
are such that the damaged side’s ideological elite claim
that there is little of consequence involved in the scandal. Think
back to the Lewinsky affair. Republicans claimed that it was a
matter of constitutional first principles; Democrats responded
that it was “just sex”. Similarly, Iran-Contra represented,
to Democrats, a noxious form of executive abuse; Republicans saw
it as merely a president who had not managed his West Wing as
well as he should have. But with this Abramoff scandal, everybody
– Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal –
seems to see some kind of important meaning behind it. It is not
simply a matter of one political lobbyist practicing his trade
beyond the approved limits. Rather, it is symbolic of a larger
problem within Washington. There is no clear agreement as to what
exactly it means, but most columnists – notably Eleanor
Clift, John
Fund, David Brooks, Richard
Cohen and Peggy
Noonan – have identified the Abramoff scandal as a sign
of deep, even ontological, trouble with the Republican party-in-government.
The obvious
follow-up question is, will the Republicans pay? If, as right-leaning
columnists might argue, they have forsaken the principles upon
which they were ostensibly elected or, as left-leaning columnists
might argue, indulged too much in the pro-business “Republicanism”
that has characterized it since the Gilded Age, will the voters
punish them? After all, an ABC News/Washington Post poll
recently found that about 60% of voters think that the scandal
is symbolic of congressional corruption. How long until they pin
it on the GOP?
The argument
of many pundits is – not too long. Most people see the Abramoff
scandal as a factor that will hurt the Republicans in the fall.
Earlier in the month, Howard Fineman worded
it in the following way:
The
semi-conventional wisdom here is as follows—some Democrats
are likely to be stained by ties to Jack Abramoff; polls show
that the public has a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward
wrongdoing in Washington; therefore, the GOP won’t be
hurt in November. I don’t buy it. Republicans are the
incumbent party in the Congress. They are led by a less-than-popular
president in the traditionally weak sixth year of his presidency.
While I do
not understand how something conventional can only be half so,
the following has nevertheless become clear to me. In contradiction
to Fineman’s first point, his second point does seem to
have congealed as the conventional wisdom on the Abramoff scandal:
in some way, the Republicans are going to pay. Payment will be
rendered with votes and seats – i.e. they will lose a not
insignificant number of them to Democratic challengers.
Implicit
to this argument, but almost never stated explicitly, is an understanding
of how the American voter actually thinks about politics
and upon what ground he votes. Many pundits seem to have a sense
that the average voter is like they: an ideal democratic citizen;
wise, measured, prudent, informed, capable of executing his duties
the way Jefferson envisioned, etc. They see the average voter
as thinking about and acting within politics in ways roughly similar
to themselves. Unfortunately, this view has very little grounding
in reality. In truth, many pundits seem to have an inaccurate
idea of how the American voter thinks about politics, which in
turn means that they have an inaccurate idea of how he makes his
vote choice, which in turn means that they have vastly overstated
the electoral importance of the Abramoff scandal.
One of the
reasons that I think the pundit class tends to miss all of this
is that it requires them to do something they do not – examine
the voter using more than media polls. To get a sense of how
the American voter thinks, you cannot rely upon ABC News/Washington
Post. That poll will usually do little more than tell you
what the voter claims to think. For instance, a large percentage
of the country claims to be ideological, but are they really?
Do they actually engage in ideological thought and have consistent
ideological opinions? To answer questions like these, you have
to examine a bigger questionnaire like the American
National Elections Survey (ANES). It is only in a more expansive
and intensive survey like the ANES that we can test this question,
and, more generally, see the extent to which the voter fits the
pundit class’s conventional wisdom.
From data
like this, we have learned that he is a poor fit. We have learned
two fundamental facts about how the average American voter thinks
about politics. First, he has surprisingly low levels of political
information. This is the principal mistake that many pundits make.
They assume that the voter knows about as much about politics
as the pundit does. Not true. Not even close. This fact has become
so widely accepted among professional students of political behavior
that the animating research question of the last 20 years has
been: given these low levels of political information, how does
the average voter make rational decisions, if indeed those decisions
are rational at all? Second, he is, by and large, according to
Michigan’s Donald Kinder, “innocent of ideology”.
The conventional wisdom is that we are a 50-50 nation. This is
not true if the 50 and the 50 are ideological conservatives and
ideological liberals, respectively. It is not even true if we
define the 50 and the 50 as “right leaning” and “left
leaning”. Much of the public lacks the information necessary
to develop a coherent political ideology akin to what political
elites possess. Recent work suggests that about 30% of the public
can engage in ideological thinking or effectively ideological
thinking. The rest of the public organizes political information
in some different kind of way. Those large numbers of ideologues
that ABC News finds in its polling are not true ideologues –
for if we look closely at many of them, we will see that they
have conservative, moderate and liberal opinions, and that they
do not actually organize politics along conventionally ideological
lines.
What does
that mean for how the average voter acts in the voting booth?
For congressional elections, it means the following. He tends
to have levels of information that are drastically lower than
the political elites of the electorate. He knows his incumbent
member of Congress and might know the name of the challenger,
but usually knows little more about the latter. He does not tend
to vote based upon ideological considerations: he does not view
his incumbent through the lens of ideology, nor does he gauge
how his vote will change the ideological balance of Congress.
He does not see his vote as a referendum on the state of the nation
or a notice of disapproval/approval for Congress. Instead, he
tends to vote upon his assessment of the incumbent. He sees his
vote as a decision about him. All things being equal, he tends
to heavily favor his incumbent – in large measure because
his incumbent, and not the challenger, is better known and better
financed. Information is costly to provide to the average voter
in a congressional election, and the challenger usually lacks
the resources to do more than just introduce himself. The average
voter also favors the incumbent because he usually approves of
him to begin with; he lacks the information necessary to effectively
attach his member of Congress to that about the institution he
dislikes (since, after all, the biggest provider of information
about the member is the member). Thus, when asked about why he
supports his member of Congress, he will eschew specifics like,
“He voted correctly on H.R. 211” and claim something
more general like, “He reflects my values.”
Conversely,
in open seat races, the average voter tends to focus more on issues,
sometimes national and sometimes local. The reason for this is
usually due to the fact that there is more parity between candidates.
They are often more equally funded and more equally recognized.
There is no dominant personality in the race. The voter makes
a comparison based upon roughly equal amounts of information on
both. This is why challenging parties stand the best shot at a
seat pickup in open races – the incumbency advantage disappears.
This should
inform any prediction about the Abramoff scandal. There is no
reason to believe that it will induce the average voter to think
or act differently than he does every election year. Thus, if
we are interested in understanding how the Abramoff scandal will
influence the midterm elections, we must predict how this
voter, as opposed to the ideal democratic citizen, will respond
in the voting booth.
Accordingly,
I think that it will have a significant effect on the midterm
elections if, and only if, any of the following come true:
(1) Multiple
members of Congress are somehow tied to criminal or notably unethical
activity. It is not enough for the Democrats to charge a “culture
of corruption”; nor will it be enough for them to castigate
all members who accepted legal campaign contributions from Abramoff
or his associates (especially in light of the fact that Democrats
did as well). That will simply not cut it – at the end of
the day, voters have a fairly accurate set of intuitions about
the “culture” of Congress, and they already see their
particular member as not being part of the problem. A few legal-yet-returned
donations that are now publicly regretted by the recipient will
do little to alter that positive perception of a member, certainly
not in a way that will resonate through November. To convince
the average voter to kick out his member of Congress, Democrats
must also make a clear and convincing argument to him that his
member is part and parcel of obviously corrupt or inappropriate
practices. Otherwise, it is very likely that the average voter
will, in 2006, hate Congress all the more but still like their
member of Congress.
This is why
the Republican leadership will probably pass some kind of lobbying
reform early in the second term of the 109th Congress. It will
give individual members of Congress the ability to say: “You
betcha I’m disgusted by what Duke Cunningham did! You betcha
I’m disgusted by what Jack Abramoff did! That is why I voted
for the ‘<Insert the Name of the Member of Congress Who
Needs His Name Attached To This Bill The Most Here> Bill’
that finally reformed our system. I’m part of the solution,
not the problem!” Many pundits will interpret any lobbying
reform only half correctly. They will correctly estimate that
the Republicans are scrambling for cover, but will underestimate
the extent to which they have found it.
(2) The scandal
induces a significant number of members of Congress to not seek
reelection. This seems unlikely, and we would probably only see
this if we also see (1). However, if this happens, those open
seat races will indeed come closer to being referenda on the state
of the nation, and thus the Abramoff scandal could become important
in those contests. It is, furthermore, possible that the Abramoff
scandal will have an effect on already existing open seat races,
particularly Senate contests.
(3) The scandal
becomes amplified in such a way that elite Democratic would-be
candidates decide to run for offices this year that they would
not otherwise seek. In other words, the political elites of this
nation strongly sense, correctly or incorrectly, an anti-Republican
climate. This is why Watergate was a factor in the 1974 midterms.
The public opinion surveys taken after the fact did not show that
the public blamed individual Republicans for the sins of the Nixon
Administration. The theory goes that what really happened is that
the fall of Nixon created an anti-Republican environment that
induced the best of the best Democratic candidates to run for
office. Better candidates are better funded, usually with better
name recognition, and therefore are better able to make incumbents
run issue-oriented campaigns.
I think the
likelihood that any of these conditions will hold is small. Thus,
this scandal will have only an insignificant effect on the 2006
election.
The average
voter is a creature of habit. Even if he votes for different people,
he nevertheless uses a similar process to reach his voting decision.
Thus, political scandals usually come to influence his congressional
vote in fairly regular ways. If you know the rough outlines of
a scandal, you can predict with a good deal of confidence what
will be the electoral effect of the scandal will be. This one
seems like its effect will be minimal. While the Abramoff scandal
may be a sign that the GOP is in the midst of some deep existential
crisis, it is not a portent of trouble at the ballot box.
Jay
Cost, creator of the Horse
Race Blog, is a doctoral candidate of political science at
the University of Chicago. He can be reached at jay_cost@hotmail.com.
