America’s Foreign Policy Future, part 2: Why Jane Matters

In my previous post, I declared that a fictitious American swing voter named Jane Smith – a middle aged mother of two from the heartland – was the most powerful actor in American foreign policy. I placed her ahead of a pack including President Obama and Secretary Clinton, amongst many others. Hyperbole? No doubt many of you thought so.

Jane’s (or swing voters’) influence on American foreign policy may not be as direct or as concentrated as the nation’s foreign policy principals, but it is, in its own way, no less potent. In today’s toxic and acrimonious domestic political climate, where every nickel of federal spending is under pressure and under assault by politicians making budgetary and policy decisions based less on national priorities and more on satisfying the whims of a largely uninformed voter base, it would be a tragic mistake for the foreign policy establishment to either ignore or underestimate the power Jane has over them.

From the moment an individual decides to run for Congress, their life becomes merely a small element of a complex, nearly round-the-clock operation. While the vagaries of a domestic political campaign (such as a congressional seat) may – to the casual observer – appear chaotic and haphazard, these campaigns are generally quite sophisticated operations that pivot on the interpretation of a large set of variables, some more amorphous than others. First, as mentioned, is money (although money is probably slightly less important than people think it is. Consider the case of the 2010 California governor’s race, where former eBay CEO Meg Whitman spent $170m of her own money versus $38m spent by Jerry Brown: Whitman lost, 54%-40%). The more important metric than total amounts raised is this: did the candidate raise enough money to mount a worthwhile media strategy, while at the same time solidifying your campaign’s credibility? The national American political organization EMILY’s List, which assists female candidates for higher office, is not named after an individual named Emily, but for the acronym “Early Money Is Like Yeast” (“it helps raise the dough”), the point being that establishing strong fundraising numbers early in a campaign bolsters the perception that a candidate is a serious challenger.

Another variable in a campaign is time. This, of course, is constantly deteriorating. Election dates in America are fixed; the campaign knows the date of the election from day one, and that date does not change. This is why observers of American politics often talk of “October surprises,” unexpected developments that happen late in campaigns (elections in America are held on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November). If something unanticipated happens in October, campaigns have very little time left to react to or rebut the development in a sophisticated manner. Late-breaking news can derail or boost a campaign in ways that cause previously developed leads to evaporate rapidly.

A third variable is the strength of your candidate, and by proxy the campaign. An excellent candidate can lose by running a terrible campaign, and no campaign can be well run enough to overcome the deficiencies of a mediocre or awful candidate. Of course, in American politics, the factors that conspire to make a candidate unpalatable to the electorate may have less to do with policy positions than with personal issues (see: Congressman Weiner, Anthony [ret.]).

Finally, there are the variables that shift based on national whims and moods. Virtually no campaign can control or seriously impact these. If the economy is in the tank, nothing a candidate says, nothing a campaign does, can or will change that reality or seriously impact the effect that a weak economy has on the mood of the voters.  Particularly entrenched perceptions about the policy strengths and weaknesses of the two parties are another example. For instance, it is difficult, though not impossible, for Democrats to overcome the perception that they are “weak” on national security; similarly, Republicans are less likely to find automatic approval across wide cross-sections of the electorate with their default positions on so-called entitlement programs, such as Social Security.

Truth be told, very little about Congress changes from election to election. Even in significant “change” elections such as 2006 and 2010, re-election rates for congressional incumbents are stratospherically high: 94% in 2006, for instance, while a much lower 85% in 2010. In almost all individual congressional districts, the outcome is all but certain. Control of Congress, therefore, depends entirely on the outcome in some open seats (where incumbents have retired) and a few swing districts. With majorities – even significant majorities such as the Democrats enjoyed after 2006 and such as the Republicans control now – rarely outside the margin of the number of legitimate swing districts, particularly in a turbulent and dissatisfied political atmosphere such as that seen today, control of the body is on the line every election cycle.

This is where Jane matters.

From the perspective of a foreign (or for that matter, domestic) policy professional, the average American voter is stunningly, perhaps even dangerously, ill-informed. In my last post, I gave some statistics about Jane’s response on various survey questions about foreign policy, especially the amount of the federal budget spent on, for instance, foreign aid. While everything else about Jane’s biography was fabricated, those numbers were not. Here are a few dismaying results from some recent studies and opinion polls:

• In a 2008 survey of basic civic literacy, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that less than half of Americans can name all three branches of government, that only 55% knew that Congress shares any foreign policy responsibility with the executive, and only 27% knew that the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits the establishment of a national religion (and before anybody makes smug accusations about perceived disparities based on age or political leanings, you should know that the scores on the exam for Americans age 25-35, and those for Americans over 65, were an identical 46%; those identifying as liberal scored 49% while those identifying as conservative scored 48%);
• A January 2011 USA Today/Gallup poll on the federal budget found that 59 percent of respondents favor cuts to foreign aid – no other program received a higher percentage of “should be cut” responses, and a majority of both Republicans (63%) and Democrats (55%) favored cutting it;
• A February 2011 Program for Public Consultation survey (opens a PDF) found that the average respondent estimated 21% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid, while the average “appropriate amount” response (e.g., what percentage of the budget respondents felt should go to foreign aid) was 10% (the actual amount budgeted in FY ‘10 was 1%)

Foreign aid has always had its detractors, but what should be alarming for proponents today are two game-changing realities. First, Congress is much more beholden to their narrow ideological base voters than ever before, and with the budget and debt first and foremost on the mind of every voter, and foreign aid clearly leading the pack in terms of unpopular programs, it doesn’t take a hardened campaign pro to see where points can be scored with a cut-the-fat, jittery electorate; and second, the misinformed nature of the American voter will not necessarily allow distinctions to be made between foreign aid and the wider basket of foreign policy spending.

You may think that campaigns are simply staggering from one position to another in a “throw the spaghetti at the wall” attempt to please voters whose whims they do not entirely understand. You would be gravely mistaken. Along with the other sophisticated mechanisms at work at the center of a well-run campaign is a detailed, nuanced profile of the electorate at stake in any given race. Campaigns have access to mountains of historic data on voter behavior and history, all of which is now computerized in complex national databases compiled by the two parties. Any campaign worth its salt can, with sometimes astonishing precision, target voters based on party registration, historic voting data, responses to survey and polling questions, geographic location, age, gender, household statistics culled from Census data (how many in the household, etc); if you want to know how many women between the ages of 30 and 50, who have voted in at least 2 of the past 5 presidential elections, who are registered as Democrats and who live in a household with no other registered Democrats, live in a single town in a single district, you can have that list of names in seconds. You can make surprisingly rational educated guesses about who will turn out in a given election, and who they will support. Somebody who has identified as “strong Democrat” or “strong Republican” in an election cycle or two will never be targeted by candidates from either side, because data shows that they are predictable, with a high degree of confidence – they will pretty much always stick with their party. Elections are won and lost entirely by who does the best job convincing Jane they’re the right choice, and then making sure Jane votes.

And yet, the rise of the so-called “Tea Party” in American domestic politics has brought with it a cohort of members of Congress whose rigid adherence to a narrow political ideology has imperiled even those programs traditionally somewhat insulated from the vagaries of national opinion. In February of this year, the House adopted an amendment - notably, over the objections of newly elected Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-OH – to kill funding for the somewhat controversial “second engine” program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet. The program has continued to yo-yo since then in defense appropriations, but it was remarkable that more than half of the incoming freshman GOP members of the House – 47 out of 87 – voted against Boehner on the bill, in the name of fiscal austerity.

The anguish in DC, and around the world, over the debt ceiling increase this summer was yet another example of how brinksmanship and a singleminded focus on the interests of narrow domestic constituencies is having colossal effects on the formation of not only domestic but even international policy. Congressional rhetoric during the debate belied a disbelief, or at least a cavalier disregard for fact, in the ramifications on the global economy of even a brief default on U.S. debt obligations. Even traditional budget and deficit hawks seemed, by the end, uncomfortable with the extent to which Congress – especially the Tea Party-identifying wing of the Republican caucus –  was willing to hold the debt ceiling hostage in favor of spending cuts. In the midst of the crisis, there was yet more evidence that Speaker Boehner’s ability to control his own caucus was shaky at best.

Even the Senate has been far from immune from this upheaval at the level of base voters. In 2010, two incumbent Republican senators (Bob Bennett of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) were defeated in challenged primaries (though Murkowski went on to prevail as a write-in candidate in the general election); a third incumbent Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania,  chose to switch his party affiliation to Democrat rather than face almost certain defeat in a primary of his own (somewhat ironically, he ended up defeated in the Democratic primary); incumbent Republican governor Charlie Crist of Florida also switched his enrollment, to independent, rather than lose to a more conservative challenger in the Republican primary for the open U.S. Senate seat in his state. The “establishment” candidates in Republican primaries also lost in Kentucky (home state of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell) and Delaware. Despite belief among many Democrats that these candidates would ultimately prove “unelectable” in general elections, the “Tea Party” candidate won in Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania and Utah. The same scene played out across the country in House and Gubernatorial elections, as well, to say nothing of state legislatures.

So put it all together, and what are you left with? A rancorous, acrimonious, poisonous atmosphere in Washington is at least partially caused by an obsession with satisfying the narrow, slash-and-burn spending reduction preferences of their most engaged base voters. They have a bevy of programs available to cut, but most – social security and Medicare, for instance – register broad and significant support even amongst members of their own party. Tax and/or revenue increases are absolutely off the table for them. This leaves discretionary spending, and there, though a small amount of money overall, can be found one of the most unpopular programs in the federal government: spending on international and foreign programs, particularly foreign aid. Independent voters like Jane are up for grabs, but the prevailing wisdom seems to be that swing voters are trending toward the cut-the-budget tendencies (though they support entitlement programs even more strongly than Republican voters), since Tea Party candidates keep winning general elections, not just primaries.

Jane isn’t a terrible person. Despite her lack of information about policy and spending, she also isn’t a stupid person. She’s a typical, rational, intelligent American who is strapped for time under the best of circumstances and cannot possibly be expected to investigate and self-educate on complex issues such as foreign aid or the entirety of the federal budget, let alone vote on that knowledge. She does, however, experience the same emotional response from certain well-crafted messages as anybody else. If I were a campaign manager looking to make some waves with somebody like Jane, I might very well consider ads blasting my opponent for “sending billions of dollars to farmers in Afghanistan while farmers here face rising prices,” or for “sending billions of dollars to give job training to Iraqis, while unemployment at home continues to climb.” Talk about message amplitude.*

The single greatest imperative in American political campaigns is primum non nocere. And that leaves us with a question: who who will be brave (or, as the case may be, foolish) enough to stand for the world when it comes to setting America’s policy priorities?

*Believe it or not, this post is not intended as a screed about the Tea Party in terms of my agreement or disagreement with their general policy platform. Far from it. I do disagree with them, in the interest of full disclosure, but my goal is not to examine my opinion of their ideology, but rather to analyze how their impact on domestic politics has changed the landscape in setting spending priorities – and consequently policy priorities – in Washington. I’m not sure how many foreign policy experts fully understand the implications here.

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