Marmot was kind enough to send the paper above, which you can download and read. The summary is that Curtis Bram, a researcher at UT Dallas, did some polling analysis around the 2020 election and came up with these conclusions:
Voters expected more change as a result of the 2020 election than experts, and made less of a distinction between what a president can do and what requires legislation.
High expectations were a better predictor of voter turnout than other measures.
It looks like Republicans had higher expectations of policy change from Biden than Democrats or independents.
Bram also notes that “if voters want more change than politicians can reasonably deliver, then those unmet expectations may lead to disillusionment with political institutions.”
It was interesting to me that Republicans had higher expectations of change. Here’s what Bram said about that:
These results suggest that if Democrats had the same expectations as Republicans, then Democratic-leaning voters would turn out at higher rates than they currently do, a potentially pivotal change in competitive elections.
There are a lot of things that stand in the way of setting and meeting high expectations. Two of them are the filibuster and the corrupt Supreme Court. On that point, Josh Marshall suggests this:
“Litmus tests” get a bad name. In American political discourse, they are usually framed as cheap and narrow-minded things that single-issue activists use to constrain or maybe eliminate statesman-like behavior. Think about it for a moment, and I think you’ll see that the phrase is almost always used this way. It’s almost never used as a positive thing. But that’s wrong. What litmus tests do is create clarity, truth in advertising. When you vote for candidate X, you know what you’re getting. They’ve given a clear promise that they support a particular thing and will do, if given the opportunity, a particular thing. If they don’t come through, they can be voted out of office. The promises need to be crisp and clearly framed. Politicians will almost always try to avoid that. They want to retain freedom of action. You’ll see this so often in the Senate when the caucus moves as a pack resisting demands to say clearly what they do and don’t support on critical issues. But when questions or pledges are framed tightly enough that becomes very difficult.
[…]
[W]here we can all make our voices and demands heard is building this set of litmus tests: making it clear that it’s not acceptable to be elected to Congress as a Democrat without supporting abolishing the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court.
Even with this litmus test, we have our work cut out for us. Assuming we take the House and Senate this year, one way that we could communicate our expectations to voters who don’t give a shit about “checks and balances” (or any other excuse for inaction) is to pass our agenda and let Trump veto it. This agenda can’t be some little incremental changes, but rather big things. Anti-corruption measures, meaningful changes in healthcare, and other benefits like child care. The message: keep a Democratic Congress and elect a Democratic President, and this is what you’ll get. We could also impeach Trump for his corruption and the Epstein accusations, not that we’ll get a conviction, but it will draw attention to the last couple of years of unprecedented criminality.
I’m writing this realizing how far we need to go from where the party is now. We’re at such a low point with our elected Democrats that they’re afraid to be confronted by the base at a candidate forum. But, it’s OK to have expectations, that’s how change happens.
