Discount the Whole Foods Perspective
Quantifying the distance between Twitter and the median Massachusetts voter
Great hearing from many of you over the last two weeks since our first post. We address the biggest question below, but first some updates ...
Hoping to learn more after attending January’s Policy For Progress & MassINC event on school segregation? Check out last week’s panel discussion hosted by METCO & Families Organizing for Racial Justice.
We joined WGBH’s politics podcast The Scrum last week, have a listen (and subscribe, it’s always good).
We’ll be releasing a general election poll of the 19th Suffolk District general election early next week, and considering doing a Zoom preview before posting. Reply if interested.
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What does it mean for Very Online activist groups to be detached from the ‘mainstream’ or ‘median voter’?
The divergence between internet opinion and election outcomes is not new. But several people asked this question, and noted how important understanding it is to making progress in our state. So we wanted to get into more detail about what it means in Massachusetts.
During the grueling 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s campaign manager repeated a mantra around the team’s Chicago headquarters: if online political news sites “say we’re winning, we’re losing.”
That quote sprang to mind lately when “win the Internet, lose the election” cropped back up after the special Massachusetts House election to replace former Speaker Robert DeLeo. It does reveal a growing truth about modern politics, and a new, distilled mantra that we think candidates, operatives, and parties could take to hear:
Lose Twitter, Win Elections
We got a ton of feedback on that frame - and some requests to print “Lose Twitter, Win Elections” bumper stickers
It’s possible -- actually, likely -- that you can get clowned, dunked on, veritably drowned out on Twitter and still wind up with more votes.
We all know the internet is not real life. But so many politicos, activists, and journalists spend so much time on Twitter that no amount of data - or election results - seems to break through.
A full year before Team “We turned off Twitter” Biden locked up the nomination, The New York Times ran a lengthy, data-driven piece on how different the Online Left is from those “with the numbers to decide the 2020” primary.
A year later, the paper was back with a call to “Break Out of the Whole Foods Bubble.”
Democrats dominate voters who live within 5 miles of a Whole Foods, but those areas only include 29 percent swing state voters. Republicans dominate the other 70 percent, near chains like Bass Pro Shops and Cracker Barrel.
In Massachusetts, as outlet-goers south of the city know, there is a Cracker Barrel in Wrentham (where Charlie Baker won 80 percent in the 2018 cycle). There’s another in Tewksbury (Baker 79 percent). And there is a beautiful, gleaming Bass Pro Shop in Foxborough (Baker 77 percent).
For this discussion, you can tighten the Whole Food trap: progressives dominate within five minutes of a Whole Foods. Nationally, voters within a mile of one gave a 48-point advantage to Democrats.
Whole Foods Outliers
It’s tricky to establish this argument within the daily political discourse, largely because so many of those who shape it live close to a Whole Foods. Media jobs, public affairs firms, campaigns themselves tend to be clustered, so it’s natural that the people in those occupations would have their worldviews -- and perceptions of political reality -- shaped by their geography. A geography that social scientists show increasingly mirrors the online world, where partisans are isolated from each other.
In Massachusetts, the challenge is that these misperceptions among those who build the popular political narratives are compounded by sharp asymmetry.
State representative districts like those in Northampton, Brookline, Cambridge, Brighton, Amherst, Somerville, or Jamaica Plain do not simply vote more Democratic than average, in the same way other districts may vote more Republican than average.
Those districts are outside of the normal distribution. This chart plots each of the 160 state representative districts in Massachusetts by the distance from the median district’s partisanship score (scores produced independently with 2014 data by Brent Benson at MassNumbers).
To take one example, Brookline isn’t just more Democratic than the median district (which is also safely Democratic). It is outside the normal distribution.
We’re not in the organic Kombucha section anymore
To wit: Only 11 percent of voters in Brookline went for Trump in 2020. How much of an outlier is 11 percent? No county in the state was even close. Suffolk, anchored by Boston, was at 18 percent.
And it isn’t just in general elections. The renewed call for Ranked Choice Voting is driven largely by the results in the 4th Congressional District in 2020. In Massachusetts, we have “open” primaries where voters who aren’t enrolled in either party can vote. Here are the 34 towns in the 4th ranked by whether more primary voters were Democrats or unenrolled voters (e.g., Brookline has 65 percent Democratic and 35 percent unenrolled, so it registers a 30 percent share):
The Whole Foods towns (in red) are different on this metric, as in many others.
In that 2020 primary, now-Representative Jake Auchincloss won 25 of the 29 towns without a Whole Foods.
When it came to issues, our analysis of the primary described what we called a “Brookline Lens”, dismissive of the fact that a majority of voters supported candidates who preferred a public option over Medicare For All (which the aforementioned Data For Progress framed in a poll question as simply “improving and expanding Medicare”).
Don’t let the (national) media get fooled again
You can’t blame Brookline or Bernie Bros alone for the excessive media focus on the Online Left. It’s the media’s job to figure out how they should be covered, but everyone (save pragmatic Democrats of all ideological stripes) has an incentive to hype the battle within the Democratic Party -- it’s good for the Online Left, it's good for media companies when conflict drives clicks, and it is surely good for the Republican Party.
The pattern recurs. Take another 2020 congressional primary. Last year, the Huffington Post published a story about the progressive primary challenges in Massachusetts, including this gem of a quote:
The article includes statements like “The official campaign arm of the Democratic Party doesn’t appear to be on the ground,” which sounds like someone filled in a Online Left Mad Libs (the state party is not allowed to get involved in primaries).
As the article points out, Lynch didn’t campaign - he left more in his campaign account than he spent.
We covered the Left Decile last time (and in the Globe the prior election cycle). Lynch is not in it. The article goes on to name others who won primaries (in Left Decile districts, unlike Lynch’s).
This should be simple!
National progressive groups like Data For Progress -- which later blamed high turnout for the losses -- noted a SuperPAC helping Goldstein and that “Lynch could be vulnerable.” Goldstein, who lost by 33 points, claimed he was within 7 points. Lynch, who spent no money on the race, presumably had polling showing it was not close. Goldstein outraised Lynch in the final two reporting periods
Other aspects of intra-party debate were also shoehorned in. Several national articles raised Lynch’s concerns about socialism branding that could scare voters as a pejorative instead of a fact.
And the result? As illustrated by Drew Savicki, Lynch won every town, losing only Ward 19 in Jamaica Plain. To the extent that the low-heat race registered online, Lynch lost the Internet, but won the election. In fact, the only thing he lost was that lonely ward in J.P.
And yes, Ward 19 is home to the only Whole Foods for more than seven miles in any direction in the district.
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If you’re still reading, you’re not alone - we got about 5,000 more views than expected last week, and tons of great feedback from across the spectrum of Massachusetts politics & policy.
Please reach out with comments, questions, concerns or commentary of your own - it is essential to make progress as a Commonwealth.