Rhetoric, Inevitability, and the Behavior of Voters
On November 5, 2016 — just three days before Election Day — the Princeton Election Consortium at Princeton University released results from a survey indicating that Hillary Clinton had a 99% chance of winning the presidency. The survey results raised doubts among some esteemed pollsters, but they also reinforced a lot of common sense about Clinton’s inevitability.
Evidence that Clinton was going to be America’s 45th President was plentiful. For one, Republicans were supposedly concerned. A theme that emerged early in Trump’s 18-month campaign was that Republicans were worried Trump would be an albatross around the whole party’s neck come November.
Polling seemed to validate their concerns. Throughout the last few months of the election season, Clinton was considered the likely winner against Donald Trump. Though Trump showed some strength in various national opinion polls in September, the tide had turned decisively by October. Most of the reputable polls, including aggregate polls, had Clinton up by 2–5 points in the last 6 weeks before the election, and some of the polls gave her as large as a 15-point advantage by the end of the month. The day before the election, CNN’s Political Prediction Market put Clinton’s chances of winning at 91%.
The copious survey data was bolstered by the Trump campaign’s obvious ineptitude. In March 2016, Paul Manafort was promoted to Campaign Chairman and Chief Strategist to work alongside Campaign Manager Cory Lewandowski. In June, Lewandowski was fired. Manafort became interim Campaign Manager. In August, Kellyanne Conway assumed Campaign Manager responsibility. The following day, Steve Bannon took over as Campaign Chairman and Chief Strategist. On August 19, Manafort was fired. That kind of campaign staff turnover isn’t exactly unprecedented, but it’s certainly not the sign of a healthy campaign.
Anyone reading the tea leaves in the summer and fall of 2016 could be forgiven for assuming that Clinton’s win — even with <gasp> Pizzagate, and <gasp gasp> BENGAZI!!!, and <gasp gasp gasp> the email scandal — was inevitable.
Needless to say, Clinton didn’t win, much to chagrin of nearly 66 million voters.
My interest at this point, however, is not producing another post-mortem about the unique circumstances of Clinton’s loss. I don’t have any particular insight that hasn’t already been covered better by 1000 other commentators. What does interest me, however, is the emerging set of parallels in coverage of Joe Biden’s presumable inevitability.
Just this week, a Quinnipiac Poll was released showing Biden up by 15-points. That poll is an outlier, but his average lead in national polls is around 9 points, and Geoffrey Skelley at 538 noted last week that the race “is verging on a landslide.” Skelley goes on to point out, as others have, that “Biden’s lead over Trump has been both incredibly stable and unusually large.” Democratic strategist, James Carville, has repeatedly predicted that Trump will drop out of the campaign because “He’s so far back.” Other pundits have mulled the same possibility, and some Republican strategists are apparently worried about that possibility, as well. Once again, Republicans are openly — if anonymously — worried that Trump will cost them the Senate. And yesterday Trump replaced his campaign manager, less than 6 weeks before the planned convention. No one — not even Carville — is saying Biden is inevitable, but anyone reading the tea leaves could be forgiven for assuming that he is.
Inevitability of the sort I’m describing here is a rhetorical problem. Research in political polling shows that voters’ expectations about the potential impact of their vote informs complex strategic decisions about voting.
In January 2016 (nearly a year before Trump/Clinton, mind you), British professor of communications, Mark Balnaves, glossed the effects of polls on voter strategy. According to Balnaves, “Strategic voting is motivated by the intention of voters to affect which party wins the election.” If voters think their ballot is crucial to elect their candidate, they vote for their candidate. If they think their vote cannot change the result for their candidate because their candidate has no chance of winning, then they may make other strategic decisions. The decision-making process is too complicated to detail here, but the point is that people make complex, strategic decisions about voting based on what they believe a candidate’s likelihood of winning is.
It stands to reason that voters may make other strategic decisions — for example, about whether to spend the time and energy necessary to vote — if they think an outcome in inevitable. In 2018, Pew Research published an overview of research on the effects of election forecasts on voter turnout. Although he was careful to hedge the implications of the research, the author of the Pew article, Solomon Messing, essentially concluded that election forecasts can have important effects on campaigns and voters. According to Messing:
[Some] research shows that when people aren’t sure who will win an election, they vote at higher rates, though not all studies find the same effect. That could mean that if citizens feel assured that the election will almost certainly break one way after reading probabilistic forecasts, some may see little point in voting.
Likewise, according to Messing’s overview, a candidate’s air of inevitability can reduce donations, depress mobilization, and even lower a candidate’s incentive campaign harder and invest in the campaign. If you add the obstructive challenges of voter suppression to the mix, a sense of a candidate’s inevitability can have serious effects on an election. In other words, how voters are persuaded to think about a candidate’s chances have real, significant, measurable effects on voter behavior.
It’s hard to assess what specific consequences the rhetoric of inevitability had for Clinton in 2016. Certainly turnout was down by more than 18 million voters over the 2008 election, which likely resulted from a combination of voter suppression efforts and lower voter enthusiasm, either of which may have been informed by the rhetoric of inevitability.
It’s also hard to assess what consequences the rhetoric of inevitability may have on the 2020 election. It’s one complicated element in an impossibly complicated political ecosystem. Nevertheless, even without trying to predict the specific effects on Clinton or Biden, we can reasonably infer that the aura of inevitability is likely to effect voter behavior. It’s not unreasonable to predict that if one candidate — in this case, Biden — is perceived as inevitable because of his lead in the polls, he might lose donations, depress campaign mobilization, scale back campaign activities and investment, and even depress his own supporters’ turnout. No matter who your candidate is, in this election or another, the rhetoric of inevitability has powerful — and potentially dangerous — effects.
The rhetoric of inevitability isn’t going anywhere. Predictions — especially bold predictions — are like catnip to political pundits and consumers. So are polls and predictions. This is the rhetorical environment we live in. But as people watch the punditry, polls, and predictions, we’d do well to watch how the rhetoric of inevitability creeps in, and be attentive to how it may shape our behavior, as well as our friends’ and neighbors’ behavior, in the run-up to a momentous election.
