Voting on faith

In the United States last week, voters rejected Republican candidates at the hustings — largely, according to polls, because of revulsion at Donald Trump — while pushing a rainbow coalition of Democratic candidates, many with unusual personal backgrounds, into office. This was, of course, exactly what was supposed to happen last year, but it took Trump’s actual ascension to office to energise the coalition Hillary Clinton was trying to put together. 

But the thing is: None of this means that Trump’s core voters are in any way disillusioned with him — even those who had voted for Barack Obama at least once previously. In an article that is being read a great deal at the moment, Politico reporter Michael Kruse returned to a decaying town in central Pennsylvania to visit families that had voted for Trump last year, to find that they were not at all disappointed in him. “Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most,” says Kruse. “It’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting. Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst.” 

There’s something very important about how we get politics wrong that’s buried in there somewhere. A lot of political analysis centres around winning back voters you have lost. Yet that might simply be the wrong framework to use. Perhaps once you lose some voters, you lose them permanently. 

When we look at elections in India, for example, you have to wonder if the various Opposition parties will ever be able to win back most of the young men who abandoned them for Narendra Modi. That appears to be a large part of the effort they are making — look at the Rahul Gandhi Congress’ new-found aggression on social media — and I’m sure it’s a valuable and useful way to balance the narrative. But is it the case that focusing on those who Modi won over in 2014 is the best use of your time? The notion of the “swing voter” has done great damage to political analysis, I think — it suggests to parties that there is a group that they should consistently target, when that is not how most people behave. Most, over their lifetime, move from one side to another; you’re politicised by a particular event, like Gujarat 2002, or the Iraq War, or the United Progressive Alliance’s scandals, or the financial crisis, or Trump’s misgovernance. 

Look at the difference between the Democrats’ losses in 2016 and their victories last week. The difference was this: They focused on their own core voters, and even more crucially on expanding their voting coalition by including those who might previously have been apolitical or unenthusiastic. This paid off in victories by all sorts of unlikely candidates in unlikely places — such as a Liberian refugee who beat an anti-refugee incumbent mayor in predominantly white, rural Montana. They did not fritter away their energy trying to win over those voters — the famous “white working class” — who had put their faith in Trump. 

Fighting faith is always a bad idea, for it is a slippery enemy. It cannot be beaten by logic; it cannot be overtaken by events, or be corrected by facts. A senior leader in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh once told me — not without a certain resignation in his voice — that voters trusted and liked Vajpayee, but they have faith in Modi. Faith, he pointed out, is a far more reliable thing. That is why Modi could launch demonetisation, which hurt the poor, the traders, the “neo-middle class” the most, and still not lose the votes of too many of those among those groups who had put their faith in him. Many of us wondered at those who insisted, in the face of all the evidence, that the rich and corrupt had suffered from demonetisation more than the poor or honest. But that is how faith works. 

The path back to power for any opposition to Modi is a difficult one. I suspect the obstacles on that path may already have claimed Arvind Kejriwal, who appears silenced and disheartened by his inability to win over core Modi voters. But perhaps the Gandhi Congress and others need to understand that, instead, they need to focus on different groups — those who were never too convinced by Modi in the first place. Get them enthused, get them voting. 

We should ask why, according to the Ananda Bazar Patrika-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies poll that was released on Thursday, the Gandhi Congress has some momentum in Gujarat (though it is, I hasten to add, still losing, merely not as badly as when the campaign started). I doubt this is because Modi fans are being won over. It is more likely those who are being slowly politicised by the jobs crisis, or the problems with the goods and services tax’s implementation. It is these voters who will decide what happens in 2019.

m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma