By Jim
Geraghty
Monday,
September 19, 2022
The
notion that your view is much more popular than it seems, and that it is shared
by a large group of people in a country or region who do not express their
opinions publicly, is a deeply reassuring one. The belief that you are part of
a “silent majority” means you’re not alone or part of a shrinking minority. It
means that the opposition’s power is ephemeral, and its popularity is illusory.
The opposition has only temporarily won by being louder and more outspoken than
you and your allies. You and those like you — mild-mannered, humble, reserved,
laconic — actually outnumber them by a wide margin, but the public, and often
the media, misinterpret the state of public opinion by paying attention to the
noisiest and most shrill voices.
When you
are part of a silent majority, a correction or comeuppance is always just
around the corner.
Sometimes
there really is a silent majority; the fact that people have been willing to
stand in line for 24 hours or more to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II
indicates that there was a widespread, deep, and abiding affection for the
queen that wasn’t easily captured by public-opinion polls. Across the Atlantic,
British TV host, archeologist, historian, and author
Neil Oliver offered a poignant and articulate assessment of what the country
was witnessing in this mass grief:
I wonder if it’s a glimpse, at least in part, of the silent majority we hear
so much about, but seldom see. It would be wrong to generalize, to imagine we
could know the motivations of every person in that long line, but so many
people moving as one, in the same direction, at the same time, surely suggests
something shared. My hunch, for what it is worth, is that many are also
grieving the passing of the world they grew up in — a world of long-lived
certainties — old certainties that seem to have died too at some point in the
past few years.
Over and over again, the silent majority, whoever they are, wherever
they are, seem to defy expectations, much to the annoyance and frustration of
those who wish they would simply disappear, once and for all. Brexit defied
those expectations; so too an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.
The silent majority won’t do what they’ve been told, that much is clear.
They are silent, that majority, but they are still there, silent yes,
and stubborn too, and from time to time they stand up and make their point
about what Britain means to them, indeed, what they mean by Britain, and
British, and how they want things to be. I say this is one of those times — and
what those people, some of them at least, are making clear, not by words, but
by deeds, is that they want the way things used to be — and could still be,
should still be.
Here in
the U.S., Richard Nixon
popularized the phrase, and the term popped up again in the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and the
1994 Republican Revolution. Donald Trump even adopted the slogan
intermittently, both on the
stump and on Twitter.
Was
Trump the voice of a silent majority? He did overperform his polling numbers in
both 2016 and 2020. In my neck of the woods, Fairfax County, Va., Trump won
168,401 votes cast in 2020, and Trump yard signs were few and far between. Joe
Biden, meanwhile, won more than 419,000 votes, and believe me, it seemed like
every last one of those people had a Biden yard sign. No doubt, there are quiet
Republicans or silent Trump supporters who only make their views known on
Election Day.
But the
results suggest that Trump stood for more of a silent plurality. On Trump’s
watch, Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, the U.S.
Senate, and the White House, had fewer elected governors, and lost about 245 state legislative
seats across the country — while still enjoying an overall majority of legislative seats
(about 54 percent).
Democrats often contend that they’re the real silent
majority, and that’s disputable, too. Biden won several key states by margins
of less than one percentage point — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin — by under one
percentage point, and he fell just short of winning a majority of votes cast in
each of them. He won exactly 50 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania and 50.1
percent in Nevada. Democrats only won 50 Senate seats, for the slimmest Senate
“majority” possible, and with 222 House seats at the beginning of this
cycle, this was the
smallest House Democratic majority since the 1870s.
Sometimes, Democrats
contend that the true “silent majority” is nonvoters, and that those individuals are
more likely to support the Democratic Party’s policies. The fact that Trump did
well while bringing in new voters in both 2016 and 2020 suggests that this is
an overgeneralization. (Among 2020 voters who hadn’t voted in 2016 or
2018, Biden barely
won, 49 percent to 47 percent.)
After
the 2014 midterms served up another shellacking of the Democrats, President
Obama said, “To everyone
who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to
participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” Obama was consoling
himself with the notion that if every registered voter had chosen to vote, his
party would have done much better. But that’s not how our system works. If you
want your side to have a governing majority and to enact its preferred
policies, you have to get up off the couch and vote.
(Why
should the views of nonvoters carry as much weight as those who did their civic
duty and voted? Not voting is a de facto acceptance of the status quo.)
If your
silent majority doesn’t show up to vote in large numbers, it doesn’t have that
much say in how this country is governed. We could even argue that a silent
majority that doesn’t vote might as well not exist at all.
Recent
elections have given each party a little bit of evidence to contend that its
support is broader and deeper than public-opinion surveys would suggest. Last
year, Republicans surprised many by winning big in Virginia, nearly
knocking off a heavily favored Democratic incumbent in New Jersey, and winning
a slew of down-ticket races and ballot-initiative fights. This year, Democrats
surprised many by resoundingly defeating the Kansas abortion referendum and by
winning a closely watched special House election in New York, thus allowing
them to claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given
them new strength in unexpected places.
It is
likely that each party is fooling itself about how popular it is. When surveys
ask the views of all adults, no individual national politician or party’s
approval rating is particularly high. Maybe that silent majority doesn’t like
to answer the phone or answer a lot of questions from pollsters. There are
also, of course, the many past races in which the final results differed wildly
from pre-election polling — we all remember the reelection bids of Senator Ron
Johnson in 2016 and Senators Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham in 2020. But we
can extrapolate too much from the most vivid polling failures; we remember
those races because the polls were so far off from the final results. In
Michigan last cycle, incumbent Democratic senator Gary Peters won by a smaller
margin than the final polls suggested, but nobody is all that shocked if an
incumbent who is ahead by about five percentage points ends up winning by 1.6
percentage points.
If a
silent majority is going to hand Joe Biden and the Democrats a stinging rebuke,
it must show up — and the time to show up is coming soon. In Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia, early voting starts Friday. Absentee ballots are being mailed out this week in Wyoming.
Early voting starts about a week from now in Illinois and Michigan, and as well as in more states, week by
week.
As Yogi
Berra famously said, “It gets late early out there.”
Tax
Hikes for Thee, but Not for Me
As
a follow-up to Friday’s
edition, Morning
Jolt reader Matt observes that the tax increase that Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert
praised in his August essay
on LinkedIn is
a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits for businesses that earn at least
$1 billion a year. Patagonia’s annual revenue ranges from $100 million to about $200
million. In other
words, Patagonia was calling for a tax increase it was unlikely to ever have to
pay.
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