On Steve King's primary loss

OK, this is kind of my thing.  Congressional elections are my actual research area, and I have a long-time interest in congressional wackos.  My most fun published paper was Going Off The Rails On A Crazy Train: The Causes And Consequences of Congressional Infamy.  Yes, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) made an appearance.

Steve King lost his primary on Tuesday.  I'll do my scholarly duty here.  (And this weekend, I'll write more generally about scholarly duties, as I hinted earlier this week).

My first point is that this is one anecdote.  Don't read too much into it.  In any election cycle, a few weird things will happen.  The strong empirical pattern in legislative elections is that incumbents win, and this pattern is strongest in primaries, for a variety of reasons.  Moreover, in primaries, ideological extremists have an advantage.  See, for example, Brady, Hahn & Pope's 2007 article from Legislative Studies Quarterly.  More distressingly, see Porter & Truel's "The Increasing Value of Inexperience in Congressional Primaries."  Basically, Republicans increasingly like unqualified nutjobs.  King may have experience, but he is an unqualified nutjob anyway.

Yet, among 435 House districts, 33 or 34 Senate seats per cycle, a bunch of gubernatorial elections and more, weird things will happen.

As reprehensible as Steve King is, what is surprising is his loss.  It is a statistical anomaly.  You may be tempted to think that there is some ray of light shining through the clouds-- some bit of hope demonstrated by Steve King's loss.  There isn't.  This is a glitch in the system.

That said, the empirical pattern I showed in Going Off The Rails On A Crazy Train was that the wackos were at a statistical disadvantage in general elections.  Note:  general elections.  This was a primary.  That's why this was so anomalous.  The idea that people in the GOP would decide that they were suddenly repulsed by King... no.  This was an anomaly.  King was stripped of committee assignments, and couldn't serve his district.  That's a pretty compelling explanation for his loss, given our difficulty explaining individual events in social scientific terms.  There is a long tradition of research showing the positive effects of constituency service and district representation, including Fenno, and I'll give some mention of Cain, Ferejohn & Fiorina's The Personal Vote, in part because Bruce Cain was one of my grad school advisors, but without committee assignments, King couldn't do any of that.  King didn't lose because Republican voters lost their taste for white supremacism.  He lost because he couldn't do basic congressional tasks.

That said, Republican leaders were trapped into stripping him of his committee assignments for his overt expressions of white supremacism, but that's a very different set of causal arrows, and the real problem is the internal dynamics of the GOP.  The party in which Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) is the number 2 Representative.  The guy who described himself as "David Duke without the baggage."

The Democrats are far from innocent.  You may have missed that Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) "hot mic" moment in which he admitted that he wouldn't care about any of the protests, riots or police violence issues if he weren't in a primary.

Eliot Engel, ladies and gentlemen.  Eliot Engel.

Now, that's a far cry from Steve King, but it means he's just a pander-bear, as indifferent to racism as plenty of Republicans in Congress.  Then there's the Democratic insistence on tolerating gross antisemitism from people like Ilhan Omar, who gets treated with the softest of kid-gloves because a) Democrats tolerate antisemitism as long as the antisemite in question is also pro-Palestinian so that it turns into a status game, and b) she's got "intersectionality" up the wazoo, which makes her unassailable to the ascendant identity politics faction of the party.

Oh, but Steve King.  He really was something else.  For a long time, political scientists have been writing about "symbolic racism," which is the term used primarily by David Sears and some of the scholars in his tradition.  Sears argued that blunt expressions of overt, old-style kkk racism simply became politically untenable several decades ago, so racists needed to find more coded ways to express their racism.  You may have heard the term, "dog whistle."  Same thing.  Sears argued that for whatever reason, certain words and phrases could get people to think in racial terms, even if the words and terms were not explicitly racial in their content.  For example, "welfare."  The word is not denotatively racial, but it can invoke the image of Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen," and that image was, to many white people, someone of dark skin.  It prompted people to think in racial terms, even though the word has no racial denotation.  So, just saying, "welfare," actually divides people along racial lines, while still leaving the kind of plausible deniability that the modern racist needed, according to the Sears line of reasoning.

What?!  I didn't say anything about race!  How dare you accuse me of racism!  You're the one bringing up race!  You're the real racist!  Sound familiar?

And of course, Reagan's long-time strategist, Lee Atwater admitted that this was all about race, on tape.  Republicans still deny it, but Lee Atwater admitted it.

So, how far can you go and still leave plausible deniability?

Or do you even care about plausible deniability?

This was the thing about plausible deniability.  King didn't care, or didn't get that he was supposed to create it.  He was, among many other things, quite stupid.  So, he didn't do the symbolic racism thing.  He just came out and preached white supremacism.  Full stop.  Steve Scalise describes himself as "David Duke without the baggage."  Steve King said to himself, "hey!  That's some nice baggage there!  What is it, Samson-white?"

[Reader:  boo!]

[Me:  I am a political scientist, not a comedy writer, and reading this blog is free.  Quit complaining.]

So, yeah.  Steve King.  What a guy.

The other big point here is about Iowa, and how everything you think you know about redistricting is wrong.  Time to bash "goo-goos" again!*  You know how everything that's wrong with American politics can supposedly be solved by redistricting reform?  All we have to do is have statewide commissions that draw compact, nicely-shaped and competitive districts?

You know which state does exactly what all of these goo-goos tell us the whole country is supposed to do?

Iowa.

The result?  Steve King.  And he didn't lose because the redistricting plan created by goo-gooism finally worked.  He lost because the party stripped him of committee assignments after too many outbursts of overt white supremacism, and he couldn't do the job anymore.

Yes, that's one anecdote, but I've run through the numbers too.  I'm just pointing it out as a relevant anecdote for the day.  Steve King has been defiling Congress with his existence for 18 years.  He's exactly the kind of thing that should be prevented by Iowa's approach to redistricting, if the goo-goos were right.  They're not.

Why could King ooze all over the Capitol for 18 years?  Because Iowans heard his racist schtick and said, yeah, go racist all over Congress for us, you racist!  (Yes, I "verbed" "racist" in that sentence.  I felt like it.  What'r'ya gonna do about it?)

Goo-gooism can't stop racist, idiotic voters from putting a racist idiot in office.  That's just "democracy" in action.

Gee... I wonder if that has implications beyond Congress?

Anyway, there's a mid-week post.  I'm thinking about other things.  Responsibilities of the scholar, and all of that.

Oy.  Oy-vey.  This is such a mess.



*For those who have forgotten, "goo-goo" is the derisive and infantilizing term for a "good government" advocate.