There Are No ‘Vagina Voters’
Since Barack Obama’s run for president, and now with Hillary Clinton‘s nomination, smug dismissals of “identity politics” have become popular in some circles. Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell laments that our “sense of American unity is being undermined by the reckless polarization of group identity politics.” At the radical Indypendent, Linda Martín Alcoff posits that Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic nominee if not for the fact that “identity politics [trumped] class politics” in the primary. And John Avlon, editor-in-chief at The Daily Beast, argues that the fact Jewish voters didn’t flock to Sanders, and Millennial women did, is evidence that “identity politics doesn’t seem to drive votes.”
But according to a growing body of research, the reality is that we all choose candidates and parties based on a seemingly irrational mishmash of group identity, symbolic attachments and partisan loyalties that are mostly inherited from our parents. Virtually all politics are identity politics.
People are quirky. There may well be some Americans who choose the candidate best aligned with their interests or ideological beliefs based on a dispassionate review of his or her record and policy proposals. The rest of us engage in identity politics — but we only call it that when the identity in question is a traditionally under-represented group, like people of color, women and LGBT folks.
As the dominant group, whiteness isn’t a discrete identity. There are multiple white identities — you could be a redneck from Alabama or a Southie from Boston or a goombah from the Jersey Shore. Nate Cohn pointed out in The New York Times that in 2012, “in many counties [across the South] 90 percent of white voters chose Mitt Romney, nearly the reversal of the margin by which black voters supported Mr. Obama.” I doubt anyone will argue that either group calmly evaluated the two candidates’ proposals before deciding whom to support, but only one of them is condemned for engaging in identity politics.
“It’s really a function of social identities — it’s a question of which groups you belong to, or think you belong to,” says George Washington University political scientist John Sides. “The logic here is two-fold: first, we know that social identities and group loyalties are powerful forces in our lives, in all kinds of respects — from the political arena to more mundane areas like sports. And we also know that most voters aren’t spending a lot of free time thinking about politics. So if there are shortcuts we can take, we gravitate toward them.”
Political scientists Larry Bartels from Vanderbilt University and Christopher Achen of Princeton call the common view that people select candidates based on either a consistent ideological analysis or a judgment of who will best represent their own interests the “folk theory” of democracy; in their book Democracy for Realists, they assemble a pile of evidence suggesting it’s largely a myth. First, they show that most voters hold a jumble of often contradictory ideological positions. Second, very few have enough info about the candidates’ records and positions to evaluate who would be the best fit.
There Are No ‘Vagina Voters’, Page 1 of 2