I posted yesterday about the search for a majority in Whitewater. A political majority, whether temporary or permanent, requires three satisfied conditions: (1) a means of communications, (2) an understanding of the demographics of one’s audience, and (3) an issue around which a majority will form.
More means of communication are better than fewer, but we have ample means already: print, digital, etc. No one need rely on carrier pigeons; we don’t have a broken telephone problem.
Policymakers in the city know its demographics, to be sure. (Of course they do.) Still, with a few obvious exceptions, those policymakers do not follow the implications of those demographics, at least if their aim is a genuine majority within the community.
The largest single age group in the city is residents aged 20-24, a group greater in number than groups aged 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-59, and 60-64 combined.
Add those aged 15-19, and the 15-24 age bracket approaches twice the number of all those aged 25-64.
More critically, these age cohorts are not composed only of a single economic, cultural, or ideological outlook.
And yet, much of Whitewater’s politics is a kind of soft identity politics of the middle aged, resting on the assumption that one draws support from those who look like oneself.
It’s shortsighted and self-limiting: there is no group in the city that represents by itself a stable, effective majority. Still, it’s gratifying to a few to contend otherwise, and they’ll not see things any other way.
Of surveys accurate measurement is key; I’ll write next week about a recent survey whose sample is oddly unrepresentative of the community.
(An obvious point: I don’t claim to speak for any view other than my own. It would never occur to me to claim to be a representative of more than one, so to speak.)
Whitewater’s policymakers face either insisting erroneously that a portion of the city – the portion that looks like them, that is comfortable to them – is the whole community, or doing the much harder work of crafting a message that reaches beyond smaller factions. A few choose the harder way; most choose the lazy way of a soft identity politics.
An issues-oriented, and so ideological, approach could lead to a majority (at least issue by issue), but that’s more demanding than the lazy approach of saying trust-me-because-I-seem-like-you.
(Whatever a compelling issues-oriented, majority message is, one can assume it’s not a program to find ways for government to generate more revenue for itself.)
Until more policymakers adopt a cross-cultural and ideological approach, forming majorities in Whitewater will be more chimerical than real.