Another Week, Another Guest Speaker

By Robert Harvey

This Tuesday, Dr. Lynn Vavreck was welcomed to Elections Class to speak on issues of polarization and modern electoral politics including those from her recent book “The Bitter End”, co-authored by Vanderbilt’s very own John Sides. 

Dr. Vavreck is a rare example of a political scientist who has significant work experience in the area she studies, giving her an authentic insider perspective into campaigns. As an undergraduate in 1986, she met Professor Geer early in his own career at Arizona State University. The two hit it off, and her interest in government grew as she continued taking his courses. Geer encouraged this passion, and despite being initially bent on law school Dr. Vavreck chose to pursue a graduate degree. After a chance encounter with the Vice President’s team during his visit to the University, she was scouted to join Dan Quayle’s 1992 campaign. She attributes her luck to the fast handling of a dry cleaning issue and uses this as a chance to express the importance of seizing opportunities. To her, “life is a series of doors that show up in front of you, you just have to open them and walk through”. 

In the time since her White House experience, Dr. Vavreck has authored several books and taught at UCLA for more than 20 years. Her lecture in class today was centered on a term called “calcification” which she helped to coin in her most recent book. Calcification in scientific terms refers to a stiffening of material due to calcium deposits. In a similar sense, she uses it to describe a hardening of political views, beyond just polarization. She specifically used the term “polarization plus”, and noted the following characteristics and effects.

There are four main attributes of calcification:

1. Increasing Homogeneity Within Parties

   1. Democrats are more like other Democrats, etc.

   2. Greater consensus and thus less regulation of internal party views

2. Increasing Heterogeneity Between Parties

   1. Republicans and Democrats are further from each other on issues

   2. Few or zero issues that parties agree on, forcing centrists to pick a side

3. Importance of Identity Issues

   1. More vitriolic because they surround personal ideas like sex and religion

   2. Challenging or impossible to compromise on, unlike economics for example

4. Partisan Parity

   1. Roughly even numbers in each party mean all elections are close

   2. Little incentive to make large changes to policy since winners and losers only do so “barely”

These areas are recognizable to us during the 2024 election cycle and indeed Dr. Vavrek provided evidence that it has gotten worse. In her presentation, she presented data from the last 4 elections showing a marked decrease in the number of voters who went against their party or changed sides. The 2020 election was a near-perfect replay of the 2016 election from a voter standpoint which makes accurate predictions much more challenging. The margin of error for modern polling has shrunk greatly, but so has the margin by which elections are decided. One chart showed variation in votes on a county level going back over 50 years. Prior to 2000, it was not uncommon for counties to see 20% of their voters switch from previous patterns, but in 2020 the number had fallen to just 3% on average.

Counterintuitively, Dr. Vavreck asserts that this does not reduce the importance of campaigning. In fact, she argues that now more than ever we need to pay attention to campaign messaging. The attacks coming from opponents serve as an important way to analyze an election because, in a calcified nation, candidates must choose their points carefully. The idea is to target policies where your opponent is incapable of change, and leverage that to your advantage. When two candidates have similar experiences or they agree, that issue becomes “neutralized” and is not useful to debate anymore. Dr. Vavreck points out that when Biden was still in the race against Trump, neither spent much time speaking on their own presidential experience as both had been in office. When Biden was replaced by Kamala, the rhetoric shifted and suddenly experience was on the table again.

It was a pleasure to have Dr. Lynn Vavreck in class and it will be interesting to see how 2024 voter trends reflect or refute the idea of growing calcification in America.