Special interests in Lansing continue to put out slates of candidates and endorsements that are meant to inform voters on where candidates fall on the issues they feel strongly about, but political experts say the pool of voters who are moved by one issue has shrunk.
The current polarized political milieu seems to have realigned with people who are willing to cross the aisle because of a key issue they feel strongly about. Some voters are switching parties to align with issues. Other voters are changing their stances on issues to align with their party.
So, what happened to the single-issue voter?
“That voter doesn’t really exist anymore, in part because partisan identity has now become so tied up with cultural identity,” Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray said.
Oakland University Center for Civic Engagement Director Dave Dulio said he thinks a large issue, like abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, could reignite the flames of some single-issue voters.
“They are lurking,” Dulio said. “We just haven’t had the political environment for them to maybe show their influence in the last several election cycles."
He also said it would depend on the messaging of the candidates and if that messaging hit a tipping point that would cause a single-issue voter to agree with that candidate. The example of a Pro-Life person willing to vote for people who back exemptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother.
He said there are others to whom that would be a step too far.
“While some voters may be able to name a ‘top’ issue that causes them to align with a certain party, it’s now much more likely that they are really aligned across a wide range of issues, because their larger identity within society is tied up in that partisan identity,” Murray said.
That political identity has also driven some “America First” candidates into the land of conspiracy theory.
Matt Grossmann, director of Michigan State University's Institute for Public Police and Social Research, said Democrats and Republicans did not have the partisan identity they do today. He said you can’t point to conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans as you could in the 1970s or early '80s.
“The least informed voters today know as much as the most informed voters in the 1970s about the basic differences between the parties on liberalism and conservatism,” he said.
Dulio said the issue of abortion could drive more people to look at the stances of their state legislators, because that was “where the rubber meets the road” with that issue and they would be the ones directing policy, unless the ballot initiative gets on the ticket and passes.
Grossmann agreed that the issue of abortion could drive voting, but didn’t agree that it would be single-issue voters coming out to the polls.
He said there was a unique set of circumstances that have hit this election cycle.
“It is a long-running and widespread pattern that the ruling party loses in these off-cycle elections, but part of it does seem to be about the direction of policy,” he said.
As an example, he said the political pendulum swung right during Obama and left during Trump. He said the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision may have changed that trajectory of how that policy direction is perceived.
He said since the New Deal era, there hasn’t been a time when policy has moved in one direction while the administration moves in another.
“We don’t necessarily know how voters will interpret that,” Grossmann said.
Dulio said the campaigns, however, are interpreting that through the lens of an echo chamber, where your own ideas are constantly reflected back like an echo.
“It used to be that you’d have parties trying to make these broad appeals to bring in as many people as they could,” he said. “But now, I think it is much more about base politics, both sides are playing to their base.”
He said he could see that message shift slightly after the midterms, but said he doesn’t see it shifting that far.
“Both sides think they can win with just their base and picking off a few of those swing voters,” Dulio said.
