On the menu today: A British historian offers a poignant statement about the British “silent majority,” standing in line for 24 hours or more to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II. Closer to home, both Republicans and Democrats believe they’re the voice of the “silent majority” and that the midterms will bring a stinging rebuke to the opposition party. But there’s good reason to think that neither party represents much more than a brief, tenuous majority — and that talk of a “silent majority” is only politically consequential if that silent majority is willing to show up and make its voice heard at the ballot box.
The ‘Silent Majority’ Matters More If It’s a Voting Majority
The notion that your view is much more popular than it seems, and that it is shared by a large group of people in a country or region who do not express their opinions publicly, is a deeply reassuring one. The belief that you are part of a “silent majority” means you’re not alone or part of a shrinking minority. It means that the opposition’s power is ephemeral, and its popularity is illusory. The opposition has only temporarily won by being louder and more outspoken than you and your allies. You and those like you — mild-mannered, humble, reserved, laconic — actually outnumber them by a wide margin, but the public, and often the media, misinterpret the state of public opinion by paying attention to the noisiest and most shrill voices.
When you are part of a silent majority, a correction or comeuppance is always just around the corner.
Sometimes there really is a silent majority; the fact that people have been willing to stand in line for 24 hours or more to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II indicates that there was a widespread, deep, and abiding affection for the queen that wasn’t easily captured by public-opinion polls. Across the Atlantic, British TV host, archeologist, historian, and author Neil Oliver offered a poignant and articulate assessment of what the country was witnessing in this mass grief:
I wonder if it’s a glimpse, at least in part, of the silent majority we hear so much about, but seldom see. It would be wrong to generalize, to imagine we could know the motivations of every person in that long line, but so many people moving as one, in the same direction, at the same time, surely suggests something shared. My hunch, for what it is worth, is that many are also grieving the passing of the world they grew up in — a world of long-lived certainties — old certainties that seem to have died too at some point in the past few years.
Over and over again, the silent majority, whoever they are, wherever they are, seem to defy expectations, much to the annoyance and frustration of those who wish they would simply disappear, once and for all. Brexit defied those expectations; so too an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. The silent majority won’t do what they’ve been told, that much is clear.
They are silent, that majority, but they are still there, silent yes, and stubborn too, and from time to time they stand up and make their point about what Britain means to them, indeed, what they mean by Britain, and British, and how they want things to be. I say this is one of those times — and what those people, some of them at least, are making clear, not by words, but by deeds, is that they want the way things used to be — and could still be, should still be.
Here in the U.S., Richard Nixon popularized the phrase, and the term popped up again in the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and the 1994 Republican Revolution. Donald Trump even adopted the slogan intermittently, both on the stump and on Twitter.
Was Trump the voice of a silent majority? He did overperform his polling numbers in both 2016 and 2020. In my neck of the woods, Fairfax County, Va., Trump won 168,401 votes cast in 2020, and Trump yard signs were few and far between. Joe Biden, meanwhile, won more than 419,000 votes, and believe me, it seemed like every last one of those people had a Biden yard sign. No doubt, there are quiet Republicans or silent Trump supporters who only make their views known on Election Day.
But the results suggest that Trump stood for more of a silent plurality. On Trump’s watch, Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House, had fewer elected governors, and lost about 245 state legislative seats across the country — while still enjoying an overall majority of legislative seats (about 54 percent).
Democrats often contend that they’re the real silent majority, and that’s disputable, too. Biden won several key states by margins of less than one percentage point — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin — by under one percentage point, and he fell just short of winning a majority of votes cast in each of them. He won exactly 50 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania and 50.1 percent in Nevada. Democrats only won 50 Senate seats, for the slimmest Senate “majority” possible, and with 222 House seats at the beginning of this cycle, this was the smallest House Democratic majority since the 1870s.
Sometimes, Democrats contend that the true “silent majority” is nonvoters, and that those individuals are more likely to support the Democratic Party’s policies. The fact that Trump did well while bringing in new voters in both 2016 and 2020 suggests that this is an overgeneralization. (Among 2020 voters who hadn’t voted in 2016 or 2018, Biden barely won, 49 percent to 47 percent.)
After the 2014 midterms served up another shellacking of the Democrats, President Obama said, “To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” Obama was consoling himself with the notion that if every registered voter had chosen to vote, his party would have done much better. But that’s not how our system works. If you want your side to have a governing majority and to enact its preferred policies, you have to get up off the couch and vote.
(Why should the views of nonvoters carry as much weight as those who did their civic duty and voted? Not voting is a de facto acceptance of the status quo.)
If your silent majority doesn’t show up to vote in large numbers, it doesn’t have that much say in how this country is governed. We could even argue that a silent majority that doesn’t vote might as well not exist at all.
Recent elections have given each party a little bit of evidence to contend that its support is broader and deeper than public-opinion surveys would suggest. Last year, Republicans surprised many by winning big in Virginia, nearly knocking off a heavily favored Democratic incumbent in New Jersey, and winning a slew of down-ticket races and ballot-initiative fights. This year, Democrats surprised many by resoundingly defeating the Kansas abortion referendum and by winning a closely watched special House election in New York, thus allowing them to claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given them new strength in unexpected places.
It is likely that each party is fooling itself about how popular it is. When surveys ask the views of all adults, no individual national politician or party’s approval rating is particularly high. Maybe that silent majority doesn’t like to answer the phone or answer a lot of questions from pollsters. There are also, of course, the many past races in which the final results differed wildly from pre-election polling — we all remember the reelection bids of Senator Ron Johnson in 2016 and Senators Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham in 2020. But we can extrapolate too much from the most vivid polling failures; we remember those races because the polls were so far off from the final results. In Michigan last cycle, incumbent Democratic senator Gary Peters won by a smaller margin than the final polls suggested, but nobody is all that shocked if an incumbent who is ahead by about five percentage points ends up winning by 1.6 percentage points.
If a silent majority is going to hand Joe Biden and the Democrats a stinging rebuke, it must show up — and the time to show up is coming soon. In Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia, early voting starts Friday. Absentee ballots are being mailed out this week in Wyoming. Early voting starts about a week from now in Illinois and Michigan, and as well as in more states, week by week.
As Yogi Berra famously said, “It gets late early out there.”
Tax Hikes for Thee, but Not for Me
As a follow-up to Friday’s edition, Morning Jolt reader Matt observes that the tax increase that Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert praised in his August essay on LinkedIn is a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits for businesses that earn at least $1 billion a year. Patagonia’s annual revenue ranges from $100 million to about $200 million. In other words, Patagonia was calling for a tax increase it was unlikely to ever have to pay.
ADDENDA: Thanks to Gilion at Rose City Reader, who noticed the, er, unusual opening sentence of Gathering Five Storms — “By every measure, the operation was a success, but it marked the first time Katrina Leonidivna had ever vomited on her target” — and who wrote, “Hubby read the first two and liked them. They are fast-paced, wise-cracking thrillers set right this minute.”
Yesterday’s Jets v. Browns game ended on such a stunning, quick, and unlikely reversal, I can’t even bring myself to trash-talk Cleveland Browns fans. It is as if the football gods decided to smite all of Cleveland for one group of fans’ particularly tasteless display in the pregame tailgating, relating to the scandals involving suspended quarterback DeShawn Watson. (If you saw pictures of it on social media, you know; if you haven’t seen pictures of it, you would probably rather not.) To my readers in northern Ohio, it’s just week two. To my Jet-fan readers . . . doesn’t it feel weird for everything to go right for once?