Tribalists and ideologues: turns out voters just really wanna win.

• Author: Drutman, Lee
• Position: Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public - Book review

Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public

Chicago Studies in American Politics Series

by Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe

University of Chicago Press, 224 pp.

In the early days of the 2016 campaign, many pundits seemed certain that Donald Trump couldn't win the Republican nomination, because he was not a real conservative. The Republican base, conventional wisdom had it, would demand a hard-core ideologue--someone who was, in Mitt Romney's tortured phrasing, "severely conservative." Conservative intellectuals observed darkly that the real estate developer was, in fact, a former Democrat, lacking both principles and a true conservative ideology. But Republican voters either didn't notice or didn't care--or, most likely, both.

Trump instinctively understood this. Instead of studying up to pass conservative litmus tests, Trump talked about "winning" and "losing." He was a fighter, not an ideologue. If you voted for Trump, you were picking a winner. And weren't you tired of losing?

Pundits and writers didn't grasp the appeal, because for them, politics was and is first and foremost about principles. But they live in a rarified high-information world of fellow travelers who have also devoted their lives to said principles. For most voters, principles are a lot more flexible. And a fair amount of research suggests that, for them, politics is a team sport, and they mostly just want to be on the winning side.

Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public, a new book by political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe, makes a clear and compelling case that most voters neither fully understand nor particularly care about ideology. The book didn't come out until late May, nearly six months after the election was decided. But its antecedents go way back. In fact, Kinder and Kalmoe bill their book as an update of a classic 1964 essay by the renowned political scientist Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics."

Converse documented that five in six Americans lacked a meaningful understanding of what it even meant to be a liberal or a conservative. For them, politics was a clash not of ideologies but of interests and group loyalties. They chose their leaders by figuring out who was on their side.

About one in six voters--roughly 17 percent--did, however, think in ideological terms. Interestingly, this number hasn't changed in fifty years. These voters are...