Activists

For next week, Hershey, ch. 12

Party Services and Party Money (Hershey pp. 92-93). More next week

Activism and Careers.  Parties are networks -- or "blobs." Operatives often change jobs.  Their careers encompass party organizations and campaigns, partisan outside groups (including consultancies, Super PACs, partisan "think tanks," and dark-money groups), and parties in government (member offices, leadership offices, executive offices).

Republican · Katie Walsh Shields 

Democratic -- Rob Flaherty (a CMC example)

When the same strategist moves from a party committee to an outside group to the White House, what changes besides the name on the paycheck?

Incentives for Activism

• Material: traditional party organization
• Old school:  Plunkitt-style patronage jobs
• New school: climbing the staff ladder
• Solidary: social connections -- social life and lifelong friendships
• Purposive:  issues and ideologies.  From opposite ends, costars of Coming Home: Jane Fonda and Jon Voight

Voter turnout and duty

My generation v. yours

Most people do not engage beyond talking and voting

Young adult activism

Prags v. Purists:  Polarization means activism

Clear statement of transactional relationship (at 2:00)

Jesus and John Wayne

Getting Religion from Politics:

At the same time, their priorities have begun to shift. Dr. Burge pointed to an analysis of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study he’d conducted, in which white evangelicals ranked political issues by importance. Same-sex marriage — once a point of bitter contention between white evangelicals and some of their moderate Republican allies — came in last, after jobs, crime, gun control and a variety of other matters. Abortion, too, came in surprisingly low on white evangelicals’ ranking of priorities — underneath, for example, immigration. According to Mr. Smith, Pew found this year that “81 percent of white evangelical Protestants said that the economy would be a very important issue in making their decision about who to vote for in the 2020 presidential election, while 61 percent said the same about abortion.” In 2016, he added, a similar finding also held.

“I think what happened was, over time, white evangelical orthodoxy on politics sort of just melded into Republican orthodoxy, and there’s no difference anymore,” Dr. Burge told me. “We used to always believe that religion was the first cause and then politics was downstream of religion,” but newer studies suggest that “those two lenses have switched places now and that partisanship is the first cause and now religion is downstream of partisanship.”