Omicron is feeding the Republican conspiracy beast

Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.Is anyone surprised that it took only a couple of d [Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( Is anyone surprised that it took only a couple of days for Republicans to spread obviously nonsensical conspiracy theories about the omicron coronavirus variant? U.S. Representative Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican and former White House physician, took to Twitter on Sunday to [claim](: “Here comes the MEV — the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election — but we're not going to let them!” I suppose I should point out how unlikely it is, to put it mildly, that Democrats would be capable of getting the entire world to pretend there’s a new, potentially dangerous variant of the virus that causes Covid-19, which would then serve as a pretext for absentee voting, which somehow Democrats would supposedly be able to use to cheat, even though no such cheating was detected by a series of Republican states in 2020 — and even though those all-powerful, devious Democrats also, for this to make sense, wouldn’t be able to find any other way of cheating. Oh, and that’s not to mention that the timing is all wrong. And that surely more devastation from the pandemic would be, you know, actually really bad for the incumbent party. I suppose this is why one political scientist [despaired]( about the adequacy of the tools scholars use to understand such things: “It is difficult lately to be a political scientist trained in the understanding of the various institutional practices of normal American politics when that offers little contribution to situating the truly crazy set of conspiracy theories that seem to arise each day now in US,” tweeted Scott W. Barclay of Arizona State University. First, we should be careful. Over the long run, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in either production of or belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories by ideology or party. What’s different now is that numerous highly visible figures in one party — the Republican Party — are repeating or even inventing this kind of garbage. But is that hard to understand? I don’t think so. In fact, I think conventional wisdom among scholars of U.S. political institutions is sufficient for seeing what’s happening. All we need to know is that incentives matter to politicians, political parties structure incentives for political actors, and, right now, the Republican Party has built in a series of perverse incentives that dissuade serious people from running for office and reward cranks and people willing to pretend to be cranks. Normal political parties are dominated by the electoral incentive. Politicians want to win and then retain office; campaign professionals want to win to improve their reputations and, perhaps, to reap financial rewards; governing professionals want to win so that they can govern; activists and donors want to win so that they can influence policy, and in some cases because they, too, want jobs when their party is in office. With almost all individual incentives running that way, the party collectively comes to place a high priority on winning. But party-aligned media do not necessarily share that incentive. Being out of office is good for business because negative partisanship means more viewers and more clicks when there’s an opposite-party president to dislike. Normally, party-aligned media aren’t important enough within a party for their commercial interests to overwhelm the party’s political ones, so its members tend to follow the lead of politicians and campaign professionals, both because access to them is important and because party actors generally adopt the goal of winning elections. However, as we’ve seen lately with the Republican Party, the more central party-aligned media become within the overall party, the less important winning becomes. And then second-order problems kick in. As Fox News and conservative talk radio become more popular and more profitable, Republican politicians and other party actors are more likely to think of them as a viable career goal — and therefore replace their own electoral incentives with reasons to act as outrageous as possible. And by now we’re at a point where many Republicans seem to have convinced themselves that elections are simply about which party is best at rigging rules and administration. All of this is supplemented by a strong strain of purism among many Republican activists and donors, which is something that’s been more of a problem for Democrats in the past but seems more common on the Republican side these days. That, too, tends to make winning office less important than holding the correct positions or using the correct language. Democrats are not immune from these perverse incentives. But they don’t dominate the party the way that they increasingly have in the Republican Party over the last 20 years. And I should also be clear that, in an era of strong party polarization among voters, having less interest in winning elections probably doesn’t hurt the chances of out-parties, whose success has always depended more on what happens to the incumbents. It does, probably, make it harder for Republicans to govern successfully when they’re in office. More to the point: It cuts off what normally seems to be the natural tendency of parties to try to govern successfully in order to secure re-election. Including purging the party of cranks, real and pretend. 1. Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel at the Monkey Cage on [President Joe Biden’s nominations to the U.S. Federal Reserve](. 2. Claudia Sahm on [the Fed’s upcoming challenges](. 3. Natalie Allison on [problems faced by candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump]( in Senate primaries. Worth watching closely. 4. Harry Enten on [2021 polls and the 2024 election](. 5. Nate Cohn on [Biden’s low approval ratings despite the popularity of his legislative agenda](. One small dissent: I’m fairly certain that what pollsters find as voter unhappiness with Biden’s focus is an artifact of general disapproval — which is, in turn, mostly about the pandemic and the economy. So Biden probably can’t improve his approval ratings by focusing more on the economy; he can only do so by getting better results. That’s the true lesson of Democratic success in 1934 and 1936. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( | [Ad Choices]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022