So, consider gay marriage. In the 2004 American National Election Studies survey, we asked respondents whether or not they supported gay marriage. Among respondents, 33.3% supported gay marriage. Times change fast, right? After all, in 1996, just eight years earlier, Bill Clinton-- a Democratic President, signed the "Defense of Marriage Act" in order to avoid the accusation that he might support gay marriage, and in the 2000 survey, we didn't even bother to ask about gay marriage. Why? It wasn't in the "Overton window." This is one of those policy areas where it might be useful to think of the Overton window. In 1996, gay marriage wasn't even in the window, and by 2016, even social conservatives mostly weren't talking about it anymore. In the 2016 survey, support for full marriage rights was up to 59.4%, with another 22.3% supporting "civil unions," and only 18.3% saying there should be no legal recognition for gay couples. Opposition to legal rights for gay couples is now outside the Overton window, if you want to think in those terms.
Has the push for single-payer healthcare, led by Sanders, put single-payer "in the Overton window," and if so, does that matter? I have read a bunch of commentary about this over the last couple of days. A couple of points.
First, this is actually one of those topics on which my little enclave of political science is poorly suited to make claims. The Overton window is really hard to quantify, and I like quantifying stuff. Hey! See those numbers up there? Numbers are good!
Let's try this. Put everything on a line from -1 to +1, where -1 is most liberal, and +1 is most conservative. That scale matches up with the "NOMINATE" scale we use in political science to measure ideology in Congress with roll call voting. One could, hypothetically, assert that there exists some range, from a to b, written as follows in math notation: [a, b], such that only options within that range will be considered. In fact, we do that all the time when we study Congress, except that these choices are made directly, strategically, by legislative leaders based on the desire to use agenda control to their own ends. They'll simply say that anything to the left of a won't get a vote 'cuz we say so, and fuck you if you don't like it.
Can we move this into some general, public venue? Well, what determines a? What determines b? In Congress, we have well-specified models, and they tend to work relatively well. Even in today's chaotic Congress, basic spatial models tend to do OK when it comes to figuring out when legislative leaders block an item from the floor (debt ceiling stuff is different, for reasons I have explained). We also know, definitively, when a vote occurs.
In the public, not only is it hard to specify a coherent model for what moves either a or b, who is to say where they are at any given point in time? I've read a shitload of stuff over the last couple of days asserting that single-payer is now in the Overton window. Evidence? A bunch of Democratic muckety-mucks are now on-board with it. Um... so fuckin' what? It has zero chance of passing any time in the remotely near future, and public opinion is incoherent. People are talking about it, but there are people who talk about all sorts of batshit crazy stuff. There is a non-zero probability of anything if we take a sufficiently technical interpretation of "non-zero," so how high does the probability of an option being adopted have to get before we consider that option to be within the Overton window?
Put in those terms, the concept of the Overton window gets harder to address, for those of us in the quantitative political science side. That doesn't make it useless. It just means that people like me have a hard time working with it.
Next, and following from that, is single-payer really "in the Overton window" now? A lot of people are talking about it. People who weren't before. That is traceable to Sanders. That only means it is "in the Overton window," to the degree that this is a useful concept, if there is some reasonable possibility of its adoption, as far as I'm concerned. Otherwise, I'm sort of a talk-is-cheap kind of person. One key reason Sanders never impressed me is that he doesn't understand enough about either politics or policy to accomplish anything on anything. He is nothing but an empty vessel for left-wing tea party-style frustrations, and back during the primaries, I basically pointed at him and called him more "tea party" than Ted Cruz in disposition. If all he does is provide a focal point for venting and no reasonable possibility for any actual policy change, then I can make a reasonable case that single-payer is still not in the Overton window. Talk is cheap.
I'm still going to make the case that there is no chance of the adoption of single-payer. Even if Democrats get the White House, House and Senate in 2020, they won't adopt single-payer. As I wrote the other day, it took half a century of shrinking ambitions to pass even the GOP's 1994 counter-offer to HillaryCare, and that was while the party's membership was moving left.
If a policy has essentially zero chance of adoption, what business do we have saying it is within the Overton window?
Then again, if this is a concept that is foreign to quantitative political science-types like me, what do I know? Fuck it. Here's some more country music with a "window" theme. Cahalen Morrison. Love this guy. And, "Cahalen" is as cool a name as "Gurf."
