Democrats would pay no political price for reforming the filibuster

I always find it curious when a Democratic senator frets about changing a procedural mechanism that the vast majority of their actual constituents couldn’t explain if you asked them to. Are there people in West Virginia, for example, who, as they entered the voting booth in 2016, said to themselves, “I’ll vote for that Manchin guy again, but if he ever decides to change that cloture rule, he’s history?” Or to put it another way, are there any Joe Manchin voters in West Virginia who, when offered the prospect of a huge waterworks or road repair project to bring jobs and improvement to their hometown or county, are likely to say, “Well, those things would be wonderful, but I just can’t reconcile that with changing the filibuster rule?”

Of course not. People may have different rationales to support their voting decisions, but the retention or modification of arcane Senate rules is likely not one of them—and that‘s historically true for either party. Perhaps more basic (but just as obvious): People elect their senators to get work done. That’s also generally true for partisans of either political persuasion (although it may be more so for Democrats).

Washington University political science professor Steven S. Smith wanted to find out how concerned the American electorate actually is about reforming the filibuster, and whether there was an actual, partisan breakdown, either for or against it. In a paper released this month, titled “Partisan Differences on Filibuster Reform in the American Public,” Smith, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a distinguished professor of political science at several other institutions, examined the past polling on the issue, and found—not surprisingly—that pollsters tended to ignore the issue except when a particular piece of legislation was publicly and noticeably subject to the filibuster. The fact that the issue of filibuster reform was even raised during the 2020 campaign, almost wholly in the context of the Democratic primary, was an anomaly.

Smith writes:

A fair generalization is that only a few Americans show real familiarity with the filibuster and cloture and that, in the aggregate, the balance of opinion shifts with attitudes about the legislation or nomination at stake. Moreover, the public favors both majority rule and minority rights, with preferences about the right balance affected by which party benefits from majority rule at the moment. But attitudes about the filibuster are transient.

The number of Americans who know enough about the filibuster to say how many votes are required to end one varies by the survey. A Pew survey from 2018 reported as many as 40% could “identify” that it took 60 senators to break through. But when asked in a 2020 survey, only 15% responded that 60 votes were required. Overall, in terms of their actual views about the filibuster—whether it is a “good” or “bad” thing—Americans views are, as Smith describes, “weak.”

That’s mainly because polling on the issue invariably requires asking lengthy, confusing questions that many people simply don’t comprehend: Smith cites a 2013 CBS survey that asked respondents to say whether the means to end a filibuster was a “good thing,” but was so vaguely worded that respondents could have felt they were being asked whether the specific 60-vote threshold required was a “good thing.” Overall, there was a small majority in favor of retaining the rule as is. But then came 2020, when discussions about the filibuster began to percolate through the media, and now perception of the filibuster has changed: “A reasonable working hypothesis, based on elite commentary over the past year, is that Democrats and liberals favor reform while Republicans and conservatives do not.”

But that, of course, is dependent on which party is in power at the time. It makes perfect sense that Republicans would disfavor a change that reduces their party’s ability to obstruct while Republicans are in the minority. And vice versa for Democrats. But the more interesting observation is the degree of utter indifference by Americans overall: When asked whether they would support a reform of the filibuster so that legislation could simply get a vote with 51 (majority) votes, 45% of respondents “chose “neither support nor oppose” reform or did not answer the question.” In other words, as Smith points out, “Indifference seems to run deep.”

Smith essentially concludes from his review of the polling that neither party is likely to face any discernible blowback for reforming the filibuster.

While Democrats clearly favor reform more than Republicans do, the lack of knowledge about the current rule surely must make the issue difficult to understand for the average citizen. Strong procedural preferences, independent of partisan or policy considerations, are likely to exist for only a few Americans. The result is that party and opinion leaders have a quite malleable audience for their procedural moves and are not likely to suffer a political price for those moves on whatever grounds motivate their strategies.

It is probably too obvious that for those few who would strongly object to such reform, nearly all would be from the minority party; so in our Manchin example, those in opposition would be Republicans who would never have voted for Joe Manchin in the first place.

In other words, neither he nor anyone else in the Democratic Party would pay a political price for reforming the filibuster.