Elizabeth Warren’s recent drop in the polls is the latest reminder of a reality politicians contend with again and again: When it comes to campaign pledges, vagueness is often the best policy.
Warren did the opposite. Having billed herself as the Democratic presidential candidate who “[has] a plan for” solving a vast array of problems for voters, she released a detailed, $26 trillion “Medicare for all” spending proposal along with a follow-up transition plan.
In contrast, rival Bernie Sanders, who authored the Medicare for All Act, didn’t spell out how the government would take on an estimated $34 trillion in new spending over a decade. Sanders’s poll numbers surged even though he recently suffered a heart attack, while Warren’s popularity took a nosedive.
The example illustrates how ambiguity can be essential to political success. While journalists and rivals frequently press candidates to break down how they would fulfill their promises, including how they’d fund their visions, voters don’t appear to punish candidates who are keen on their stances while light on specifics.
“Specificity doesn’t pay because then it’s easy to criticize the details and the price tag,” said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “What a lot of politicians have found is that vagueness works just fine.”
Vagueness works for other areas of policymaking, but it can become particularly pronounced in healthcare, where proposed reforms tend to be expensive, have high stakes, and cause massive disruptions.
“The more details candidates propose about what they are doing on healthcare, the more trouble they tend to get in politically, and the less it tends to sell,” said Liz Mair, president of Mair Strategies and a GOP communications strategist. “In general, people are very wary of change when it comes to something as personal and difficult as healthcare.”
For Warren, releasing a spending plan made her vulnerable to attacks that she vastly underestimated the costs of “Medicare for all.” Her transition plan, which would have first made a government plan optional, opened her up to accusations that she was not a “Medicare for all” purist. Warren appeared to change her strategy after that. In the final debate before the Iowa caucuses, Warren steered clear of details and even avoided using the phrase “Medicare for all.”
Republicans in Congress have fallen into similar traps. They succeeded during several election cycles on the promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Still, once a replacement plan materialized, several GOP lawmakers reversed course after being met with an outcry from medical groups and voters.
In turn, Democrats successfully swept the House in 2016 by attacking Republicans for trying to repeal Obamacare, particularly its rules obligating insurers to cover sick people. They did not run on detailed proposals about how they would fix Obamacare or on sweeping changes to the healthcare system.
Peter Loge, director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, said that voters don’t necessarily care to hear all the details of a candidate’s policies but that they do view the ideas as a way of “coloring in the lines” about candidates’ values.
“For most of us, most of the time, policy details are proxies for other things: Does this person care about people like me? Does this person talk about values the way I talk about values?” said Loge, who was a House senior adviser during the creation of Obamacare.
Practically speaking, politicians have more flexibility about how they fulfill their promises if they don’t lock themselves into a specific bill or detailed plan until later on, when an idea has the chance to become law. Presidents in particular can’t always fulfill the promises they make when they run for the Oval Office if they end up before an unwilling Congress.
Plus, sometimes public opinion changes or new information becomes available, leading a politician to change course, Michael Tomz and Robert Van Houweling, political science professors at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively, write in the synopsis of their forthcoming book Political Repositioning. If public officials stick to specific promises rather than compromise because they worry they’ll otherwise be attacked, then they can become ineffective.
At the same time, there is a balancing act involved. Mair said that if politicians provide so few details that it’s impossible to know where they stand, then they risk opening them up to criticisms that “this person is a fraud.”
Over in the White House, President Trump is frequently vague on policy, particularly about how he wants to change the healthcare system. Though his administration is siding with a lawsuit from GOP states to invalidate Obamacare, he still hasn’t released a backup plan for the healthcare law, saying only that it would be “phenomenal” and that Republicans would be “the party of healthcare.”
Despite outside pressure, Trump might be better off being tight-lipped about the issue. Unless the Supreme Court decides to take up Obamacare, the fate of the law won’t be decided until far after the 2020 elections, saving Trump and the GOP from the immediate pressure of presenting a fallback plan.
“It wouldn’t make any political sense to release a detailed plan at this point,” said West. “Democrats are already on the defensive over ‘Medicare for all.’ He will want the election to be contested on their plan, not his own.”
