The Political Argument for Fixing VAWA Now

The difference between policy and politics is not always well understood. Policy are the laws and strategies that politicians put in place that actually affect people. Politics is what politicians say and do to get your vote. It is often said good policy is good politics but this is not always true, because sometimes good policies are hard to explain to voters.

Over the past several years we having been winning the policy debate among people primarily concerned with policy, including think tanks and talk radio. But we have made less progress with politicians, who have to think about politics to win elections.

One way to convince politicians that the politics is on their side is to show them the votes they will get by supporting a given policy. We have calculated that 16.5 million voters, or 13.5% of likely voters, have suffered from the abusive misuse of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) or have a loved one who has, and will vote based on that experience. The nationwide and state by state calculations are shown below.

Further people adversely affected by VAWA, and their family members, represent a cross section of the electorate and very often feel so strongly about what happened to them that any recognition of the ways in which VAWA is misused would override all other issues, and they may very well switch their vote.

The next obvious question is how many votes will be lost by opposing the egregious flaws in the current version VAWA. This number is harder to calculate, but based on a National Organization for Women claimed membership of 500,000, that would leave them with less than 1/2% of likely voters. 1% or 2% of likely voters would be a very generous estimate because not all NOW members support VAWA's gender-discriminatory policies. This small group projects an inflated image of their numbers by influencing the 85% of likely voters who have had no direct experience with the system, and so are unfamiliar with the injustices caused by our domestic violence policies. No one is in favor of domestic violence, and those who don't really know anything about how our domestic violence system actually works naively believe the policies truly help domestic violence victims and don't harm innocent citizens.

Looking at the plusses and minuses of addressing the harm caused by the loopholes and other flaws in VAWA, it seems clear that Republicans would face no loss of voters because it is unlikely these voters would ever vote for a Republican. But even for Democrats who might consider addressing VAWA's flaws, the politics still works in their favor. As noted above, our calculations show that 13.5% of voters have either been seriously harmed by VAWA's flawed policies, or have had someone they love harmed by those policies. The number of voters for whom this issue is a top priority greatly outnumbers the generous estimate of the number of voters who think the current system is just fine.

But all politicians, Democratic or Republican, must be concerned with how the message is received by the 85% of voters who have no direct experience with DV.

In a nut shell, the truth, fair and just policies, and the numbers are all on our side. What the other side has is an overly-simple analysis of a complex problem. So their message, although wrong, is easier for the public to understand. So, we too must craft a simple message for politicians, but one based on truth and justice. One example of such a message is:

"VAWA inspired DV laws clog our courts with false claims of domestic violence, which prevents true victims from getting help."

Once a politician has been convinced that fixing VAWA will result in a net gain of votes, they will need simple and truthful messages for use in their campaigns.

Nationwide calculation

State by state calculation