Blowout Paradox
Both sides think they should dominate the election. But neither are trying to.
How often have you heard (or said) some version of “How is this election even close?”
A recent David Brooks column was headlined Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?
Kamala should be absolutely crushing Trump, right? After all, he’s a liar and a convict.
The headline from political scientist
read the opposite: The race is close; it should be a GOP blowout. Voters around the world, frustrated by immigration and inflation, have been tossing incumbents out of office.The presidential election, in this reading, boils down to a central tension: “people want a change but MAGA terrifies them”:
This election is essentially being fought among people who are quite unhappy with the state of the country’s leadership and quite unhappy with the available alternative. And Kamala Harris is trying to convince people that she’s not part of the unpopular administration she’s a part of, while Republicans are trying to convince people that Donald Trump is only a small part of the party he’s in command of.
But there is a larger tension, even a paradox. Supporters of both major political parties believe this election should be a blowout. But neither party actually taking steps to earn a dominant majority.
Content With Deadlock
Here’s Brooks again, highlighting a new report from our think tank friends who write at
:Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched.
This is not historically normal. Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision.
But today neither party has been able to expand its support to create that kind of majority coalition. As the American Enterprise Institute scholars Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin note in a new study, “Politics Without Winners,” we have two parties playing the role of minority party: “Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach.”
Teixeira and Levin observe that both parties are content to live with deadlock.
We are not content to live with deadlock! But major institutions on the left clearly are. There is no way of enforcing message discipline at the party level, and the centrist faction of the Democratic Party has yet to overcome the hyped leftist faction of the past decade to build a big tent. Brooks again:
The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on. These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique.
Yup, that would be a problem. Brooks goes on to list issues that we have touched on before, including energy and immigration, and how Kamala gets it1:
Harris clearly understands the problem. She has tried to run her campaign to show she is in tune with majority opinions. In a classic 2018 More in Common report, only 45 percent of the most liberal group in the survey said they were proud to be American. But Harris festooned her convention with patriotic symbols to the rafters. She’s now explicitly running on the theme: country before party.
But in just the few months she has had to campaign, Harris can’t turn around the Democratic Party’s entire identity. Plus, her gestures have all been stylistic; she hasn’t challenged Democratic orthodoxy on any substantive issue. Finally, candidates no longer have the ultimate power over what the party stands for. The priesthood — the people who dominate the national conversation — has the power.
Evangelizing Centrism
Priests have been distorting the central message for time immemorial.
MAGA even has the Trump Bible, which fuses the bad man’s unique combination of fundamentalism and crass commercialism (and graft, as Oklahoma taxpayers will soon find out).
Democrats are in need of something more like the Jefferson Bible, which the fifth president literally cut and pasted down to 86 pages to end up with a miracle-free core philosophy.
A boiled down version of Democrats was described in our run-down of Joe Manchin’s Prayer Card, the wallet-sized testament to bipartisan achievements that the electoral miracle carried around the Capitol. As we wrote then, a party with Joe Manchin’s focus could win large majorities.
But the high priests of Progressive, Inc. have built an interlocking set of organizations, donors, and social media accounts for whom purity trumps winning.
wrote recently about the problem of subtractive intersectionality, which flows from:the progressive mobilization myth — the delusion that there’s some public opinion cheat code that involves transforming the electorate or counting on the demographic tides to sweep conservatives into the dustbin of history. This might work if all coalition politics were purely additive, if you could give feminists abortion rights and Hispanics lax immigration policies, and criminal justice reform to African-Americans and the PRO Act to union members and student loan relief to recent college grads, and just add all of that up to get to 55% percent of the electorate that way.
In practice, though, things can go in the other direction. If you push too hard on climate change, you can alienate low-income voters who place a higher value on material prosperity. If you do what LGBT groups or feminists want, that may put you into conflict with culturally conservative Black and Hispanic voters.
You can read the whole Yglesias piece, and the Brooks column. And for bonus points, read the report from
, which asks “Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?”A Truly Broad Mandate
What would a majority coalition look like? The Boston Globe’s David Scharfenberg went and tried to find out.
The answer, not surprisingly, is moderation.
Broadly practiced, this kind of politics could serve a lofty end: When parties appeal to the broad middle and not just their bases, they can’t be as slashing. They drain public life of some of its enmity.
But moderation might also be a path to power — a chance for whichever party gets there first to build a majority that shapes American life for decades to come.
This is not just a Democratic play:
There is a contingent of young GOP senators who have tried to translate Trumpian populism into actual policy: JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, Marco Rubio, who was on the short list, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton.
In recent years, these “New Right” leaders have sponsored legislation that would bolster American manufacturing, discourage corporate mergers, restrict immigration by the kind of low-skill workers who compete with native-born Americans for blue-collar jobs, and provide direct financial support to working families.
Duncan Braid of the center-right think tank American Compass, which has worked with all of these senators, says a Republican Party that fully embraced their populist economics and paired it with already popular positions on social issues — from crime to immigration to education — would put itself in a strong position.
“If there is some sort of fusion between these two” elements — the social and the economic — then you’d get “a successful party,” he says.
Maybe even a dominant one.
Operationalizing a dominant party starts where Welcome has focused - listen to the winners like Manchin, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Jared Golden. Then apply those lessons deeper and deeper on the competitive landscape. Back to The Boston Globe:
There is a lesson here for politics in an age of tight margins.
The parties should do more to produce crossover figures like (Sherrod) Brown, the Democrat who holds the Ohio Senate seat, and John Duarte, a Republican representative in a California district that Biden won handily in 2020.
They should invest in more candidates trying to win “reach” races on enemy turf. They should take more chances on moderates making longshot(ish) bids.
Scoring even a few more upsets in any given election cycle could deliver a slim majority. And winning enough of these races over time could give that majority some legs — prolonging it for four or six or eight years.
That would be something short of the sweeping, generational power of partisans’ dreams, but it would be something significant nonetheless: a chance to meaningfully alter the course of the country.
And by bringing some moderation back to Washington, it might even provide a check on our increasingly bitter politics — and a portal to something better.
This is at the core of our depolarizing approach to the predictably bonkers political marketplace.
Blowout Possible
And, for one final paradox, remember that this insanely close election is just a historically expected polling miss away from an electoral college blowout. According to Nate Silver, the most likely scenario is Trump sweeps all seven swing states. The second most likely? Harris sweeps them.
The New York Times broke it down this morning: if the pandemic caused polling to be wrong in 2020, then the current overcorrection inflates Trump support and means a Kamala win. If it has been wrong because it misses the less-engaged Trump voter, well …
Forecasts show the race is a coin flip. But when the referee flips the coin at midfield, we don’t know how far from the fifty yard line it will fall. A deliciously revolting stat is that 2016 was an absolute blowout in the electoral college - so much so that if Canada (population: 40 million) was added as a state for Hillary Clinton, then Trump still would have won the election. Trump won by 74 electoral votes. There could have been two Californias, and Trump would have won. If Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee all seceded before the 2016 election, Trump still would have won.2
As we say constantly, the electorate is more volatile than you think. We don’t know exactly what will happen, but we’ve learned from the winners where and how to flip the coin. That also holds true in our districts that will determine House control. You can support those candidates here to nudge us closer to a dominant coalition.
Be a believer in the centrist path to victory, and pass it on.
Maybe because Kamala’s literal resume shows she worked for a pollster in her twenties
You could almost take out the entire South - the state of every original SEC school except Florida (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee) adds up to 73 electoral votes - and Trump still would have won in 2016