Sometime soon, I am going to delve into an issue over which Ed Kilgore and I disagreed. There are two schools of thought about the American electorate. One, which Ed subscribes to, is that the country is rigidly polarized and that on the presidential level a major party candidate is pretty much assured of about 45% of the popular vote. Elections are decided, therefore, much less by convincing the undecided and true swing voters than by differential turnout. Republicans win low turnout midterm elections, especially when there is a Democrat in the White House, and Democrats generally win high turnout presidential elections, unless there is a Republican incumbent.
There’s no doubt that this accurately describes how our politics have been since at least 2004. Given the popular vote outcome of 2000, you can even argue that the pattern had been established by then.
The other school of thought is that our two-party system is more like plate tectonics. The two parties have been locked in a stable pattern for a while now and the pattern can certainly persist into the future. But, every once in a while there is a slip along the dividing line and one party leaps ahead and gains a decisive advantage. This happened in 1972, for example. President Nixon certainly didn’t foresee how decisively he’d win that election. If he had, he wouldn’t have broken so many laws and engaged in so many dirty tricks. Yet, when you look back at 1972 with the benefit of hindsight, all the signs were there that the Democrats were approaching a complete wipeout.
I think you can say the same thing about the 1994 Gingrich revolution in Congress. The Democrats had controlled the House almost uninterrupted since 1933. People had a hard time predicting that they’d lose control at all, let alone with a lot of room to spare. But the signs were definitely there if you had the eyes to see.
So, I subscribe to this second school of thought which says that you can’t precisely predict when a political earthquake will happen, but you can look for key indicators. The political system is in a 45%-45% deadlock until it isn’t. A political analyst’s job is to assess whether or not this cycle is when The Big One hits.
When I get the chance, I’ll talk about the signs of a realignment that I’m seeing. As a teaser, however, this piece by Fox News contributor Juan Williams is a good start.
To be clear, part of my point is that presidential politics are a lot like plate tectonics. You can understand the processes quite well and still not be able to do a good job predicting when things will suddenly change. We could wind up with another election that finishes somewhere between 53%-47% and 50%-50%. There is some pretty powerful stability to how the two parties are divided among the electorate.
I just think we’re getting close to another landslide election and I see signs everywhere that it will be bad news for the Republicans.
“I just think we’re getting close to another landslide election and I see signs everywhere that it will be bad news for the Republicans.”
From your lips to God’s ear.
There’s a lot of negativity out there on the progressive side these days, so I would really love to hear any positive thoughts you have on this
What would happen if the progressive equivalent of Donald Trump ran in the Democratic primary? If Oprah Winfrey or George Clooney was channeling Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alan Grayson?
I looked at the Juan Williams piece. He talks about the GOP base and establishment fractionating.
But the base is not more liberal than the establishment. It’s more conservative. Much more, and they no longer buy the pro-illegal crap that the establishment hands out. They don’t buy anything that the establishment is standing for.
But what does that mean about a coming realignment? It suggests the Triumph of Trumpism to me, not a liberal realignment.
Did you actually read the piece?
There has been an earthquake but not due to rubbing between democrats and republicans. It has been fully within the GOP, as the Williams article mostly describes.
It is really a watershed event when the GOP can’t even nominate a presidential candidate who is an active party member. All of the ‘leading candidates’, Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Cruz are not actual GOP players. They are unqualified outsiders, or in the case of Cruz, an opportunist.
The GOP base is tearing the party apart. The party has been promising to bring back the 1950’s for about 40 years, and it is sinking in that it can’t be brought back. The election of Obama was the final straw, the catalyst that seems to have driven the GOP to have a psychotic break. Just by sitting in the White House, he drives them insane.
The realignment will/may come after the GOP wakes up from it’s fever dreams. It is not possible to predict what will happen when they do.
Does not the Democratic Party have a serious Presidential contender who has not been a member of the Party? He may not be leading as Trump is but the latest poll I’ve seen has Trump at 27% and Sanders at 30%. Is there not an earthquake in both parties? Have not both parties failed their base? Have not both parties swung to the siren song of big donors?
Nothing is gonna stop Hillary from the D nomination, in my opinion. But she won’t win the general.
I agree with you. That’s the way to bet. But I wouldn’t bet my life on either statement.
Democrats are not at all in the same position as the GOP.
The fact that Hillary Clinton has a viable opponent does not say too much on the face of it.
Sanders is unusual, you might call him an outsider. But he is not aiming to destroy the Democratic party, that way so much of the GOP wants to do to their party.
There is a case to be made that Sanders helps the Democrats, win or lose. He broadens the base and makes it a little easier for Hillary to not be a total corporate suck-up. You cannot make that argument for Trump or Carson, they are nightmare candidates that damage the brand. And who knows about Cruz? He can be a real snake charmer, and we can assume that party regulars don’t trust him for a reason.
This is the same thing that happened to the GOP primaries in 2012, only this time it’s much worse (There is no Romney, R.I.P. Jeb!). The trends are bad, and Villagers like Williams think the GOP that is heading off a cliff. So take the article at face value. Trust me, if Williams could have popped it in and let us all know “The Democrats Are Doing It Too”, he would have.
Considering that the Democratic party isn’t all that liberal in the classic sense, it doesn’t have to be a “liberal realignment”.
As Booman points out, that non-GOP Trump is tearin’ it up with the Republican base shows that the party is in total disarray. That the Republican establishment is attempting to derail the leading Republican candidate as hard as they can, shows that the GOP is in disarray.
Just because Trump has a lot of camoshirt, pig-people support doesn’t mean that he’s about to win the general election. It shows how much trouble the Republican party is…with it’s own voter base.
That is never good for the party, when the base doesn’t want to elect who the party puts up for election.
A brokered convention might actually be fun to watch.
It’s likely a Rove pipedream to be kingmaker again.
I’m eager to read your assessment, because I agree with your “plate tectonics” theory, but I see America as a lot more likely to snap in the opposite direction, as it did in 1980.
I remember just how unthinkable it seemed from 1966 through September 1980 that my country could actually elect an individual as radically right-wing as Ronald Reagan. Then it happened.
I don’t currently see much evidence that the Democratic Party is offering a vision to compete with the vicious and xenophobic vision of the Cruzes and Trumps. Defeating them, much less “soundly,” will require a mass mobilization of voters around some kind of credible common cause, and fear of the GOP will only take us part of the way. In particular, it will require a lot of occasional voters (even in Presidential election years) to show up, notwithstanding their deep, growing alienation from the political system, stoked 24×7 by the Republicans.
While I will certainly vote for Hillary Clinton if my party nominates her, she doesn’t strike me as the leader of that kind of movement, based on either temperament or belief. (I doubt Sanders could lead it either, for very different reasons.)
Add to all this the far-from-zero chance of a mass terrorist attack or global financial panic in the weeks before the election.
Simply put, I am really, really eager to hear why I’m wrong.
I think you’re focusing on the clown car, and leaving out the 51%+ that aren’t lunatics who will be going to the polls 11 months from now.
“events, dear boy, events” said Harold McMillian once about what drives politics.
I think 2008 was a plate shift largely unappreciated.
The financial crisis essentially discredited the GOP moderates forcing the party way to the right on economics. The Iraq War still tempers discussion in a way not unlike Vietnam did. Many on the right scream to get tough – but when you actually look at what is proposed few are actually proposing the re-introduction of 120,000 troops.
Obama’s failure to respond aggressively enough in 2009 to the financial crisis led directly to the collapse in the 2010 elections.
So 2016 looks like an election involving a last hurrah for an establishment figure in a time when the status quo is not popular against a politician who is outside the mainstream in many ways.
Neither force is particularly healthy.
One interesting exercise is to create the financial equivalent of the vix for politics (aka a measure of volatility). If you look at history when things like the right track/wrong direction number is really negative, you get wider swings in the election, and results no one anticipated.
No one I remember thought Reagan in 1980 was going to carry 400 Electoral Votes, and no one saw Jimmy Carter coming in 1976. In many ways this election resembles those two.
The thing about volatile elections is they tend to result in decisive outcomes that were not predicted. I can honestly see either side at this point winning by more than 10, because both sides have enormous weaknesses.
The underlying dynamic favors the GOP – whether they nominate the GOP version of Goldwater remains unclear.
Very thoughtful post, I think. I completely agree that both parties (“forces”) are deeply unhealthy. I wonder if there was a previous time in US history where both parties seemed this unhealthy, and yet there was no practical possibility of a third force, unless entirely organized around an individual’s personality, e.g., Trump, Perot, Berlusconi.
Certainly there’s no center to “split the difference.” I suppose if the Republican base nominates a Cruz or Trump, an attempt might be made to organize a center-right party by someone along the lines of Collins or Bloomberg (a la 1980 John Anderson)… But “along the lines of” is my way of saying there’s really nobody with the base of support or the commitment to do that. The few remaining moderate Republican leaders will probably bite the bullet and stay loyal (or at least quiet), like they always do.
Conversely, if somehow or other an “establishment” Republican gets nominated, you could imagine the GOP splitting on the right. But I think Rubio could ultimately finesse the immigration issue to keep his party intact, and I don’t yet see a path to the nomination for the others…
(BTW, I think a “VIX” index for political volatility is a fascinating idea…)
The structures of our election processes make a viable 3rd party impossible for all practical purposes.
As long as 51% of the vote takes 100% of the prize you will always end up with a duopoly, and without proportional representation, minor parties can’t really develop.
Sure lightning could strike with a 3rd party, but it would be quite unstable, and things would tend to re-coalesce around a winner and a 2nd place loser, leading back to a 2-party duopoly in short order.
Well, the Whigs did disappear and were replaced by the new Republican Party. They call themselves the grand Old Party but they are really the Grand New Party.
It is the Democrats that have roots going back to Jefferson, even if they now despise those roots.
It is not that new parties can’t come to be.
The structure of our system will tend to settle back into a 2-party duopoly over time.
Yes, but they don’t have to be the same party.
Those roots included robust support for slavery. They always included robust support for slavery, right through the Civil War. Repudiating that seems pretty damn healthy to me.
Those roots also included egalitarianism and individual rights. But if one is going to run a corporate garrison state those have to go.
I think that 2008 as a plate shift is overrated. 2008 Obama is Kerry + 4 years of favorable demographic growth + Republicans losing their one-time advantage with Latinos + tailwind of financial crisis.
1932 was a plate shift. So was 1968. And 1980. And 1992 and 1994.
That’s because analyzing American elections by party ideological alignment with demographics is something that only really started to even approach being mainstream in 2008.
Less charitably, I think that the shock of 1980 was because a lot of Democrats had their head up their asses. They really, really wanted to believe that the horrors of 1968 and 1972 were temporary things brought on by that Evil Great Man Of History Nixon — with a side order of October Surprise and Bungled Vietnam War, of course. Nixon’s exogenous defeat via Watergate (rather than a shift in actual ideological alignment with demographics) allowed Democrats to further wallow in this delusion despite the fact that this advantage would only be temporary.
Really, the United States is really fucking lucky that the South was so slow to politically realign via Congress. Their intransigence gave the Democratic Party enough time (via plutocratic sugar) to passively grow demographics enough to win the Presidency under their own power and block some of the conservative agenda.
’80 was the result of:
*an economy with increasing unemployment, and inflation that seemed completely out of control
*The Iranian hostages
*the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the perception over time that Carter was weak.
*An incredibly divisive primary in which the loser behaved like a petulant child.
’80 was the result of:
The Southern Strategy, which the Democrats still didn’t have an answer for.
Everything else is just after-the-fact flotsam. If Carter didn’t have the South and the Northeast was still reliably Republican, then there was no path to victory for him. We’re just talking about whether he’d get buried in a shallow ditch or a proper 6 foot-deep grave.
Reagan carried virtually the entire Northeast and Midwest.
Carter carried Georgia, and the southern states were far closer than the national vote. Carter lost SC by 1.5, Ala by 1.2, Tenn by .3,
Carter lost Ohio and New York by larger margins.
… and?
If you gave Carter every state that he lost by <7%, he still would’ve lost that election. If you gave him every state that he lost by <10% except for, say, Illinois (which he lost by 8%) he still would have lost. That’s a bit too much for the ‘but only if those Iranians didn’t take those hostages!’ or ‘if only we didn’t have stagflation!’ excuses to work.
Carter was fucked by demographics in that election, plain and simple. It’s time for Democrats to face the ugly truth that America then just plain didn’t like their policies.
The point was 1980 was not the result of the southern strategy.
The South stuck with the Democratic Party through worse economic disasters and political scandals. I find it very unconvincing that stagflation + Iranian hostages was the straw that broke the camel’s back — rather than Reagan reviving and refining Nixon’s Southern Strategy — after George Wallace dominated this region 12 years ago.
I agree with you. The financial crisis provided Obama the chance to be another FDR. But he worked for bi partisan compromise and played the conservative, with the sequester, Obamacare, willful ignorance of the cause of the GFC and that Simpson-Bowles commission. Compromise, though, was simply not possible with the GOP. So give them credit. They fought off the progressive opportunity. And 2010 saw the end of it for the economy.
I don’t see Clinton as being able to lead progressives and, in fact, I think she comes across as a woman seeking only her own power along with her cronies. I feel as if she needs to check the polls before taking a position, and therefore she is not trustworthy – and patronizing to boot. But that is just me. She could win (and I would still favor that), since I suspect the demographics favor her. However, without an enthusiastic base, she could easily fail. At the moment I think the election is the republicans to lose even with their insanity.
You could both be correct.
Both things may be happening, and probably are.
Demographics are destiny. Both the ‘fighting over a small slice of the pie’ and ‘tectonic shifts’ theories are correct, they’re just after-the-fact explanations for how the voting public reacts when parties are in alignment with their current wishes — or, alternatively, not in alignment.
If we have a Sanders or Trump or Sanders v. Trump election (both which would raise massive questions about demographic ideological alignment), you’ll get your massive earthquake. If we have a Bush or Rubio v. Clinton election, pressure will just build up a bit more since both of them are more-or-less ideologically aligned with their factions. I predicted in another thread that it would lead to probable disaster in 2020, but short of an implosion on either side 2016 will look a lot like 2012. With maybe the addition of North Carolina in the Dem column.
This is crap. “Demographics is destiny” for sure, but you never know what the demographic is until after the election.
Democrats think that specific groups vote specific ways. I agree, they all do, but what are the groups? And when do they change? Everyone voted Democratic from 1932 until 1968, and Nixon got them because of Johnson’s signatures. Reagan got groups for a time, blah blah blah.
It’s when the demographics shift that things happen, and it’s very hard to determine that.
But just keep chanting this. Nov 2016 is gonna be a big fat surprise.
We do know what the demographics are. The problem isn’t with the voters being fickle and deciding that, no, they wanted different things all along. The problem is with parties not being able to account for (or even notice) this shift.
Because underlying voter preferences generally change slowly (opinions for gay rights were relatively quick and that still happened over decades) it’s up to the parties to realize if the voters are shifting under them and to adapt. And frankly, I think that the HRC-wing of the Democratic Party is getting complacent and deluding themselves into thinking that they’ll be in good standing with the voters in 2016 and 2020.
When I say ‘demographics are destiny’, that’s not me crowing about victory in advance. That’s me sending a grave warning to the establishment wing of the Democratic Party which by-and-large seems content to sit on its ass and hope that the current trends last indefinitely.
That we both agree with.
The conservative movement is where the Democrats were toward the end of the Carter administration. The New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society were shown not to have been long-term successes, precisely because of the corruption that large amounts of money introduced into the Democratic Party and the persistence of institutional racism in the Democratic Party. The failure of “liberalism” was first broached among liberals by Daniel Patrick Monyihan’s work on the “failure” of black families. The New Left critique of the 1960s identified liberal failures from the left. Vietnam was a massive failure of the liberal nationalism that FDR embodied and the military-industrial-complex hijacked. By far, the biggest symbol at the time of liberal failure was the demolition of the Pruett-Igoe public housing towers in St. Louis. Equally available for criticism could have been the destruction by freeways of many local “black Wall Streets” and division of once functioning black neighborhoods. There was objective failure in government programs, just not the failures that conservatives hopped on or pushed in arguments for smaller government.
Conservatism 50 years after the Goldwater run for President is in the same position that the New Deal was 50 years after FDR’s victory. It’s philosophy, principles, and programs have been tried and the verdict is in. Conservatives are not at all interested in smaller government, just redirecting the government benefits from everybody to the wealthy. Moreover the Southern Strategy has so taken over the Republican Party that it has run into a coming demographic shift that automatically makes it the minority party; indeed, that is the key worry of the GOP establishment as expressed in Juan Williams’s post.
As it turns out, the Citizens United decision has done two things this year. It has funded the candidates of the GOP’s 99% out of the bounty of casino operators and fossil fuel magnates. Does that sound like it promises an economy of jobs to you? And according to Juan Williams, all of the establishment’s 1% money is still on the table. And the open dirty little secret is the finance, insurance, and real estate money has been heading Hillary Clinton’s way as a hedge. That does not look like it will deliver the “permanent Republican majority” of Karl Rove’s dreams, at least at the federal level.
But the 1%-99% division does not just apply to the GOP. The Democratic base is dissatisfied with the losses of the last two cycles by pursuing establishment Democratic organization’s strategies. Steve Israel is openly mocked; there are calls for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to step down. Chuck Schumer is in trouble and has symbolic primary opposition. Part of it is the way they have sabotaged the Obama presidency; part of it is revulsion at the fashionable notion that it is OK and “independent” to vote against Democratic positions and principles. Given current Jewish public opinion about Israel’s seriousness in peace, Schumer should have walked away from Netanyahu’s and the GOP’s gambit against Obama on the Iran agreement. That disloyalty to his own President should but likely will not disqualify him as leader of the Democratic Senate caucus after Harry Reid’s departure.
If an when there are Democratic Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have worked through their war experiences enough to become progressive in their critique of how national security is currently done, we might start seeing the new political geological formation, Likewise for millennials forced out of corporate jobs through layoffs or perennially unemployed after college because of the mismanagement of the economy by the neoliberal consensus. Some might already be in Congress or legislatures or on a potential bench in some Democratic stronghold. They will riff off of Bernie Sanders’s rhetoric and create new vibrant ways of talking about progressive policies. More importantly, they will put together a withering critique of failure of Goldwater conservatism. And they will have many conservative Pruett-Igoes to point to.
To start with there is the journey from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 with obvious discomfort with peace breaking out. Putin and China are now reaping the benefits of that failure. Even Benjamin Netanyahu has noticed and hedged his bets.
There is the almost complete devolution of public-private partnerships at the federal, state, and local level into festering beds of corruption.
There is the complete failure of privatization of infrastructure to deliver better quality public services for less costs.
There is the global failure of balanced budgets and austerity to create prosperity.
All that awaits is the Democratic politicians in the hinterlands with the boldness to proclaim that the conservative emperor in 50 years has delivered nothing but excuses.
If we are getting close to a landslide election, someone better start running for those unopposed Republican seats in the deep red states. Tides have to have some boats to lift. Otherwise, it is another missed opportunity to turn the corner.
I’m more in your corner on this than Ed Kilgore’s. Racial polarization and left-right polarization are phony emotional appeals to hide structural class polarization between the people who do the hiring and the people who don’t.
Landslide but for whom?
That remains to be seen. I was following out BooMan’s logic and expressing concern that the Democrats are not ready to have a landslide that gives them responsibility without excuses. So they choke again through inaction and failure to fill candidacies.
Who makes the Republican election into a landslide? I think every single one of the current candidates is limited. Rubio and Cruz might draw enough Latinos to win but landslide?
I think this will be a landslide for someone. Which party or candidate, I can’t really guess. But I have never seen so much anger at the status quo or current politicians, on both sides. I see the Democratic coalition ripping apart, but so is the Republican coalition. New coalitions will form, but the constituency is unclear.
I just participated in a poll, the oddest that I can remember. It began by asking the standard voting questions, and put up a couple of head-to-heads.
Then it got weird. They asked if I would consider voting Ind, and I said yes. They said “what about a guy who built a retail empire from 2 stores”? I expressed modest interest.
This guy’s name is Something Trout. I have never heard of him, but he is spending a bunch of bux looking at the Ind route. Anyone else get this call?
Nope
“This happened in 1972, for example. President Nixon certainly didn’t foresee how decisively he’d win that election. If he had, he wouldn’t have broken so many laws and engaged in so many dirty tricks. Yet, when you look back at 1972 with the benefit of hindsight, all the signs were there that the Democrats were approaching a complete wipeout.”
I don’t think this is a good argument. First, everybody knew Nixon was going to win and win big. Maybe not that big, but big. Second, Nixon did not engage in dirty tricks because he was afraid he was going to lose – even if he had known he was going to win 49 states, he would have cheated to win the 50th. That was the only way Nixon knew how to do anything.
It was part of who he was from the very beginning. He came into office believing the anti-war left was out to get him – more than a little truth to it – and he was happy to abuse his power against them from the very first. See the Huston Plan. The enemies list. White House Plumbers – they were to stop leaks – broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist after the Pentagon Papers leak. (The same group later conducted the Watergate operation.)
The Watergate operation ended up providing the evidence to bring him down, but the impeachable offenses did not begin with a desire to win the 1972 election.
In ’72 Nixon was still trying to banish the ghosts of his losses in ’60 and ’62 and a big win would mean that he was, contrary to his reputation, likable.
I’m not so sure that at the time of the Watergate break-in that the election was as settled as you seem to think it was. Nixon knew how he’d pulled a win in ’68, and those that “win by the sword” fear that they can soon enough “lose by the sword.” Any number of Nixon’s disgusting “dirty tricks” could have been exposed during the general election and have led to him being rejected again.
It certainly was settled at least that’s the way I remember it. I couldn’t find a Democrat in the field that was likely to win. McGovern – the eventual nominee – was a hopeless candidate.
One of the reasons the media – outside of the Washington Post – pretty much ignored the story during the campaign was because nobody believed CREEP or the White House would do something so stupid when the election was so well in hand.
John Mitchell was running CREEP and he nixed the burglary at least once because he didn’t see the point. He wasn’t worried about losing. Eventually, for reasons that really aren’t clear he approved it. I always thought he did it because he was afraid Liddy would think he was a wuss if he did not.
Nixon didn’t know about the plan to bug Democratic Headquarters until the next day.