The Idiot’s Guide to Dominating American Politics
Either Democrats or Republicans could build an electoral coalition that dominates American politics for decades to come. Here’s how.
This is the third and final part in my series on the American election. You can read the earlier installments here and here. Or see all three parts here!
We are in an era of exceptionally close elections. In 2016, 80,000 votes in a few key swing states separated Donald Trump from Hillary Clinton. In 2020, around half of that gave Joe Biden the edge over Donald Trump.
It’s impossible to predict what will happen less than three weeks from now. A genuine polling miss, whether in the one or the other direction, is a distinct possibility. Perhaps the winner of the election will come into clear view by the early evening of November 5. But that is not what polls and prediction models and betting markets currently suggest. As best we can tell, we are in for another nail-biter.
America’s presidential elections are only the most conspicuous metric for the recent closeness and volatility of the U.S. political system. The House of Representatives, for example, changed hands only once between 1955 and 2008; it has done so three times since.
Since it has now been over three decades since either Democrats or Republicans were able to build a broad electoral coalition that could dominate a political era, it’s easy to assume that close-run elections are the natural state of American politics. The United States is a massive and deeply variegated country. The contrasts between urban and rural, between industrial and agricultural, between native and immigrant, and between white and black remain significant. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a country so vast would make it virtually impossible for any one political party to win the stable support of a clear majority of the population.
History suggests otherwise. As an excellent new report by Yuval Levin and Ruy Teixeira points out, most periods in American history have been marked by the clear dominance of one political force. It was the Republicans who dominated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the Democrats who set the tone between the Great Depression and the decades of America’s postwar prosperity; and the Republicans who once again came to dominate in the late 1960s.
This raises an obvious question: Has something in America changed, such that it is no longer possible to build broad and stable majorities? Or could one of the two parties, perhaps taking inspiration from the leaders that set previous partisan realignments into motion, succeed in putting together such a dominant coalition?
There are non-trivial reasons to believe that this time is different. The country is much more ethnically diverse than at any previous point in its history. The rise of the internet and social media has fragmented the public sphere, leading many voters to take uncompromising positions on their hugely varied pet issues. The tone of public life has become relentlessly nasty and negative, eating away at the popularity of virtually all politicians and institutions.
And yet, I believe that—as Levin and Teixeira argue in their report—it is possible for either Democrats or Republicans to bring about a genuine realignment of American politics. At the moment, each party has placed itself well outside the political and cultural mainstream on many important issues. Indeed, each party is able to persist with doubling down on deeply unpopular stances only because it is protected by the similarly self-sabotaging positioning of the other party. If either party managed to put forward an optimistic vision of the future that is firmly rooted in positions and values shared by at least three fifths of the population, they could reap huge rewards for themselves—and perhaps even alleviate the dire state of America’s democracy while they’re at it.
Under Donald Trump, Republicans have been surprisingly successful in attracting new voters to the party.
After the party lost its second consecutive presidential contest to Barack Obama in 2012, Reince Priebus, then the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, argued that it needed to take a more moderate stance on issues like immigration in order to expand its share of the vote among segments of the electorate, such as Latinos, in which it had traditionally been weak. Trump’s ascent was initially seen as a rebuke of that goal. But since 2016, the party has made genuine strides in expanding support among workers without a college degree; in becoming competitive among Latinos; and even in gaining a foothold among African-Americans.
If Trump had managed to add these new voters to his column while retaining much of the party’s traditional support, he would be well on the way to following in the footsteps of one of his idols, Andrew Jackson, who fashioned the Democratic Party with his populist appeals and was able to build a coalition that dominated American politics for decades. But even as some of Trump’s political strengths helped him to expand his coalition, his political weaknesses made many voters who had previously been reliable Republicans run for the hills. The party used to enjoy a distinct electoral advantage among a broad swath of the educated suburban middle class. Since Trump’s rise, those voters have been decamping to the Democratic Party at a rapid pace.
Some of this may have been inevitable. Trump’s willingness to break with the party’s orthodoxies on questions of economic policy—for example by proclaiming in the 2016 primaries that he does believe the state has an obligation to help Americans access high-quality healthcare—alienated parts of the party’s erstwhile base, but resulted in a net gain of votes. In electoral politics, some trade-offs are inescapable, and this was probably the smart end of the bargain. But much of Trump’s eroding support among college-educated voters, being down to personality rather than policy, could easily have been avoided.
Trump’s electoral prospects have been deeply harmed by his unwillingness to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election; by his verbal support for the insurrectionists who staged an unprecedented assault on the Capitol; by his inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants and other minority groups; by his incorrigible penchant for making outsized promises he reliably goes on to break; and by his persistent legal troubles.
Most non-white voters say that they are politically moderate or conservative. But while some of them have duly shifted to the Republican column over the course of the last years, many continue to harbor serious doubts about the sincerity of the party’s commitment to their well-being. They sense that Trump would be willing to turn on them the moment it becomes politically expedient to do so. While they may share the growing Republican hostility to the worldview of the professional managerial class that now dominates the Democratic coalition, they fear that Republicans will, once in office, continue to favor the interests of big corporations and the ultra-wealthy.
Republicans have a genuine political opening to turn themselves into the party of the multiracial working-class while retaining significant support among its traditional base. Trump has done better at pushing the party in that direction than anybody expected when he first entered politics; but it is difficult to imagine the party completing that transformation while he remains at its helm.
Democrats should in theory be able to seize upon Trump’s extremism and persistent unpopularity to win decisive political victories. Indeed, this is what most political analysts expected them to do in 2016, when it was widely assumed that Trump’s elevation to the Republican nomination would all but guarantee Hillary Clinton’s ascent to the White House. And yet, we are now in the midst of the third consecutive election campaign in which Democrats have failed to build a sufficiently broad coalition to shut the MAGA movement out of political contestation. So why on earth is Harris failing to build a stable lead over Trump?
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As is to some extent inevitable in a two-party system, Democratic strengths and weaknesses are largely an inverted mirror image of Republican ones. Democrats have turned themselves into the party of the credentialed elite; they now dominate voters with college degrees and have their biggest geographical strongholds in the richest parts of the country. But they have also been bleeding support among much of their traditional electorate. White, working-class voters are now far more likely to vote for Trump than Harris. Astonishingly, the non-white voters that were supposed to fuel the party’s inevitable ascent are also deserting the coalition in significant numbers. According to current polls, Trump is likely to gain record support among Latinos and even (albeit at a much lower level) African-Americans.
One common explanation for this remarkable fact has been the idea that the average American voter is benighted. If Trump is such a persistent threat, this theory holds, then most Americans must be racist or sexist or xenophobic or all of the above. But that theory never made much sense. If the reason why people are voting for Trump is down to racism, then why have so many non-white voters been attracted to him?1 Even more incongruously, both survey research and observational data suggest that Americans have more tolerant attitudes towards racial or sexual minorities now than they did in the past; though some political scientists have made a valiant effort at squaring the circle, it is hard to see how an explanatory variable like “prejudice” can be blamed for an outcome like the increase in populism if it has been steadily declining.
An extensive new survey which Levin and Teixeira conducted as part of their report serves as a helpful reminder of just how inclusive the opinions of a clear majority of Americans have now become in many respects. Asked whether “increasing racial and ethnic diversity” is a good thing for American society, for example, 59 percent said that it was; 25 percent said it would not make a difference; only 15 percent said that it would be bad.2 A clear majority of Americans is also willing to acknowledge that members of minority groups continue to suffer from serious disadvantages; asked whether there is “a lot of discrimination” against black people, 65 percent answered in the affirmative.3
There is now a clear majority for a tolerant and inclusive politics in America, one that resolutely stands up for the equal treatment of all people, and even takes energetic action against forms of social exclusion and racial discrimination that persist in the country. So when Democrats blame their inability to build a broad coalition on the prejudiced attitudes of average voters, they are resorting to the worst form of cope, lashing out at the people they are tasked with winning over for their own failure to do so.
The problem, rather, is that most voters perceive the Democratic Party as going far beyond these core commitments to tolerance and inclusivity. While only about one in three Americans consider themselves liberal, Levin and Teixeira’s survey shows that two out of three believe that Democrats have moved to the left over the course of the past years, with most of them saying that the change has been dramatic. 61 percent of Americans believe that the Republican party is too extreme, a testament to the fact that the potential for a broad anti-Trump coalition remains strong; but Democrats are struggling to exploit this opening because 55 percent of voters say that the same description applies to them.4
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This conviction is in good part based on areas in which the policy commitments of Democrats clearly clash with the preferences of the electorate. On cultural issues from affirmative action to the inclusion of transgender athletes in competitive sports, a large gulf separates the Democrats’ official position from public sentiment. Even on some of the Democrats’ strongest issues, they are in danger of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Abortion, for example, is one of the strongest issues for the party in this electoral cycle, and nearly two in three Americans now oppose far-reaching restrictions. But nor do they support the official position of mainstream Democrats, which goes far beyond what is legal in virtually any European country. While 71 percent of Americans want abortion to be legal in the first trimester, only 39 percent support it being legal in the second trimester, and only one in five voters believe that there should be no legal restrictions on the procedure even in the third trimester.
When you look at a ton of polling data and listen to dozens of focus groups and talk to as many voters as you can, it becomes clear that the views and preferences of most Americans are much less polarized than the conventional wisdom would suggest. The loudest Democratic and Republican activists live on different planets from each other; but neither comes close to representing the majority of American voters. There is now a clear—and reasonable—majority for the taking.
On economic issues, that majority skew moderate or slightly left. Most Americans believe in capitalism and value the free market. They abhor the intrusion of the state through needless regulation and want small businesses to thrive. At the same time, they want the state to take a more active role in making sure that the fruits of economic growth benefit the many, not the few. Proposals for the government to negotiate drug prices, facilitate access to high-quality health care or help parents defray the costs of child-rearing poll very well. Conversely, tax cuts and loopholes and handouts that benefit the rich and big corporations are deeply unpopular.
On cultural issues, the majority skew moderate or slightly right. Most Americans want to live in a fair country and lament that many of their compatriots continue to suffer from serious forms of discrimination. They believe that immigration has been a net benefit to the country and have a positive view of diversity. But they abhor what Democratic strategist James Carville calls “faculty lounge politics.” They want their politicians to speak plainly rather than to use terms concocted in university seminars and judge anyone who didn’t get the memo. They want the rights and duties of Americans to depend on their individual achievements rather than the group into which they were born. They want their government to have control over its own borders and expect their politicians to know the difference between well-founded requests for inclusion and policies pushed by activists that violate common sense.
Either party could in theory seize this middle-ground of American politics and build an electoral coalition that could potentially become dominant for decades. But both parties face serious internal obstacles in getting there.
For Republicans to seize the middle, they would need to turn themselves into the genuine party of the multiracial working-class. Over the last years, some influential voices within the party have been trying to spell out what such an economic agenda would look like; progressives who dismiss these voices as absurd do so at their own peril. But the theoretical groundwork that some conservative intellectuals and electeds are laying has so far led to little action. When Republicans are in power, whether at the federal or at the state level, they largely default back to policies which favor big business or give handouts to the richest Americans.
Another obstacle for Republicans has to do with Trump’s character and rhetoric. His sharp attacks on the country’s class of credentialed elites resonates with a large segment of the electorate. Even his warnings about the risks of a porous southern border appeals to a much broader range of voters, including most Latinos, than Democrats are willing to admit to themselves. But the party will struggle to hold on to many of its more moderate, college-educated voters as long as Trump assails basic democratic norms—and will curtail its potential gains among the non-white working-class as long as its figurehead gives many of them reasonable grounds to fear for their future standing in American society.
Democrats also face significant obstacles to seizing the middle ground. The gulf between them and the median voter is comparatively small in the realm of economic policy. Democrats often fail to convey their admiration for the entrepreneurial spirit that pervades many of the communities whose votes they long took for granted. Like Republicans, they are widely seen as representing the interests of the core interest groups that have traditionally supported the party. But the electorate should be receptive to their basic economic message. When Democrats focus on bread-and-butter issues like raising wages or defraying the cost of childcare, they are able to build credibility. Their most effective politicians, like Sherrod Brown—who may ultimately lose his tight Senate race in increasingly red Ohio but is polling significantly ahead of Harris in that state—recognize this. They are able to combine touches of economic populism with genuine respect for hard work and an aversion to ideological jargon.
It is more difficult to imagine Democrats changing course in the cultural realm. In a sense, that is surprising. Unlike in the 1970s, the silent majority in American politics is now committed to basic values of tolerance and inclusion. Though progressives always claim that anyone who wants Democrats to distance themselves from the most unpopular planks of their program is selling out minority voters, it is perfectly possible for the party to broaden its electoral coalition while standing by its most fundamental moral commitments. As it happens, many of the policies whose abandonment would supposedly sell out minority groups in any case turn out to be more popular among the highly educated white voters who now make up the bulk of the Democratic Party’s activists and staffers than among nonwhite voters.
But that is precisely the problem: For Democrats to broaden their coalition, they would need to make a clean break with the narrow cultural milieu that has completely come to dominate the party. And since personnel is policy, this might ultimately prove all but impossible.
Over the course of the last weeks, I have discussed four myths about the American electorate. These add up to a conventional narrative whose overall shape dominates political thinking about America:
The American electorate is deeply polarized along racial lines, with Democrats sure to profit from demographic change.
Economically speaking, Republicans remain the party of the affluent or the rich while Democrats retain a distinct advantage among working-class voters.
Since every sane person has made their mind up about Trump one way or the other, winning elections is a matter of turning out the base.
America is now one of the most polarized countries in the world, with two stable voting blocks of roughly equal size opposing each other at every election.
If you buy all of that, it seems to follow that it is basically impossible for either party to win a commanding majority. The high level of conflict the country is now experiencing is all but guaranteed to persist for the foreseeable future. But while each of these myths is so popular because it contains a kernel of truth, all four deeply distort reality. Taken together, they lead to a fundamentally erroneous perception of America. Once they are corrected, a very different picture emerges:
The traditional cleavages which shaped the American electorate are fast eroding. While the American electorate was once deeply racially polarized, the color of a voter’s skin now plays a rapidly diminishing role in determining who they vote for. As a result, both parties now have a real chance of boosting the number of votes they receive from within each ethnic group.
The economic structure of the electorate is also changing. Republicans are no longer the party of the affluent, and Democrats are rapidly losing support among the “little man.” A voter’s income now says much less about who they are going to vote for than their educational attainments, with rich parts of America leaning towards the Democrats and poor parts leaning towards the Republicans.
These changes help to explain why there are a lot of cross-pressured voters who genuinely can’t make up their mind about whom to support. It is the voters who are changing their mind and flipping their allegiances who have decided the last two presidential elections.
While the United States are indeed deeply polarized, they do not come close to being as divided as countries like Kenya, Lebanon or Bosnia-Herzegovina. The two Americas are neither set in stone nor destined to remain implacably opposed to each other; it is perfectly possible for one party to build a broad electoral coalition which inaugurates a new political era.
For all of these reasons, we need to make a fundamental distinction between two very different, if apparently similar, claims. The first is that we live in an era in which presidential elections are extremely close run; this has been true for the last three cycles, and is likely to remain true on November 5 of this year. The second is that the American electorate is so closely divided or so deeply polarized that it has effectively become impossible for any one party to pull off a convincing victory, as Barack Obama did in 2008 or Ronald Reagan did in 1986; this, as Levin and Teixeira rightly argue, is fundamentally false.
The 2024 election is part of an odd interregnum. But while interregnums can last a long time, they tend to end abruptly. That end may come in 2028 or 2032 or 2036. But come it likely will, and the shape it takes will determine the nature of American politics for decades to come. That should be of concern both to capital-d Democrats who could turn into a permanent minority in an era they once assumed they would dominate, and to small-d democrats who have no way of knowing whether a newly-dominant Republican Party would prove to be more respectful of institutional norms than its current incarnation.
A major partisan realignment is in the offing. Whatever happens on November 5, any political force that is serious about shaping the future of American politics must focus on bringing it about. That work is unlikely to begin for another month—but it must start in earnest the day after the election.
Yuval Levin and Ruy Teixeira will discuss their excellent report—and the 2024 election—on a special episode of The Good Fight we are releasing next week. To hear my conversation with them, and gain full, ad-free access to all episodes of the podcast, please become a paying subscriber today and set up your private feed!
The explanation offered by especially ideological defenders of this thesis, that these Latino voters are “white-adjacent” while African-Americans who vote for Trump have “internalized white supremacy,” is singularly unconvincing.
Similarly, presented with two competing statements about the impact of diversity, 62 percent said that “we should encourage more diversity in the U.S. because doing so makes us more tolerant and can change how we think about the world;” only 36 percent said that “we should be careful about how much diversity we encourage because it can diminish national unity.”
Similarly, a clear majority disagreed with the claim that “police officers generally treat blacks and other minorities the same as whites.”
Another indication of this difficulty is that voters don’t believe Democrats share their values. Asked whether this statement describes the Democrats accurately, only 11 percent said that it does so very well.
Your central point is, of course, right and a critical one for us to understand. Democrats could dominate politics with a “Democratic focus on bread-and-butter issues like raising wages or defraying the cost of childcare”—again becoming the party of the working class.
And right again that this is precisely the problem:
Democrats “need to make a clean break with the narrow cultural milieu that has completely come to dominate the party.”
David Shor, the child prodigy, Obama’s data guru for his second win, has been screaming your winning strategy at the Democratic elite for years. But you well know that he got his ass canceled by “the narrow cultural milieu” aka CRT thugs, even though he’s a Marxist. He calls your idea “popularism.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html
So the real problem is actually the same old problem we focus on so often — How to shut down the radical authoritarian left who cloak themselves in niceness and concern for the oppressed. As you said June 30, 2020, we “need to rise to the fight of a lifetime. … to build a new community of thinkers, activists, and citizens.”
All of your essays are actually useful for this and encourage this (like this one does), but you need to help us make the links from theory to practice. This substack would be the perfect safe base for organizing thoughtful activism, if the door for that could be opened, as it almost was in 2020. Help us “rise to the fight of a lifetime.’
I think that Democrats are being punished, especially in the Senate, by failing to advance a bold and progressive program to help out rural communities. Republicans only offer them guns and appeals to patriotism and racism. FDR came up with the Tennessee Valley Authority. LBJ championed electrification and anti-poverty programs. The divide in America is more rural vs urban than anything else, and Dems are identified as the “city” party. Secondly, Dems need to reach out to small entrepreneurs. There is no good reason why Joe Blow who owns a John Deere dealership in Cornville is a diehard Republican, who in fact is an activist and possibly a Convention delegate. Universal health care would free small employers from the nightmare of employer sponsored health care. My two cents.