Why Isn’t Biden Winning By 20 Points?
Why Isn’t Biden Winning By 20 Points?
A complicated answer about partisanship in America.
Today’s newsletter requires some set up. If you’ve already listened to Friday’s Secret pod, you can skip ahead a bit.
1. Landslides
On Friday’s Secret Show, I lamented that, by every objective measure, Joe Biden should be winning this election by 20 points. This was my howling-into-the-void act where I took the objective economic data, coupled it with Trump’s criminality, and felt like I was taking crazy pills.
Sarah responded by saying that it was a good question and Democrats ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves why Biden isn’t winning by 20. They ought to interrogate what they are doing that makes them so out-of-step with half of the country.
My response was that while Joe Biden might not be a perfect candidate, even the Perfect Democrat would be unlikely to outperform Biden by more than 5 points.
Which is to say: While a theoretically Perfect Democrat might be able to get to +8 against Trump, +20 was simply impossible.
That conversation nagged at me all weekend. So I want to unpack it today starting with this précis:
Over the last 40 years American politics has polarized along ideological lines. This polarization has created a deep partisanship which has, in turn, locked us into an era of political trench warfare.
Presidential landslides are not possible in this era.
Let’s work backwards, starting with the fact that the presidential landslide has been declining for 40 years. We’ll start at 1960, since that’s the advent of the television age in politics, and look at the popular-vote margins.
Three points:
We had close elections in the past (1960, 1968, 1976). But these were choice elections, pitting non-incumbents against one another.1 Having made a choice, Americans were happy enough to vote for the incumbent the following election in a landslide (by more than 15 points).
Because of Ross Perot’s influence in 1992 and 1996, it’s possible that the transition isn’t as smooth as it looks.
The margins in 2004, 2008, and 2020 suggest that while a presidential “landslide” used to mean a margin >15 points, today it means winning by roughly 5 points.
That’s the reality. So how did we get here?
I want to put two more charts in front of you—both from Pew—while you have the above graph fresh in your mind.
The first is a look at presidential/Senate “mismatches.” What we’re looking for here is senators who won election in a state that went for the opposite party’s presidential candidate:
In the 1980s, these mismatches happened all the time. So much so, that a senator had a 50-50 chance to win in state which voted for his opponent’s party at the presidential level. Here’s the same data, but in percentage form:
We went from a world in which half of the winning senators were from a different party as the guy who won their state’s presidential vote (the yellow line) to nearly zero percent.
As a consequence, the percentage of split delegations has dropped. Have a look at this graph and note how the number of gray boxes—meaning, states with split delegations—goes from a sizable majority in 1980 to a tiny minority in 2022.
Now that you have these numbers in your head, let me tell you a story.
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2. The Heterodox Era
Once upon a time, America’s political parties were heterodox. There were conservative and liberal Republicans. There were liberal and conservative Democrats.
Because of their heterodox natures, the party of a candidate was less important than his value proposition to voters. The candidate’s ideological makeup had to be in step with his state, and if it was, then he was viable, irrespective of his party ID.
And because of that most Americans lived in states where they were habituated to voting for candidates from each party. A voter might be a “conservative” or a “liberal,” but she saw those values as existing in both parties, depending on the candidate. She would vote for Ronald Reagan for president, but also for Al Gore for Senate.
Beginning in 1980, the parties began to sort ideologically. Liberals increasingly identified only with the Democratic party and conservatives increasingly identified only with the Republican party.
It’s not clear why this shift happened, but my top three explanations are:
Political realignment caused by the end of the Cold War.
The geographical self-sorting of voters as they moved into like-minded communities at scale.
Changing technology and the media environment.
As always, when we talk about big changes the answer is probably complicated and involves a great many factors. But fast-forward to 2024 and what we have is:
An ideologically homogeneous Republican party.
A somewhat less ideologically homogeneous Democratic party.2
A partisan divide in which most voters are locked into a single party because they have never voted for a candidate from the rival party.
As the partisan share of the electorate get bigger, the elections get closer, and the size of what counts as a “landslide” win shrinks.
In other words, I don’t think it’s Biden’s fault, or the Democratic party’s fault, that Biden isn’t winning by 20. I think there are giant, structural forces at work over the last two generations that have put us where we are today.
Further, I suspect that the parties are as much reflections of this reality as causes of it.3
The flip side of this coin is that I don’t know that I’d blame the Republican party, either. Democrats like talk about how it’s the Republican party or Fox News or talk radio that created our hellscape.4
Certainly it’s the collective choices by individual Republican voters that got us here. And conservative media surely played some part. But also: Compared to the end of the Cold War, massive internal migration, and the internet, Rush Limbaugh and Fox strike me as small-ball.
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3. The Opportunity
How do you break out of trench warfare? You diversify the party ideologically.
Republicans are in the middle of an ideological contraction. As MAGA consolidates its ownership of the GOP, the party is purging all non-MAGA Republicans. Which means that, for the foreseeable future, the Republican party will remain highly dependent on partisans. Meaning: the trench warfare status quo is to its advantage.
Democrats, on the other hand, are more ideologically diverse simply by dint of being more demographically diverse. Just one example: the party is highly reliant both on older African-American voters (who tend to be conservative) and young, college-educated whites (who tend to be liberal).
The Democratic project should be to lean into this ideological diversity to find Democrats who are in-step in red states—like John Tester in Montana and Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Because by creating split-ticket voters now, they will be seeding the ground for a bigger upside in presidential elections later.
This is an asymmetric advantage for Democrats: They have the ability to create split-ticket voters in red states that Republicans do not currently have in blue states.
None of this happens overnight; it’s the work of a generation. If anything, I think the Biden Democrats have done a pretty good job of leaning into this diversity—both on policy and politics. That’s why we have Tester and Cooper, but also Fetterman and Warnock and Kelly. That’s why Democrats nominated Tim Ryan in Ohio in 2022 and, frankly, why they chose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in 2020.
Over time, I like the Democrats’ odds here. They should be able to break out of the era of trench warfare before Republicans can.
And this last fact explains why Republicans are less interested in breaking out of this era than they are in moving America toward an Orbánist illiberal democracy.
Ford was the incumbent in 1976, but I consider him a special case.
Modern Democrats are significantly less ideologically homogenous than modern Republicans—but are significantly more homogenous than Democrats of 40 years ago.
Though it’s possible that the parties themselves could have chosen to hold onto more institutional power than they have. The decline of the parties’ strength is one of the big explanations for where we are today, but I’m not sure if that decline is cause or effect.
It would be nice to blame Fox News, or Newt Gingrich. And they each deserve some share. But at the end of the day, the conclusion of the Cold War combined with the disintermediation of institutional gate keepers combined with massive economic prosperity and increased mobility matter a lot more.
I think the role that bigotry and racism play in rightwing politics is routinely underestimated by those who analyze these things. Attitudes get passed down from generation to generation and what may at first strike us as an aberration due to Donald Trump's destructive influence on the body politic is actually more of a fanning of flames from fires of resentment and hatred that have been smoldering throughout American history. Reading "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson gave me a deeper understanding of this. Having grown up believing in a simplistic view of Americans as the good guys and liberators of the Jews in World War II, I was shocked to find out that the Nazis studied American attitudes and segregation laws when formulating their own plans of how to begin making Jews outcasts in German society.
What this means is that pre-existing inherent biases make Trump's MAGA base easy suckers for the rightwing propaganda machine - because they begin by being predisposed to believe the lies that they like.
MAGAs literally despise and hate those of us they think of as "woke” because they see us as the agents of the changes they feel so threatened by.
They call us "libtards," "demorats" and "demonrats" because we are the ones supporting the move toward “diversity, inclusion, and equity” which to their way of thinking represents most of what has been going wrong with this country.
We think white privilege is a problem.
They think the problem is reverse racism - and they are the victims of it.
Likewise, when those on our side of the political fence see and treat LGBT people like normal worthwhile human beings, that is an affront to those on the other side of the fence, a challenge and an insult to the values they hold close.
What rightwing propaganda peddlers do is continually reinforce, strengthen and exploit the bigotry, racism, and aggressive animosity that is already out there with a relentless deluge of lies that help to rationalize it.
I mostly agree here with one important caveat. I think you cannot overstate the importance of Fox.
I was recently flipping through my kids history book and came to the section on the "Yellow Journalism Era". I find it profoundly funny that we still feel superior enough to comment on this period as if it was a huge aberration we must read about as a discreet historical era.
We're living through a yellow journalism era. Of course Fox only gave the people what they wanted but there was ALWAYS a market for insanity. It was a strong code of professional ethics and a national response to yellow journalism that kept the "manufactured consent" era.
I wonder if Chomsky has stopped to reflect of the fact that the manufactured consent was actually a good thing.
Bit by bit the strong sense of duty and professional ethics was lost. It was gate keeping that kept the media honest. Fox obliterated that. And the left has been furiously trying to create a leftist Fox ever since.
The average person hasn't read McCluen or Chomsky. They haven't read Lenin or Goebbels. They say they distrust the media. In fact they completely trust THEIR media and distrust media that doesn't affirm their beliefs.
This was always here. It wasn't a mind virus of the 1800s. People purposefully stopped doing that for the good of the state and society.
Fox broke that consensus. It has been a catastrophe.