Why aren't I 50 points ahead, you might ask!

Reader Picks comments are unhinged lol

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48211573)

Oct. 17, 2024, 7:00 p.m. ET

a photo illustration showing black and white photos of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

Credit...Ioulex for The New York Times

Share full article

55

David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.

We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move.

The second thing that baffles me is: 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. (In the 1930s the Democrats dominated with the New Deal, and the Republicans complained. In the 1980s the Reagan revolution dominated, and the Democrats tried to adjust.)

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. The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.” Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again. Kamala Harris refuses to break with Biden on any significant issue and is running as a paint-by-numbers orthodox Democrat. Neither party tolerates much ideological diversity. Neither party has a plausible strategy to build a durable majority coalition. Why?

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to. In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

Let’s look at the Democratic Party. The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy. Voters trust them on issues like health care and are swinging their way on issues like abortion. They have a great base from which to potentially expand their coalition and build their majority. All they have to do is address their weaknesses, the places where they are out of step with most Americans.

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. 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. The more the Democrats embrace the priesthood’s orthodoxy, the more it loses working-class voters, including Hispanic and Black working-class voters.

For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.

Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes. According to a 2022 University of Southern California survey of Americans, 92 percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” Which is why only a third of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they supported using race as a factor in college admissions.

Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops.

But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is. An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.

Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countries. But most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.

On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.

The Republicans have exactly the same dynamic, except their priesthood is dominated by shock jocks, tech bros and Christian nationalists, some of whom are literally members of the priesthood.

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.

The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.

Each party’s metaphysic seems to grow more rigid and impermeable as time goes by. Sometimes it seems that Harris is running not to be president of the United States but to be president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain, while Trump is running to be president of Republican Fantasy Island. Each party has become too narcissistic to get outside its own head and try to build a coalition with people outside the camp of true believers.

The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without a college degree than with one. Class is growing more salient in American life, with Hispanic and Black working-class voters shifting steadily over to the working-class party, the G.O.P.

The problem for Trump is that he is even better at repelling potential converts than the Democrats. He’d be winning landslides if he had tried to wedge MAGA Republicans into a coalition with Bush-McCain Republicans, but he’s incapable of that.

The problem for the rest of us is that we’re locked into this perpetual state of suspended animation in which the two parties are deadlocked and nothing ever changes. I keep running into people who are rooting for divided government for the next four years. It will mean that America will be able to do little to solve its problems. They see this as the least bad option.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48211629)

The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy.

The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy.

The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy.

The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48211645)

The true test to me is look at something like a potential DeSantis vs Newsom match for presidency. Pre-covid, it was probably polling like 48-48. Then you have this huge crisis, DeSantis bravely follows the science and opens things up, rescues kids, protects bodily integrity, etc. Conversely you have Newsom locking people in their homes for years (while he dines out at French Laundry), he masks kids for no reason for years after Florida did, record number of people are leaving CA (vs entering FL), he forces everyone to get a vaccine that now it's been admitted does not stop spread, etc.

Yet in head to head matchups in 2023 they were polling at like 49-47. So only 1 person out of 100 changed their mind after looking at DeSantis staring down criticism and doing the right thing vs Newsome literally locking people in their homes while he dined out.

David Brooks is answering that wiht this column. People don't care if they're toddler is forced to wear a mask at school for 8 hours a day so long as the politician gives speeches that say "climate change is a huge threat to our world!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48211693)

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOO

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48212604)

Open primaries create a lot of pressure on candidates not to do things that would expand their popularity more broadly and the expense of turning off the true believer.

Politician have to balance broad appeal with base appeal more than they used to.

In addition to a bunch of other stuff like the media is 100 little niches that you have to appeal to instead of broad mass media, which if you won, you we're highly likely to be broadly popular.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48212064)

the 50/50 seemed to be built as some response to Reagan '84. It has had peaks and valleys since then, but it has always aspired to a perfect 50/50.

There are probably a million reasons why its architects desire it, but I dont think there's any escaping that it is, in fact, their goal.

There's a problem, though.... To build the 50/50 since 2000 or so, they have had to supplement Dem numbers with appropriate numbers of immigrants. That was a perfect short term solution, but they did not have the luxury to care about the fact that these people have a lot of kids

If Texas flips, 50/50 is fucked for many years. And one of these cycles, it really could flip.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48212236)

Those days are long gone. It’s not a coincidence that Dems are aligned with Cheney and Jamie Dimon. This would have been inconceivable in 2004. I think of John Kerry trying to pretend he was a military man and get people to forget that he was a war protestor as the clear beginning of this shift.

In the GOPe side, at least as recently as the mid-1990, they were supposed to be the party of fiscal constraint. Romney even tried to talk about getting people off food stamps. That went out the window with Bush. Now both sides are arguing about much to give away, with Vance talking out “inequality”.

That’s why they spend so much time arguing about culture war stuff that actually doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change - like abortion, gays, now trannies. The two sides are more or less indistinguishable now on war, spending, size of government, welfare state, corporate control and individual liberties.

This all supports the op’s theory of the commitment to the 50/50 model. But as stated above mass illegal immigration will destroy the fabric of this pretty fast - and not because illegals will vote for Chuck Schumer. They will bring their own extremist party framework from South America, and we will look more like Brazil (culturally and politically).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5613657&forum_id=2Elisa#48212597)