Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Joe 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.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% 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 GOP.
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
