In the Two-Party Trenches

I’m thinking about the election as a lesson not in whatever’s unique this year but as what’s become utterly predictable: our precise and inflexible partisan divide.
       The narrative being written about this election is almost entirely about those people who were extremely excited about Trump and showed up in much bigger numbers than usual. But I’m trying to understand another, quieter narrative that I think is just as important. Those Trump loyalists did tip the scales in the end—but only because they were added to the votes of at least thirty million people who actively didn’t like him, people who weren’t particularly driven by blue-collar anger or fear of globalism or xenophobia or the other bullet-points of most election postmortems. 
       We’re no longer the America of 1964 or 1972 where millions of members of one party would cross the line because of a candidate. We’re now so deeply wedded to our party affiliations, have made them so much a part of our social identities, that instead of adjusting our choice of party according to the candidates we adjust our perceptions of the candidates to support our party biases. “Undecided” voters are mostly undecided between voting for their party’s nominee or staying home. Even most “independent” voters have sympathies with one party or the other that rarely shift.
       This isn't about conscious loyalty. Hardly anyone actively likes their party anymore—or at least the party’s leadership. More and more of us register as independents and feel like we’re constantly stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. But if you look at the county-by-county results of the past five elections (especially if you leave out the panic-year of 2008) they’re astonishingly similar. If you look at exit polls, the demographic breakdowns of who voted for which party in those counties is also astonishingly similar. And what difference there is can be mostly explained by relative turnout among different groups—not changes in people’s preferences.
       There’s a disconnect between the feeling and the doing. I can say, in full sincerity, “I hate Starbucks.” But if you keep catching me in line at Starbucks and every time I say, “I do hate Starbucks, I just didn’t really have a choice this time because I was in a hurry and blah blah blah,” it’s still true that I feel hate for Starbucks—but it’s also true that I’m a regular Starbucks customer and they can probably count on me to keep giving them my money even while I bitch about them.
       Obviously a lot of this reflects the fact that Democratic and Republican candidates are much more consistent than they used to be on their main issues. If Roe v. Wade is high on your agenda, you know which party is for and against it, election after election. But even when you get a candidate who rejects big pieces of the usual party agenda, I don’t see it making any real difference. How many Republicans or Democrats for whom global trade is a major concern actually voted the other way, even with Trump talking protectionism and Clinton’s background on globalism? Looking at the results, it almost seems like the only Republicans who defected were the big-name Neocons in the news. 
       A lot of political scientists have been saying lately, “Candidates don’t matter much.” If any election were ever going to disprove that, it was this one. Instead it bore it out. After all the talk about “realignment,” the only real surprise was the number of Rust Belt states Trump won—but there’s a reason they’re called “swing states.” Their swing wasn’t any big shift of allegiances, it was turnout. Kind of a mirror image of the increased black turnout and lower working-class white turnout in those same states last time. The only real significance of individual candidates now is how well they inspire some subset of the party’s loyalists to vote. It’s enough to tip the balance in a race, but not enough to break the duolith.
       I see a deep cultural split manifested around political parties, a group-identity split that shapes not only our final choices but the lenses through which we see everything. We’ll say, “I hate my party for sticking me with this lousy candidate…but we have to stop That Monster.” And we prepare the monster role for the other party’s candidate before we know who it is.
       This year has been so heated and bizarre that it’s hard even to talk about this, but when I look back four years I remember a lot of fairly reasonable people calling one centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical leftist or the other centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical rightist. And I can see the lenses in action this year. I know sensible Republicans who were appalled by Trump in the primaries but were actively supporting him in the end because they saw Hillary as a threat to everything that makes America what it is. From my side, I can’t conceive how anyone could possibly see a cautious, centrist wonk like Clinton as a threat to everything that makes America what it is (or at least any more of a threat than any Republican or Democratic candidate of the past forty years). But they had no doubt. On the other hand, they don’t understand how I can see Trump as a racist, fascist threat to everything that makes America what it is, where they see just an impulsive jerk who attracted some wing-nut supporters but is basically a pragmatist who will at least preserve most of those things that make America etc. Leaving aside any argument about who’s closer to the truth, there's a split in perceptions here that’s clearly in place long before we know what candidates we’ll be dealing with.
       A lot of that is typical election-year rhetoric. In my research on this new book of mine I’ve found plenty of people who were equally apocalyptic about Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. I remember my parents getting in fights with relatives about whether Goldwater or Johnson was going to destroy the country. What’s different is the relatively tiny number of people who are inclined to look at the other party’s candidate outside the preset partisan lens. (And I include myself in the vast majority who aren’t. I can tell you right now that in 2020 I’m going to hate the Republican candidate and have lots of arguments as to why the Democrat isn’t nearly as bad as those right-wing liars claim.)
       It’s temping to take this as proof that we’re ready for a third party, but the truth is the opposite. This is precisely the situation, when warring camps have divided the field in half, that breaking ranks is hardest. It would be like trying to start a peace movement in the trenches of World War I: the knowledge that stepping back from the battle even for a moment will allow the enemy to advance is too terrible. Even with two candidates deeply unpopular with huge swaths of their own parties and endless talk about how broken the party system is, Johnson and Stein barely broke 4% between them—and less in the swing states.
      Until we can change this, we’ll be stuck in this quadrennial rehash of anger, lies, and prophecies of armageddon, ending with some thin slice of the electorate making the choice for the rest of us. And we’ll be wrestling with the same frustrating challenge we have now: how to make our parties relevant to our beliefs and needs while also targeting them at subgroups of voters in a few counties in Florida and Ohio. But how do we change it? Massive demographic shifts may do it someday, or new generations with very different ideas. I don’t think I can believe that a candidate or strategy or set of policies can do it anymore.
      In the meantime, maybe we can at least look at our nominating systems and see if we can bring more sanity to our choice of the “two for the see-saw.”

Grand Old Fantasies

There's been a lot to analyze and think about in the results of our recent election, but what I'm finding most fascinating right now is the astounding wrongness of Republican predictions on the eve of the vote—or, to be more precise, the stubborn adherence to wrongness by a whole lot of smart people in the face of overwhelming evidence.

       Without exception (as far as I know), prominent Republicans predicted a Mitt Romney victory while nearly every nonpartisan analysis of the polls put the probability of an Obama victory at 80 or 90 percent. And this wasn't just let's-predict-victory-to-keep-our-spirits-up cheerleading. These were serious prognostications. Some expected a Romney landslide, when even the most Republican-leaning state polls showed him trailing in nearly all the swing states he needed to win.

Nor were these just the usual Fox News gasbags like Dick Morris. They included seasoned observers like George F. Will (who a few months before had written a sober and sensible analysis of why Obama was going to be very hard to unseat), strategists like Karl Rove (whose credibility would seem to require a realistic grasp of the facts), and, worst of all, the very people who should have been most realistic about what was going on with the electorate, the pollsters working for the Romney campaign.

        I heard three main arguments from these people as to why all the nonpartisan analyses were wrong. The first was that the polls were "skewed," especially that they were "oversampling Democrats." Even though 38% of voters identified as Democrats and only 32% as Republicans, several pundits insisted that voters from the two parties should be sampled equally, even hinting (at least on Fox News) that the greater number of Democrats was the result of the pollsters' own political biases. This seemed to spring, on the one hand, from a certain paranoia—why on earth would pollsters and odds makers whose livelihoods depend on accuracy intentionally publicize inaccurate information to express a political sentiment?—and on the other from the juvenile but deep-seated resentment that we hear so much of from the right wing lately, that the world is unfairly ranged against them. Republicans should be sampled the same as Democrats, damn it. Otherwise it's just no fair!
       The second argument was that Romney was riding a wave of momentum that had started with the first debate, so that he just had to pull close enough by the final weekend of the campaign that his momentum could carry him over the finish line. That ran against all the evidence of the public polls, which showed that his momentum had stalled out at least two weeks before the election and that the incumbent was actually pulling further ahead by the end. (The GOP apparently produced a few polls on the final weekend showing Romney gaining again, but everyone in that business knows not to trust weekend polling.) In the face of that, members of the campaign talked about the excitement of the crowds wherever they went, a feeling of momentum that couldn't be denied. That one was just wishful thinking.

       The most reality-based of the arguments was the one that held that while the polls' projections of turnout among young and nonwhite voters were based on 2008 results, the truth would surely be that those groups would only turn out at 2004 levels; in others words, 2008 was a fluke because a mad passion for Barack Obama made black people and twenty-somethings behave in a way they never would again. There was actually some evidence to support that one: pro-Romney voters expressed distinctly higher levels of interest and intensity than pro-Obama voters. Still, interest levels have always been an unreliable measure; organized get-out-the-vote operations have proven to matter more, and no one doubted that the Democratics had that part down. The non-partisan poll analysts had the same basic information and didn't bother much about the "intensity gap."
       The New Republic ran an article a couple of days ago breaking down the Romney camp's internal polling and dissecting just how this delusional group-think evolved. But it doesn't answer the other question: why? Why were so many experienced analysts and strategists willing to fly so boldly in the face of so much contradictory evidence, to assert so confidently that they alone had the "real polls" (to quote Dick Morris), to imagine that they had exclusive possession of reality?  
       This was a triumph of mutual self-deception, a vast collaboration on a shared fantasy. Not the sort of thinking one expects from a lot of smart grown-ups with decades of experience in the real world. I'm sure a lot of elements came together to make that happen, but I think the biggest one is also the simplest: We don't like pain and fear, and when they're intense enough we'll do almost anything to squirm away from them. As organisms, we may be able to think in the long term, but we feel in the short term. It's how we evolved: pain and fear are so hard to bear that we bring all our resources to escaping them. And if we can't escape the situation that inspires them, we bring those resources to adjusting our own thinking so the feelings diminish.
       Usually, group wisdom keeps us grounded in reality even in those situations. But when the group is united by an especially agonizing anxiety, then the members may start encouraging each other not to an uncomfortable acceptance of reality but to a mutual soothing of the pain. When the group feels cut off from other people and is already inclined to distrust what it hears from outside, then those strategies of reassurance can zoom like a welcome virus through the mass conversation. Think of the Nazi high command believing that the war could still be turned until there were Russian tanks in Berlin. When we give each other a veiled choice between amplifying our anxiety together and creating hope together, we're primed to choose the latter.
       Republicans had spent years working each other into the terror that an Obama reelection was the worst thing that could happen to them. Then they spent months encouraging each other to believe that that fate could be averted. And, of course, all along the way they continued to reinforce in each other the conviction that the liberal media was ranged against them and couldn't be trusted. When the evidence kept stripping them of their hopes and leaving them naked against their fears, they did the human thing: they came to one another's emotional defense.  
       In times like those, no matter how experienced we are and no matter how complex are our mental gymnastics, we're all like kids again: doing whatever we can to comfort ourselves through the night, but leaving ourselves vulnerable to an ugly reality in the morning.