27 Observations about American Politics
For whatever reason, people love blog posts in list format
Donald Trump is unfit to be President of the United States. He’s too old, he’s hopelessly corrupt, and he quite clearly envies the dictators. Dozens of his former hand-picked senior officials have denounced him. His senior national security leaders—uniformed and civilian—are lined up against him. And his basic politics is that of a banana republic. And no, this is not true of all presidents; most have a baseline respect for the rule of law.
Unfit is not the same as unpopular. Voters always face cross-pressures, and this is especially true of the presidency. Leadership ability, character, and—yes—even corruption levels have to be weighed against policy positions; you only get one vote. And, of course, some people genuinely like the aspects of Trump that make him unfit.
Donald Trump is unpopular. He never had an approval rating over 50% during his presidency. Since leaving office, his favorability average has hovered in the low 40s, and currently stands at forty-three percent.
Unpopular is not the same as unelectable. Elections are sometimes described as popularity contests about which candidate you’d rather have a beer with, but that’s not exactly right. Voters might rationally prefer an asshole. Even to the degree it is a popularity contest, it’s a binary election choice. And Kamala Harris ain’t popular either.
Of course this is true, and denying it is dumb. Most of us are actually practicing it to one degree or another. Like, I’m going to vote for Harris, but she’s far from my ideal candidate. My main concern with the presidency is foreign policy and executive experience/competence, and I really don’t love Harris on those dimensions. I expect her to be mediocre at best.
But for me, she’s by far the least-worst option. I can’t stomach the thought of Trump in charge of foreign affairs again. I always hear people say things weren’t so bad under Trump, and that strikes me as—at best—a very domestic-policy oriented view. His foreign policy of talking tough but mostly appeasing China and Russia was really bad for US and allied interests, and a second term could easily worsen our position against the authoritarian global powers in disastrous ways.
It’s less important, but the same with domestic issues. I’m definitely somewhat to the right of Harris and the Dems on domestic policy. Both more neoliberal on economic issues and modestly more conservative on social issues. But Trump’s core economic issue—universal protective tariffs—is the worst policy centerpiece of any presidential candidate of my lifetime. Normally, I’d just shrug because LOL Congress will never go for that. But tariff policy is essentially unilaterally controlled by the president under statutory authority granted by Congress.
Congress should amend the relevant statutes and give the president less of a free hand with tariff policy. Some discretion is necessary, but Congress never intended the authority for what Trump is proposing, and should hem it in accordingly.
Highly unpopular candidates are a new thing. In the not-so-distant past, presidential candidates were often reasonably popular. In some cases, really popular. It’s impossible to explain to anyone who can’t remember it, but Senator McCain had a favorability in the mid-50s or higher for the entire 2008 election, and he got crushed. Which is more evidence that popularity itself isn’t enough to win an election.
Candidates can’t just take all the popular positions. There’s a line of naive thinking that’s like “why doesn’t Trump/Harris just change their position on X and Y and get all the votes?” and the answer is that (1) electoral coalitions are fragile; (2) the coalitions help you on non-policy dimensions; and (3) you don’t gain that much by switching to the popular position.
Consider Trump and abortion. I’m sure Trump would love the world in which he just declares he’s pro-choice, it totally neutralizes the issue, and he pays no price for doing so. That is not how any politics works, anywhere, ever. First, pro-choice voters would be very skeptical. Second, pro-life voters would be livid. People always say “what are they going to do, vote for Harris?” but that’s not really the problem. Instead, they stay home. They stop sending you money. They bad mouth you. They undermine your new policy. They don’t help you on other issues. They turn other officials against you. They come at you in primaries. Candidates are leaders of coalitions; if the coalition collapses, the candidate collapses. Look at Biden.
Elections matter, just not exactly how you think. I’ve written about this at length. Yes, they change the composition of some parts of the government. But they also do two other things. But second, and more importantly, they change the outlook for every actor in the system. The election is a signal about new possibilities in policy and politics. Everyone is watching, and the cataclysmic shock of the voters weighing in to rearrange the chessboard of what people will think possible to attempt, and what they will actually attempt. The meaning of the election is, at a very real level, as important as the election itself.
And what the election “meant” is itself open to contestation. We don’t know who is going to win or lose the election, but we are already over-specified about why they won or lost. Everyone will actively try to shape the public meaning of the election, hoping to create optimal conditions for the policies they would like to pursue, the officials they would like to empower, and the future candidates they would like to see succeed. All of this sums to a massive policy fight in the public sphere, where actors who existed before and after the election must reassess their strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and resources as they plan new strategies in the world created by the election.
This is one reason why election-denialism is so deadly to a political party and to a party system. If you incorrectly understand the meaning of the election as nothing more than fraud, there is little incentive to alter your policies, but a strong incentive to (1) endlessly focus on the fraud; and (2) purge your coalition of people who don’t believe there was fraud. Solve for the equilibrium.
In a broader sense, all politics is a public fight over meaning, be it elections, policy choices of legislatures, or the actions of public officials. And the actual answer is, in some sense, unknowable. Instead, voters and parties and coalitions will have a public fight over the answers, and the results of those fights—whether right or wrong—will be the drivers that shape the forward going policy, political, and electoral strategies.
A not-trivial pet peeve of mine is people who use politics as synonymous with elections. Electoral politics is a tiny subset of politics.
I always loved this old party cleavage chart by Jennifer Victor. It’s worth pondering. The specific names you put in the boxes and the specific economic and social issues you might label the dimensions with have probably changed. But it’s a very succinct and effective illustration of the party coalition shifts in American politics. Most of us grew up in a national politics dominated by an economic cleavage, but now are living in one increasingly reflecting a social cleavage. The Chamber of Commerce is heading toward the Dems; the union-vote is heading toward the GOP. Also: read Polarized By Degrees.
Racial depolarization would be an unambiguously good thing for American politics. A lot of Democrats are understandably upset about the erosion of their sizable advantage with minority voters. But both parties effectively competing for minority votes is the surest way to guarantee neither party is programmatically hostile to distinct minority interests. And a country where the African-American vote splits 50/50 is likely to be producing overall better public policies for African-Americans than one where it is 90/10, especially since so much public policy in the US can be blocked by intense (political) minorities.
The combination of the last two items may lead us toward a lot of changes on voting rights. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that Democrats now do better in low-turnout elections. College-educated people vote at a higher rate, and the Democrats are gaining those voters and losing non-college voters. The marginal non-voter is probably now more likely to be a Republican. This equilibrium is easy to solve for: pretty soon, Dems will probably give up fighting the popular voter ID laws. That may not sit well ethically with committed liberals, but the parties have never been—and won’t be—moral fonts on mission-critical electoral issues. Ditto on racial issues. If the depolarization continues, look for the GOP to give up fighting their unpopular battle against restoration of voting rights for convicted felons in states that currently disenfranchise.
The last five presidencies have begun under unified government. That has typically meant major party-line legislative pushes, including the use of reconciliation instructions to bypass Senate filibusters (Obamacare, TCJA, ARPA, IRA, etc.). It’s pretty unlikely—but not impossible—that Trump could win the presidency and not hold the House, but there’s a decent chance Harris would start without the Senate. I’m not sure the 118th Congress should be your model for anything, but you can throw your entire legislative campaign agenda out the window if there’s divided government. It’s going to be a slog.
An opposition Senate will be a brave new world. Ever since the 2013 and 2017 nuking of the filibuster for the executive calendar, divided government has featured the peculiar phenomena of the Senate spending most of its time confirming judges. Both Trump and Biden have had judicial nominations confirmed at record rates (depending on how you count things), and there were times in the 116th and 118th Congresses where that was seemingly the only thing happening on the floor in either chamber. We haven’t had an opposition Senate since 2016, and we really don’t know what the confirmation process is going to look like in the current partisan environment. While an all-out blockade seems unlikely, we’ve already seen a SCOTUS seat left open (Garland) in 2016. Might a party try to leave one open indefinitely? Or just repeatedly vote them down? It wouldn’t shock me.
Even under a unified government, I don’t think there are close to enough votes to do any serious legislation on abortion. Even if the filibuster is abolished, I don’t think there are enough votes in the Senate (or even the House) to do any serious legislating on abortion. Neither side has the votes for the median party position, and “leave it to the states” is likely to prove more popular politically than any centrist compromise you can come up with. Abortion politics, at the national level, will likely be fought out in administration policy surrounding things like interstate shipment of abortion pills.
What is almost certainly going to happen in the 119th Congress is tax policy. The 2017 Trump tax cuts are set to expire on the individual side, which will automatically reopen the issue, and I expect congressional action. And that’s what makes all the crazy tax proposals Trump and (to a lesser degree) Harris are throwing out there somewhat scary. Normally I’d just laugh and say this will never get through Congress, but something like “no tax on tips” could easily get laundered through a respectability-machine and make its way into the bill.
The budget deficit is a dog not barking. From the perspective of 15-30 years ago, I would have thought higher interest rates and massive debt service would have given rise to a lot of budget-hawk-talkery, but it’s just not what you hear in DC right now. It may yet come back, but right now there is one party/coalition that wants to spend significantly more than we make in revenue (Dems) and another that wants to spend significantly more than we make in revenue, but also further cut the revenue (GOP). Except for social security insolvency, I’m not sure what alters this outlook at the policy level.
I do not know who is going to win the election. I really see it as a coin flip. And I don’t know how to answer your follow up “But who do you think is going to win” When I say it’s 50/50, that includes pricing in all of my intuitions. I really have no idea. I’d take either candidate right now at 3-2. Both are +EV at that price.
You can get Harris right now at 3-2! It’s an open secret a bunch of whale money has been dumped on the Trump side of the betting markets, and you can get Harris right now at 3-2. That’s a +EV bet. And you can do it legally on Kalshi.
But maybe make an emotional hedge bet instead. Look, I’m not advocating betting money on the election, especially if you are heavily invested emotionally in the outcome. But there is a classic strategy for linking those two things in a productive way: hedge your political preferences with bets. Just ask yourself: how much money would I pay for my candidate to win? Then take that amount of money and put it on the other candidate. Now you either “buy” a victory in the election for what you already said you would pay, or you get a pile of cash you can use to mop up your tears on election night.
It's odd how policy-literate people consider "no tax on tips" some sort of damning PR-to-policy campaign disaster when the main future deficit problem is how much money Medicare spends on well-to-do retirees. It's the high-brow version of complaining about Ukraine Aid as if it's even close to the main driver of spending in America. Tax revenue as a % of GDP has been consistently around 17% since the Korean war, despite Democrats' best efforts to mislead voters and raise taxes further. Check the CBO's 50-year charts if you don't believe me, I'll wait.
The main problem of our deficit is one of rising spending, mostly on seniors. The good news is you can just keep existing benefits and not grow them as much[1]. Of course, because Democrats have twice now trimmed Medicare's growth to spend on partisan bills (the ACA and IRA), they might not like that. Republicans also share with Democrats some of those rich seniors who would like to keep their multi-million-dollar homes and 401k disbursal trajectories with current Medicare premium and service trajectories. Tough luck for them; it's morally reprehensible to spend money like this while transferring away from young workers[2]. That's basically my top reason to vote for a GOP Congress, and in a way, I sometimes suspect Harris winning with GOP House control might be the best option for me despite writing in the presidency.
[1] https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2024/10/04/how_to_balance_the_budget_1063073.html
[2] https://manhattan.institute/article/the-overextended-retirement-state
I hope you will write more often in the future Matt! In list format, or otherwise :) Your articles are some of the most informative I've read on how American politics actually works. More podcasts with Nate Silver would also be awesome.