"So who's going to win the election?"

I don't know. But I got asked that dozens of times in the last two weeks.

I spent the last two weeks on vacation, first in Upstate New York (Albany / Saratoga) and then at home here in NoVA with my kids for their last week before school starts. I talked to a ton of people about the presidential election. In no particular order, here are some things I came away thinking about.

1. The most common question people asked me was “who is going to win?” When I responded that the election was roughly a coin-flip, I routinely got the follow-up question, “yeah, but who you think is going to win?” I always find this question really odd because, in my mind, what I think is already priced-in to my original answer. Oh, you wanted my real thoughts?

   I can never tell what people are actually asking me. Sometimes I think it’s “who do you want to win, and what’s one way they might?” Other times I think it’s “tell me a way the candidate I want to win might win?” And sometimes I think it’s “tell me something that would change the race dramatically.”

   There’s just a deep desire among a lot of people for non-probabilistic answers to probabilistic questions. I will note that it did not work to respond “I’d happily take either candidate at 3-2.” You aren’t going to be able to will your way to certainty about the election. And if anyone tries to tell you they are certain, just ask them for 4-1 on a bet and take the other candidate. It’s the +EV play.¹

2. People take way too narrow a view of how elections shape politics. Everyone is fixated on the straightforward impact: elections change the composition of the government. New elected officials. New appointed officials. New leaders. But they do more than that. Elections force candidates and parties to adopt campaign platforms and promote policies. They also reset the time horizon for officeholders, by eliminating it for lame-duck electoral losers, and pushing it maximally far off for freshly (re)elected officials.

   And, perhaps most importantly, elections provides a strong signal to everyone involved about what public policy choices will likely succeed or fail in the public sphere going forward. As everyone struggles to understand the meaning of the blunt vote results, elected officials will consider their public policy opportunities. Will new ideas likely be accepted now? Is it the right time for a bold initiative? Are the conditions now right for me to run for Senate, or President?

   

   A group of people coming together in Chicago in 1860 to decide their party policy is to oppose the expansion of slavery into any western territories.

3. This is also how you should think about the party conventions. It’s absolutely true that conventions no longer are the battlefield for selection presidential and vice-presidential nominees they once were. But that doesn’t mean they are merely 4-day infomercials, though they are that too. The quadrennial conventions are the single-most important coordinating point for the political parties, and you should think of them as collections of all the party factions and interests and groups coming together to struggle over what the party believes, what the public message should be about those beliefs, and who should deliver it. Who will speak? When will they speak? What policies should they emphasize? What should go in the platform? Who are the future leaders? This is part group decision-making and part real-time struggle. Like all collective decisions, no one is actually in control. It goes where it goes.

4. Following up on the time horizon feature of the election cycle, I’d just like to note that Congress is barely going to do anything in September. The House is only scheduled to be in for 13 days. If they can pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) to patch over the FY24 appropriations into the beginning of FY24, they may very well leave earlier than that. Everyone wants to go home to campaign. It’s not exactly true that Congress never does anything major right before the election—check Dave Mayhew’s list of landmark legislation, you’ll see some stuff in Sept/Oct of POTUS election years—but it’s not a bad approximation. And it’s how it’s going to go this year.

   The regular appropriations bills aren’t going to pass. No one wants a shutdown. So that means a CR. They’ll be some kicking and screaming about the length of the CR, but they’ll pass one into December pretty easily, on a bipartisan vote with some notable whining from the Freedom Caucus (I’d put my money on a CR through December 5th or 12th).

   The flip side of this is that things do happen with some regularity in the lame duck session after the election but before the new Congress starts. Everything from the 13th amendment to the First Steps Act. All the horizon issues work in your favor; you can pick up votes from retiring members no longer worried about the voters, and from returning Members who know there’s no election for at least 2 (or 6) years. If there’s going to be any major legislating left in the 118th Congress—there hasn’t been all that much so far—it’s much more likely to be in November and December, after the election.²

5. More generally, when was the last time you heard anything about Congress? Not only have they not been in session since July, but the presidential election is crowding out all the oxygen in the news and, to a lesser degree, in Washington. This is normal. One of the key ingredients of any Congress is how the election dynamics play into the policymaking. People often think about that via the electoral connection of the individual Members and the parties, but there’s a much more general effect in presidential years: the attention shifts to the campaigns, the agenda-setting shifts to the presidential candidates. Sometimes it’s explicit: the bipartisan immigration bill died this year specifically because Trump wanted an issue not a policy. A lot of the time, it’s just an atmospheric.

6. People make way too much of the public impact of the individual speeches at the conventions. I promise you that almost nothing that happens on Monday night at the DNC or RNC has an effect on any swing voter in any swing state. As noted above, a lot of the convention is the party working things out internally, not even aimed at the general audience. This is how I read Biden’s speech Monday, as an exercise in party unity, aimed at the partisan elite and the partisan electorate audience. Swing voters barely saw it, and those that did have mostly already forgotten it. But as an act of party unity and a rallying of the faithful, it was an important moment.

7. Biden really has shown his true nature as a party regular in the last month. One importance difference between Biden/Trump is Biden is very much a creature of his party—even more than most modern Dem POTUS—and Trump is very much not, way more so than any modern POTUS. And that difference is key to understanding a lot of current political dynamics. The basic story is that Biden's interests are aligned with Dems in way Trump's are not with GOP, and Biden cares about the future of his party in ways Trump almost certainly does not. You see that in almost everything.

   But I think there's more than that. Biden really did build and depend on a coalition instead of a cult of personality, to a greater degree than almost any modern POTUS. He's just not beloved the way Obama or Clinton or Reagan or, well, Trump was. hat comes across in his approach to policy making, his approach to public relations, and his relationship with the factions of the party. He was always going to be a negotiator/deal cutter more than a going-public style POTUS.

   Trump was never a party guy, never saw his political strength as being derived from the party, and much of the time found himself at odds with the party. A fair story is that, the first time around, he defeated the party for the nom, and lost to them on the policymaking. Trump has built more party support this time around, but it's still an open question where the party goes after him. Biden quite clearly moved the ball forward on behalf of his party, a hired CEO who did well.

   Once the Dems grew very wary of Biden as a candidate, he had no chance to survive without their support. But once he was ousted, he remained a party loyalist, working to party ends even after being shoved aside. Trump would never do that. The GOP might or might not have been able to shove him aside in 2024, but he had a credible threat to kick over the chessboard and screw the party if they did. Biden really didn't have that threat.

   And while almost every POTUS of the modern age is somewhere between Biden and Trump on this spectrum—part party creature, part independent cult of personality—I actually think Biden is as much an outlier in his direction as Trump is in his. As someone who is wary of the modern presidency, I welcome Biden-style candidates, constrained by their coalitions and ultimately deriving their political support from the party. Trump, generically, is very much the nightmare version of the modern president, the office empowered and unconstrained by Congress, the occupant unconstrained by party.

   In the end, the key to successfully throwing Biden overboard, even more than I originally appreciated, was that (1) everybody liked Biden but nobody loved him in the cult-hero way, he was a just a very solid hire; and (2) Biden is such a party guy he not only wouldn't sulk, but he'd play ball. They threw him overboard and he showed up to give a Monday night speech at 11:30pm at the convention for the very people who tossed him! If that’s not a party regular, through and through, I don’t know what is.

1. My new strategy for the follow-up is simply to respond randomly.

2. I don’t mean to be ignoring the executive branch here. Lots of things can be done by lame-duck administration, not the least of which is the sleazy pardons you always gets from the president on the way out of office.