Why Is This Race So Damn Close?

Persuasion

Ruy Teixeira is the co-founder and politics editor of The Liberal Patriot, and the author, with John Judis, of The Emerging Democratic Majority and, most recently, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Levin is the author of A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus and, most recently, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin discuss “politics without winners,” or America’s unusual streak of close-run elections; why both Democrats and Republicans have failed to build a dominant coalition; and what it would take for either party to win a durable majority.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Yascha Mounk: I've been asked one question incessantly for the last weeks and I never have a good answer, so I'm going to pose it to the two of you: Who's winning the race?

Ruy Teixeira: Well, there are many views on this, but I think the correct view is that it's a toss up. I mean, it really is that close. For example, if you look at Nate Silver's forecasting model, which I think is probably the best of the lot (for whatever you think those things are worth), he's got 51-49 Harris. The rest of the models aren't too far off that.

When you're in that territory, even if it was 55-45, it really is just a coin toss. There's so many other factors here. We don't know what kind of bias is built into the polls at this point. There are various known unknowns. Now, in the very recent past, say, the last week or ten days, there's probably been a slight movement toward Trump. So in other words, Harris's momentum may have stalled a little bit.

Yuval Levin: I agree with that. I talk to people who are not in and around politics and they always think we know something they don't, but what's really going on is a 50-50 race. It's a very hard thing to accept, but it's actually where we've been for a long time.

Teixeira: “Politics without winners,” to coin a phrase. It might be worth pointing out some of the demographic contours of this stalemate, which is that we're seeing a continuation in this cycle of declining Democratic support among working class voters, i.e. non-college voters, including non-whites. And we're seeing an improved performance among college educated voters, particularly white college educated voters. Those are two forces going in two different directions, but they're kind of netting out at pretty close to 50-50. Those two trends are working themselves out and in the end will probably determine who wins the election. There’s a lot of churn underneath the hood of these coalitions, but amazingly, they seem to wind up basically continuing to butt heads at roughly 50-50.

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Mounk: On one count, this should be easy, right? Donald Trump is a one-term president who lost his bid for reelection. He is believed by most Americans to bear significant responsibility for an assault on the US Capitol. He is, at this point, gearing up to be the oldest or one of the oldest presidents in United States history. He is very unpopular in the electorate, with approval ratings that are underwater, even though they're slightly better than they used to be at various points in the past. This electoral cycle, it feels like his campaign is mostly about himself and seeking vengeance against the people he feels have gone after him and so forth.

Shouldn't this be an easy election for Democrats to win? And if so, why are they not winning it?

Levin: You describe that as though he were the incumbent, but he's not the incumbent. And in a time when the incumbent is unpopular and the incumbent party is unpopular, that party is running a candidate that, while certainly more impressive to the public than the actual incumbent president, is not very impressive to the public. And that candidate just has trouble overcoming doubts.

I think that the peculiar challenge that both parties face is that their greatest strength is not being one another and their greatest weakness is being themselves. And they can't really change either of those things. So I think the question is whether the problem of incumbency that Kamala Harris has to bear can be a slightly lesser problem than the problem of being Donald Trump that Donald Trump has to bear. In a funny way, that's what this election comes down to. I think it suggests that Republicans as a group are in a better place than Democrats as a group, but their candidate is an extremely unpopular figure. That's a slightly better place to be as a party, but he is their candidate. And I think we're at 50-50 not because people love both parties equally, but because people can't decide which they dislike more.

Mounk: I think there's two slightly different readings of what makes this election close—and, in a way, two slightly different readings of what you've been saying—and perhaps both are true. One is structural. It is to say that the economy is pretty good, but it's not amazing. Trump is unpopular, but so is the Democratic Party incumbent. And when you look at some basic models that take things like the inflation rate and the employment rate and a bunch of other kinds of factors, they predict a relatively close election. And lo and behold, the election is relatively close.

The other way of reading this, which obviously speaks to the report that you've just published, is to say, no, despite these structural factors, one of these two parties could actually be winning big. And they’re failing to win big because neither of the parties has figured out how to broaden its appeal beyond the core part of the electorate.

So is this more that, structurally, the election was always going to be close, or do you think, to start with Democrats, they could have done something to win this election big?

Teixeira: Well, we're talking about rerunning history. But I think there were a couple of things that should have been clear to the Democrats when they got into office in 2021, which is that Biden did not have a mandate. He barely got in there. He barely controlled the Senate. People were not voting for a transformative president. They were voting for normalcy. They were voting for an end to the COVID pandemic and to get the economy back on track, and to just turn down the volume here on politics. Now, the way Biden actually governed, reflecting the compromises he made during his campaign and the way he staffed up once he was elected, really did empower the left of the party to a non-trivial extent. And that reflected a lot of the movement within the party and within the so-called discourse overall that took place in the George Floyd summer of 2020.

There was and has been a distinct move to the left on the part of Democrats on race and gender, crime and immigration and so on. And Biden did not come in determined to do much about that. In fact, one of the very first things he did was get rid of the Trump rules that were at least somewhat effective in keeping illegal immigration down. And, by George, we got a lot of illegal immigration.

The inability of Democrats to disidentify themselves with the unpopular aspects of their policies or of their image has definitely been a factor. Because they viewed themselves as being a transformative party in a transformative election, they actually had a very aggressive approach to legislating in the early parts of the Biden administration, which is really not justified by the situation and by the amount of support they had. Who can forget the endless arguments about how many trillions of dollars should go into Build Back Better when the country was still in a sense reeling and trying to recover? And then in the end, related to that, though not obviously just caused by that, we did have a very significant spike in inflation that really did crimp people's living standards, really did make people think that this was not a good situation.

Now, the economy has improved since then. Obviously inflation's gone down. Real wages finally started to go back up. But I think that the shock of that is still in people's system, particularly working class people, because they actually looked back at the years of the Trump administration before COVID hit as being pretty good: Wages were up, incomes were up, and there was very low inflation. It was great. And they don't feel that way about how things have been under the Democrats.

Levin: There's also a broader pattern here that aligns very much with what Ruy is talking about, but that broadens the picture a bit. Looking at the loss of confidence in institutions in my work over the last 10 years, you can explain the public's loss of confidence in any particular institution in a relatively straightforward way. We can come up with reasons why people might not trust the military right now, or why they might not trust public health officials after the pandemic. But when you step back and see that nobody trusts anything, then it seems like there's more to explain here. And so when you step back and see that we've had 50-50 elections for 30 years—I think the only real exception might have been 2008 when Barack Obama, I think, won a pretty comfortable majority—just about nobody else has been able to pull off a real win. And the answer to that is not the economy, in one particular moment or another, though that obviously is a factor in these elections, but I think has to do with the way in which both parties are thinking about how to gain power and how to use power.

And what you find is exactly the pattern that Ruy describes, which is after the party's win, they think, first of all, that they've won a durable majority and, second, that that means it's time to satisfy their base. And those things are both wrong. The way to build a broader coalition is actually to use political power to broaden your appeal rather than to use political power to service your base. Being in office should be the time when you show the country that, in the next election, they should trust you because you do broadly acceptable, moderate things that work. And instead, both parties win these narrow elections and they say, well, now we've got to get everything we've ever wanted because we're going to lose this thing in five minutes. And therefore, they do.

Mounk: And there's sort of two possible reasons for that, right? One is that neither party has been able to capture the imagination of 55 to 60% of Americans in the way that happened in some past eras. But another, more technical reason for that—and I don't know where the cart is and where the horse is here—is that the respective bases of the party, the party activists, the party donors just seem to have much more control over the direction of the party than they did at other points.

Why is it that when these parties win an election, they don't try to build this broader coalition? Perhaps because they lack the imagination for what that broader coalition might look like, but also because, in the Democratic Party, the highly educated college graduates who live in the coastal areas just have hugely outsized power. And in the Republican Party—even though there's some amount of change within the party and there's some moves towards trying to make it more like a party of the multiracial working class—when it comes to making economic policy in the end, some big business interests and so on remain very powerful and they're able to get a lot of what they want, so Republicans don't broaden the coalition the kind of way they might.

So is this just a problem of party activists and elites having too much power, or is it really about the lack of imagination and the incoherent program of each party?

Teixeira: Well, I think the two things are related. I think that, in fact, the activists and the shadow parties of both parties have an enormous amount of power and we have a media and general political ecosystem now which enhances the power of these non-directly political actors so that they can actually bring to bear a lot of influence through lobbying, through advocacy groups, through a variety of other means, through the media, through various sort of targeted megaphones that yell at the party activists and mobilize them. It's a different universe than it was 50 years ago or 60 years ago. And you could definitely see it in a Democratic Party where the shadow party that John Judis and I described in our book is enormously powerful. And it would be one thing if they were powerful and they were tuned into the beating heart of America and they were just trying to push the party to do more outreach and be more aggressive and so on. But no, they have their own set of priorities, their own values and the things they really care about that they push no matter what. They're not necessarily committed to the idea that the party should win a broad majority. They do want the party to win, but the broad majority thing is less important. Mostly, they just want to see their priorities attended to.

And I think that is true on the Republican side as well. Despite the fact that it's become a more working class party, I think the people really in control of the discourse within and around the Republican Party and Republican media, at least establishment media, are still kind of singing out of the same hymn book they have for a while, despite the fact that their base has changed, the people they have to respond to has changed. They can't figure out how to leverage that growing working class support into that broad majority that conceivably could be built on that. Is that fair, Yuval?

Levin: Yeah, I think the Republican story feels a little different because the internal arguments are less about policy, at least on the surface, than they are on the Democratic side. There is a kind of struggle about who will own anti-leftism. The Republican Party is now, above all, an anti-left party. It understands itself to be the outside party in American life, the party that's being pushed around by various kinds of elites, and its leaders are always at risk of being attacked as either being weak or being corrupted by the appeal of elite power. And that means that coalition building itself becomes risky in Republican politics. Seeming like you're reaching too far beyond the angry base of the party runs the risk of making you look like you are trying to water down the direction that primary voters want to go in. And the striking thing about this is that it generally has very little to do with substantive policy debates. A lot of it is about tone. A lot of it is about a kind of willingness or unwillingness to negotiate. And you really see this in the congressional party, where House Republicans right now are not really trying to do anything in particular, most of the time. They don't have some agenda that they're really trying hard to push. Their fight of the day with the left as it's expressed on cable news and social media is what occupies all of them. And that makes it very, very difficult to think about building a broader coalition than the existing base of the party. Obviously, Trump himself and Trumpism has a lot to do with why things have taken this shape.

There's one big question at the heart of the life of the Republican Party now, and the question is Donald Trump. And obviously most Republicans answer “Yes,” some will answer “No,” but none of them are talking about anything else. And I think that does make it very difficult to offer the public very much that's of interest to people who are not already in this conversation.

Mounk: So we've been dancing around the report for a little while. Let's actually go into it directly. One of the kind of unstated assumptions of this conversation has been that there is a broad majority for the taking, that either Democrats or Republicans could find a way to really dominate a political era, a period of 25 or 30 years of American politics in which they wouldn't win 80-20, and they wouldn't win every election, but in which they clearly would be dominant.

So what is the argument for the idea that the normal mode of American history has been to have one party build a dominant coalition that persists for a surprisingly long time before it breaks down and has to be reconstituted. And why should we think that what was possible in the past still continues to be possible today?

Levin: If you look in on American politics at just about any time in our history, what you would find is a recognizable majority and minority coalition. Fairly durable, they tend to last for multiple election cycles, often decades at a time. And in a sense, the differences between them are organized around some core set of issues in American politics that do render the public into a majority and minority coalition. Then, as things change, the majority tries to hang together a very complex coalition, the minority tries to broaden its coalition, and you run into one or several transformative elections that allow the minority to become a durable majority for a time. That's been the pattern of American history.

Periods like the ones we're living in are very exceptional. There's really been only one like it; it was at the end of the 19th century. It lasted for about 20 years and we've already been living through a longer one. Now, I think it's important for this purpose to distinguish polarization from something more like this kind of deadlock that we're living through. Polarization is more common than that. The two parties really hating each other—that's not always the case, but it is often the case in a two-party system. And polarization is not the same as the sort of 50-50 politics that we're living with here. And in a sense, the 50-50 politics we're living with, in my view, has a lot to do with a sort of confusion about the issues that ought to be the governing issues in the post-Cold War era in America. The Cold War ended a long time ago, and we're still really struggling to think through what are the big questions about the direction of the American economy, about the direction of American foreign policy, and the culture.

Our report is based in part on a large survey that the American Enterprise Institute’s survey center performed for us, and one of the striking things about it is that, among the issues where there's not an obvious advantage right now for one party or the other, those include the economy and foreign policy, and those are really the two big issues that our national government was intended to address, and it seems like neither party really offers a vision on those issues right now. They're not identifiable along that axis. And they're failing in a sense to show the public what it would mean to vote for the Democrats, to vote for the Republicans, other than to say what it would mean is the other people wouldn't win. And in that sense, there is a failure here to appeal to the imagination of the public.

It's not the case that people are stuck in party identities. There are a lot of Americans who are going to vote this year for a party they did not vote for 10 years ago. That kind of change is happening. The trouble is it's happening in a way that remains bifurcated, that remains at 50-50, in part because the big question is really a yes or no question, rather than a question about the future, about the range of issues that might shape people's lives. In that sense, both parties are failing to offer a political vision that might foster a coalition.

Mounk: The other thing you do, as you've alluded to a couple of times, is look at a bunch of the issues that turn out not to be 50-50 issues, but 70-30 issues, sometimes 80-20 issues, and yet ones where each party on some of these counts is on the wrong side of it. What is the set of majority beliefs that would stand at the core of a 60-40 coalition in a map?

What is the set of values, attitudes, and policies that are so broadly popular that if one of the political parties actually managed consistently to put them at the heart of the program, they would be able to have this kind of stable majority?

Levin: Well, for all of my lifetime, I've heard people say that the underserved center of the country is economically conservative and socially liberal. And what we find is roughly the opposite of that. The core of what would need to be a durable majority coalition is relatively conservative, or at least moderate, on social issues relative to today's Democratic Party. It's quite conservative on social issues, but is also interested in an active government that spends money on behalf of the public. That's where economic policy is, I think, well to the left of where the Republican Party has generally wanted to be in my lifetime. So that the underserved middle is, broadly speaking, more socially conservative than the Democrats and more economically liberal than the Republicans. And both parties have had some trouble reaching that center. I think they can both see that there are opportunities there, but they both have had trouble letting go of the priorities of their own base. And I think the set of issues that present themselves there are uncomfortable for both parties. They would take real sacrifice for the base of both parties to be able to make the kinds of arguments you'd need to make. But that's really where the center is. And a lot of elites in both parties are most comfortable with the opposite of that, with a mirror image of that. And obviously, that's a big part of why the parties have had such trouble reaching these voters.

Teixeira: From the standpoint of the Democrats, if you look at our survey and a lot of other data, you can see that, for example, people like immigrants. They think they're great, but they don't want an uncontrolled border. They don't want a lot of illegal immigration. And that's just very different from the attitude of Democrats and Democratic activists. And it was really an unbelievable, sort of in a way, unforced error that the Democrats come into office in 2021 and they basically open the floodgates because they're under such pressure from their advocacy groups to undo everything Donald Trump did that they just sort of like, they just made it open season.

People like immigration. They have nothing against immigrants. They realize immigration is part of the history of the country, but they don't want the border basically out of control, and they don't want their communities overburdened and so on and so forth.

Mounk: What's striking about this particular point is that Democrats, I think, always feel very much under pressure from their interest groups. And it's not just because for historical reasons, interest groups have always had this strong standing in the Democratic Party. It's also, I think, that they mistake the views of the interest groups for a general representation of the demographics in whose name these interest groups speak. One of the really astonishing lines in your report is based not on your own survey, but a CBS News survey from June, in which it turns out that not only do 62% of all voters believe that starting a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the US illegally would be a good thing, but that includes 53% of Hispanics—a figure that I think would would probably generally astonish a lot of Democratic Party activists.

Yuval, Ruy has been very clear on what the problem of the Democrats is. By the same token, why is it that the Republicans have not yet succeeded in building what some of the intellectual leaders of the party, such as they are, have talked about for about a decade now, which is a genuinely multiracial working class coalition? They've clearly moved somewhat in that direction. They have expanded the share of the vote among particularly working class nonwhite voters and Latinos, but also with, if some of the polls at the moment are to be believed, African Americans. But they haven't gotten nearly far enough in that direction to command a clear majority.

What is it that has inhibited Republicans from seizing this opportunity more decisively, and what would they have to do in order to do so in the coming years, if not in the few weeks remaining of the campaign, to create that coalition?

Levin: I do think there's a way that the situation of Republicans is better, broadly speaking, than of the Democrats, but that the leaders they've chosen, especially the leader they've chosen over the last 10 years, has made it difficult for them to seize the opportunity they have. Republicans have been moving in the direction of the middle I described, which is more economically populist than they used to be and reasonably socially conservative. That's the direction the party's moving in. So in a sense, its momentum is pushing it in the correct direction, which is mostly not the case for the Democrats. But they're doing it in a way that is very off-putting to voters that they have to keep. Republicans have gained new voters, and they're very proud of that, and they'll point you to it. It looks like Donald Trump could win 15% of the black vote. And if you had told Mitt Romney, you could win 15% of the black vote, he would say, “Great, we're going to win 60% of the vote!” But in the process of doing that, Republicans have lost a lot of the voters that even Mitt Romney just a decade ago was able to count on almost without thinking about it. And those tend to be suburban middle-class college educated voters who were comfortable with Republicans as a party of stability, as a party that had in mind a basically functional economy and could be counted on to make that work. It's harder for them now to persuade people that that's who they are. And some of the problems they face on that front are similar to those of the Democrats. I think that the survey that we base our paper on points in this direction, even on abortion, for example, where Republicans face an enormous challenge with public opinion. But it turns out that the position of the Democrats is actually quite unpopular. The position that there should be essentially no limits on abortion throughout pregnancy isn't really what Americans think. But Americans believe Republicans want to ban all abortion at all times. And Republicans have trouble persuading them that isn't the case because their own activists on that issue won't let them say so.

And so, again, there is this kind of dynamic where party figures can't say what voters need them to say. But there is also just an underlying sense that the populist party can't be trusted. That's always a problem that the populist party in American politics faces. That has been the Democrats at some points in the past. It is now the Republicans. And that means that in order to make the most of their working class voters, they have to be more trustworthy, more reliable, more normal. Again, as Ruy used that word with the Democrats too, they just have to strike voters as normal. And they certainly have not done that in the Trump era. So voters see a huge risk in supporting Republicans right now. And as long as that's the case, they can't capitalize on what I do think is a real opportunity for them going forward.

Teixeira: Yeah, that's a very important point. Obviously, the Republicans have been shedding white college graduate voters. That's well established, particularly in the suburbs. But a lot of these people who have moved over to the Republicans are not particularly liberal. They're moderate to conservative. And if you look at the moderate to conservative white college graduates in our survey and in others, it's very clear that their positions are actually not very consistent with the sort of center of gravity of where the Democratic Party is coming from at this point. They're energy realists, moderates on immigration, moderates on crime. They're not really enamored of racial and gender ideology, but they vote for the Democrats nonetheless because they hate Trump and they think, again, he's an irresponsible populist. So you sand off the rough edges on that, or just get someone else in there who can appeal to moderate-to-conservative white college graduates, and all of a sudden, you've got the makings of a solid majority if you keep your burgeoning working class base. But it's really hard to do that when your standard bearer is someone like Trump.

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Levin: I think Republicans have avoided this in part by persuading themselves that there aren't many Republicans who are anti-Trump, because if you look at the Republican primary voters, the anti-Trump vote is in the neighborhood of 15%. But if you look at potential Republican voters, the anti-Trump vote is massive and determinative in election after election. The fact is, Trump has been an enormous cost to the Republican Party, a huge electoral burden. And a lot of people in the party, voters and politicians and activists, still to this day do not see it that way.

Mounk: So you're saying that the basic dynamic of American politics is that you should expect a dominant coalition to come into being at some time, there is at least the potential through agency for one of the two political parties to actually seize the moment and build that kind of dominant coalition. I think part of the hope behind this is that this kind of dominant coalition would make our politics a lot more sane, that it would force the other party back to the negotiating table in order to compete with the out-party. But at the moment, each party can be indulgent to its own activists precisely because the other one is also indulgent to its activists. So there would be a broader salutary effect for this political system if one of these parties figures this out.

With a few weeks left of the 2024 election, I think it's quite obvious that whoever wins, it's not going to be that kind of transformative election. So when will it happen? How confident are you that this is going to happen in 2028 or 2032? Are you talking about a theoretical possibility that people should be aware of and politicians might try to seize, but that is really uncertain? Or do you think in 10 years or in 12 years, we will likely be talking about the nascent dominant coalition that one political party has been able to build?

Levin: I think we should expect it to happen, yes, but I think part of what will be involved in it is a kind of generational transition in American politics that is only just beginning. I'm not sure that this is happening over the next election cycle, but I do think that we're living in a period where both parties are failing in a fundamental way to do their job. And the fact of voter dissatisfaction, which is very great now, should be an increasingly strong force that wakes up the parties to the potential opportunity here.

It is going to take political talent. It's going to take somebody who understands coalition building as their purpose and also knows what they sound like to people who don't agree with them, and that's a kind of knack that we've oddly lost in American politics. If you think about the people who have been transformative in relatively modern times, they've been someone who was a liberal in Arkansas his whole life. They've been someone who was a Republican in Hollywood his whole life—people who are really used to the notion that not everybody begins by assuming what they assume. And both parties now are kind of full of people who are not very good at that. I do think that that sort of talent would present somebody with a pretty extraordinary opportunity at the moment. And it's not just going to sit there on the table forever.

Teixeira: Political entrepreneurship takes political entrepreneurs and, we can't really tell at this point where that's going to come from. But right now they're clearly not who's dominating the parties. Trump is Trump. He's got a shtick. He's going to stick with it. Kamala Harris, I think, is like a placeholder for the current Brahmin-left edition of the Democratic Party. She's not an entrepreneur who's going to do anything particularly different in terms of expanding the coalition. She's just trying to get by. And she's a product of California-liberal Democratic politics, which—not to be unkind to California-liberal Democratic politics—is not that close to the center of the country. But that's what she's comfortable with. But out there among the governors and the senators, maybe below that level, it seems like that would be a logical thing for some smart, talented man or woman to start thinking: This is not working, what we're doing. We're not maximizing our probabilities here of building a coalition. We're just getting by. We're at a stalemate. We need to break that stalemate. Who it is and where they are, I don't know. But I do think the possibility is there. And I do think eventually it'll be taken advantage of. And you can certainly make the argument that, in the aftermath of this election, there should be a lot of raw material for people to be rethinking their approach in the rest of the 2020s. And 2028 could conceivably loom as a very important election where some of that entrepreneurial coalition building might actually come to pass. But we'll see. You never make predictions about the future. That's what I say. But I think it cannot be ruled out that this might come sooner than we think.

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