Why Isn’t Biden Winning By 20 Points?
A complicated answer about partisanship in America.
Today’s newsletter requires some set up. If you’ve already listened to Friday’s Secret pod, you can skip ahead a bit.
1. Landslides
On Friday’s Secret Show, I lamented that, by every objective measure, Joe Biden should be winning this election by 20 points. This was my howling-into-the-void act where I took the objective economic data, coupled it with Trump’s criminality, and felt like I was taking crazy pills.
Sarah responded by saying that it was a good question and Democrats ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves why Biden isn’t winning by 20. They ought to interrogate what they are doing that makes them so out-of-step with half of the country.
My response was that while Joe Biden might not be a perfect candidate, even the Perfect Democrat would be unlikely to outperform Biden by more than 5 points.
Which is to say: While a theoretically Perfect Democrat might be able to get to +8 against Trump, +20 was simply impossible.
That conversation nagged at me all weekend. So I want to unpack it today starting with this précis:
Over the last 40 years American politics has polarized along ideological lines. This polarization has created a deep partisanship which has, in turn, locked us into an era of political trench warfare.
Presidential landslides are not possible in this era.
Let’s work backwards, starting with the fact that the presidential landslide has been declining for 40 years. We’ll start at 1960, since that’s the advent of the television age in politics, and look at the popular-vote margins.
Three points:
We had close elections in the past (1960, 1968, 1976). But these were choice elections, pitting non-incumbents against one another.1 Having made a choice, Americans were happy enough to vote for the incumbent the following election in a landslide (by more than 15 points).
Because of Ross Perot’s influence in 1992 and 1996, it’s possible that the transition isn’t as smooth as it looks.
The margins in 2004, 2008, and 2020 suggest that while a presidential “landslide” used to mean a margin >15 points, today it means winning by roughly 5 points.
That’s the reality. So how did we get here?
I want to put two more charts in front of you—both from Pew—while you have the above graph fresh in your mind.
The first is a look at presidential/Senate “mismatches.” What we’re looking for here is senators who won election in a state that went for the opposite party’s presidential candidate:
In the 1980s, these mismatches happened all the time. So much so, that a senator had a 50-50 chance to win in state which voted for his opponent’s party at the presidential level. Here’s the same data, but in percentage form:
We went from a world in which half of the winning senators were from a different party as the guy who won their state’s presidential vote (the yellow line) to nearly zero percent.
As a consequence, the percentage of split delegations has dropped. Have a look at this graph and note how the number of gray boxes—meaning, states with split delegations—goes from a sizable majority in 1980 to a tiny minority in 2022.
Now that you have these numbers in your head, let me tell you a story.
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2. The Heterodox Era
Once upon a time, America’s political parties were heterodox. There were conservative and liberal Republicans. There were liberal and conservative Democrats.
Because of their heterodox natures, the party of a candidate was less important than his value proposition to voters. The candidate’s ideological makeup had to be in step with his state, and if it was, then he was viable, irrespective of his party ID.
And because of that most Americans lived in states where they were habituated to voting for candidates from each party. A voter might be a “conservative” or a “liberal,” but she saw those values as existing in both parties, depending on the candidate. She would vote for Ronald Reagan for president, but also for Al Gore for Senate.
Beginning in 1980, the parties began to sort ideologically. Liberals increasingly identified only with the Democratic party and conservatives increasingly identified only with the Republican party.
It’s not clear why this shift happened, but my top three explanations are:
Political realignment caused by the end of the Cold War.
The geographical self-sorting of voters as they moved into like-minded communities at scale.
Changing technology and the media environment.
As always, when we talk about big changes the answer is probably complicated and involves a great many factors. But fast-forward to 2024 and what we have is:
An ideologically homogeneous Republican party.
A somewhat less ideologically homogeneous Democratic party.2
A partisan divide in which most voters are locked into a single party because they have never voted for a candidate from the rival party.
As the partisan share of the electorate get bigger, the elections get closer, and the size of what counts as a “landslide” win shrinks.
In other words, I don’t think it’s Biden’s fault, or the Democratic party’s fault, that Biden isn’t winning by 20. I think there are giant, structural forces at work over the last two generations that have put us where we are today.
Further, I suspect that the parties are as much reflections of this reality as causes of it.3
The flip side of this coin is that I don’t know that I’d blame the Republican party, either. Democrats like talk about how it’s the Republican party or Fox News or talk radio that created our hellscape.4
Certainly it’s the collective choices by individual Republican voters that got us here. And conservative media surely played some part. But also: Compared to the end of the Cold War, massive internal migration, and the internet, Rush Limbaugh and Fox strike me as small-ball.
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3. The Opportunity
How do you break out of trench warfare? You diversify the party ideologically.
Republicans are in the middle of an ideological contraction. As MAGA consolidates its ownership of the GOP, the party is purging all non-MAGA Republicans. Which means that, for the foreseeable future, the Republican party will remain highly dependent on partisans. Meaning: the trench warfare status quo is to its advantage.
Democrats, on the other hand, are more ideologically diverse simply by dint of being more demographically diverse. Just one example: the party is highly reliant both on older African-American voters (who tend to be conservative) and young, college-educated whites (who tend to be liberal).
The Democratic project should be to lean into this ideological diversity to find Democrats who are in-step in red states—like John Tester in Montana and Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Because by creating split-ticket voters now, they will be seeding the ground for a bigger upside in presidential elections later.
This is an asymmetric advantage for Democrats: They have the ability to create split-ticket voters in red states that Republicans do not currently have in blue states.
None of this happens overnight; it’s the work of a generation. If anything, I think the Biden Democrats have done a pretty good job of leaning into this diversity—both on policy and politics. That’s why we have Tester and Cooper, but also Fetterman and Warnock and Kelly. That’s why Democrats nominated Tim Ryan in Ohio in 2022 and, frankly, why they chose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in 2020.
Over time, I like the Democrats’ odds here. They should be able to break out of the era of trench warfare before Republicans can.
And this last fact explains why Republicans are less interested in breaking out of this era than they are in moving America toward an Orbánist illiberal democracy.
Ford was the incumbent in 1976, but I consider him a special case.
Modern Democrats are significantly less ideologically homogenous than modern Republicans—but are significantly more homogenous than Democrats of 40 years ago.
Though it’s possible that the parties themselves could have chosen to hold onto more institutional power than they have. The decline of the parties’ strength is one of the big explanations for where we are today, but I’m not sure if that decline is cause or effect.
It would be nice to blame Fox News, or Newt Gingrich. And they each deserve some share. But at the end of the day, the conclusion of the Cold War combined with the disintermediation of institutional gate keepers combined with massive economic prosperity and increased mobility matter a lot more.
I want to float one other potential factor. Increased lifespans.
There's the old saying that "Science advances one funeral at a time". I think the same is true for social change. People are not as flexible in their belief systems as they like to think, and for a long time, generational turnover was what drove social progress. Now, with people living longer, voting for longer, and holding onto power longer, there's more inertia thwarting generational progress.
One thing that stuck with me from the podcast, is Sarah seems to know why these people cling to the Republican party despite what they've become. She kept dancing around it. These people hate social progress. Sure, there are some wealthy business owners who are up in arms about marginal tax rates or regulation, but they are a tiny fraction of a minority. Most Republicans stick with the party because they are mad about all the non-white people they see, or the gay couple, or their non-binary nephew.
Because Sarah is a kind, curious person, she has a hard time admitting the simple truth, that these people are mostly just bigots, and are fundamentally incurious and uncaring people at heart. Their worlds are small and constrained, and they resist every attempt to make them even the tiniest bit more open. Sadly, for most of them, they'll take those beliefs to their graves.
Why Isn't Biden Winning By 20 Points?
Because the GOP is better at slander than just about anybody in world history. Watching them at work is like seeing a gold medal performance at the Criminal Olympics.