American Politics Is Less Confusing Than It Seems
Throw a dart at an American map and with few exceptions you'll know what's going to happen state-by-state.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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It’s Easier Than You Think
The venerable political reporter Walter Shapiro has a column up in Roll Call that argues because of the changing nature of American politics, 2024 will be a deeply unpredictable campaign.
That perfect-pitch putdown of the political press corps came courtesy of David Axelrod, who then was Barack Obama’s top strategist, at a Harvard conference following the 2012 election.
Axelrod’s point was that campaign reporters had been overreacting to evanescent gyrations in the national polls while missing almost everything else about the race between Obama and Mitt Romney.
I resurrected that Axelrod quote because, in hindsight, the 2012 campaign belongs to an innocent long-ago age when politics was still comprehensible and took place, for the most part, in public.
But now, just a year before the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, we are on the cusp of the biggest stealth campaign in history.
Shapiro notes that fewer people see campaign ads on television, the social media landscape is changing dramatically, meaning we may see more misinformation next year, and polling is becoming harder to conduct because of low response rates (he also points out that few Republicans regularly watch Fox News, 30%, which I found genuinely surprising). The result, he writes, is that “2024 threatens to be explosive and unpredictable whether because of Joe Biden’s age or Donald Trump’s rage.”
But I would argue that the data points Shapiro identifies lead to a different potential conclusion: American politics seems less comprehensible, but in reality, it’s more predictable than ever.
Indeed, in most US states — and House districts — we can rather easily predict which party will win. Of the 435 House elections in 2022, more than 80 percent were decided by ten points or more. The average margin of victory was 28 points (and that’s not taking into account the 32 seats that went uncontested).
In addition, only 23 members of the House represent districts won by the other party’s 2020 presidential nominee. That’s an improvement from before the 2022 midterms. Then the number was 16. However, in 2009 there were 83 such members.
The Senate is following a similar trajectory. In 2009 (based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations), there were 23 senators in states won by the other party’s presidential nominee. North Dakota and South Dakota had 3 out of 4 Democratic Senators. Both Arkansas senators were Democrats! Today there are six senators in states won by the other party’s presidential candidate. And in the 2024 election cycle, the most competitive races will almost certainly be the three states represented by Democrats that Donald Trump won in 2020 (Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia). Outside of a handful of swing states (Nevada, Arizona, maybe Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), we can likely pencil in the Senate winner now.
On the presidential level, in 2022, eight states were decided by 5 points or less (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). The next closest race was Texas. That means that a state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1976 had a closer margin than Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and New Hampshire, all states that not long ago were considered reasonably competitive.
That number may fall further in this coming cycle, with Florida, Michigan, and possibly Pennsylvania becoming less competitive.
Why is this happening? The answer is sort of obvious: stronger partisan identity, heightened polarization, and a decline in persuadable voters. Voters are less willing than at any time in recent history to vote for a candidate of an opposing party.
Split ticket voting has not disappeared, but outside of a handful of swing states, it’s increasingly rare. In the 40 or so states that lean toward one party or the other, it’s next to impossible for a member of the minority party to win — and it usually only happens when Republicans nominate an extreme candidate (governorships in Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana, the Alabama Senate, albeit briefly), the electorate is deeply idiosyncratic (Maine), or a candidate has a strong personal brand (Ohio, Vermont, Montana, and West Virginia). So while Shapiro is correct that in its current iteration, American politics is “frayed and disarrayed,” it’s also shockingly predictable.
While I avoid making predictions, it seems right now — 16 months before the 2024 presidential election — that Donald Trump winning the 2024 Republican nomination and losing the presidential race to Joe Biden by a similar popular (4.5) and electoral (306-232) vote margin to what happened in 2020 seems like the likeliest outcome. Obviously, things can change between now and then (both men were born in the 1940s), but even if that were to happen, I’m not sure the trajectory of the 2024 race would be demonstrably different. The reality of modern American politics is that plus ça change plus c est la meme chose.
What’s Going On
Kudos to the Daily Northwestern, a school newspaper, for exposing the rot inside the school’s football program.
The Arizona GOP has fallen off the crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down.
The Murdochs are suddenly coming to the realization that Ron DeSantis is a shitty presidential candidate.
Musical Interlude