In the California Recall, Republicans Turn to the Conservative Media for Party Leadership

The field of Republican candidates seeking to replace Democratic governor Gavin Newsom in next Tuesday's recall election in California includes the former mayor of San Diego; a businessman who was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 2018; a former member of both houses of the state legislature who serves on the elected state tax board; and a current member of the state Assembly. All of these candidates have the kind of background that commonly precedes service as a top statewide elected official.

But none of them have much chance of replacing Newsom if he is recalled. Assuming that the polls are roughly accurate, all of these candidates are stuck in the single digits, while the clear favorite candidate of Republican voters—who will likely lead the overall vote for a successor, since no major Democrat is running—is Larry Elder, a conservative talk show host. A majority "yes" vote on the recall itself would automatically make the plurality winner of the replacement contest the next governor of the state. Even if more Californians oppose recalling Newsom than vote for Elder, all Elder needs is more votes than any other single replacement option, and it seems like he's in position to achieve at least that second goal.

California Republicans do not appear to be bothered by Elder's lack of conventional experience for high executive office. His favorable position in the race has allowed him to pursue a strategy of skipping the major debates where he might face attacks from other candidates or lines of questioning designed to test his grasp of state government. And even the negative publicity that Elder has received in recent weeks has kept the media's attention on him, making it difficult for any single other Republican to break out of the also-ran category in the final stretch of the race.

Elder's success reflects the appeal that a conservative media figure's candidacy can have among Republican voters—and, more generally, the growing influence of the conservative media universe over the direction of the Republican Party. Talk show hosts like Elder boast several potential advantages over more conventional Republican candidates: they are skilled at delivering the red-meat rhetoric that conservative voters reward; they lack a governing record that might contain elements of ideological impurity; and they are "outsiders" who can serve as a personification of resentment towards a class of traditional party leaders who have failed to reverse the growing power of liberalism. Elder's rival Kevin Faulconer is running on his successes in managing the state's second-largest city, promising to bring the same "strong and stable leadership" to the governor's office, but that argument has not caught on among California Republicans like Elder's more provocative style and resolutely pro-Trump message has.

Of course, California has twice elected famous actors to the governorship who sold themselves as anti-politicians. But both Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were true celebrities, widely known as entertainers before they decided to enter elective politics. Elder, by contrast, is a creature of the conservative media world without any larger notability, and his campaign is strongly ideological rather than merely throw-the-bums-out populist.

To actually become governor, Elder needs independents and some Democrats to vote to recall Newsom, which may well be a tougher sell with a right-wing successor seeming to wait in the wings. Two organizers of the recall even complained recently that Elder was "outspoken to the extreme" and being "very politically naive" by trying to ride culture-war backlash to the governorship of a socially liberal state. Faulconer's moderate policy views and less pugnacious demeanor would seem to better fit the typical profile of a victorious Republican in Blue America. But Republican voters are not really in the mood to value political pragmatism or conventional leadership experience. If they were, conservative media personalities wouldn't have such political power in the first place.

As New Census Numbers Show, the Biggest Divide Isn't North v. South Anymore—It's Metro v. Rural

On Thursday, the Census Bureau released the 2020 census data for cities, counties, and other geographic subdivisions. Just as with the state-level numbers announced in April, there were some surprises. Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010:

Many rural areas have been stagnant and struggling for a long time, but the distinct trajectories of big-city and small-town life have seldom been as divergent—and as connected to partisan politics—as they became over the past decade. Kathy Cramer's fieldwork in Wisconsin during the late 2000s and early 2010s found a prevailing sentiment of political alienation among rural voters, who perceived their communities as suffering a steady economic and cultural decline for which they often blamed greedy and decadent urbanites. An existing collective preference for the Republican Party among this heavily white, socially traditionalist population was soon super-charged by Donald Trump's brand of nostalgic populist nationalism, producing record Republican electoral margins in rural precincts from coast to coast in 2016.

But Trump's policies as president did not solve the long-term problems facing rural residents, or reduce the financial and cultural opportunities that migration to larger population centers can offer their children and grandchildren. The invocations of a nation fallen from past glories that resonated so strongly in small-town America inspired less enthusiasm among the residents of racially diverse, increasingly well-educated metropolitan municipalities, where even the challenges of daily life—high costs of living, insufficient housing supply, traffic congestion—often reflect the byproducts of growth and success rather than decline and decay. Prosperous suburban enclaves that once served as reliable sources of support for the mass Republican Party (such as Orange County, California; Loudoun County, Virginia; and Cobb County, Georgia) continued to shift steadily toward the blue end of the partisan spectrum in response to Trump's rise.

The fundamental geographic division in American politics has traditionally been a sectional conflict setting the North against the South. The idioms of "red states" and "blue states" caught on widely after the 2000 presidential election because they could be applied to a regional divide—blue North, red South—that was already presumed to reflect the main axis of political debate and competition. But the partisan difference between large-metro and rural residents has now become much larger than the gap between northerners and southerners.

Until 1996, the difference in presidential voting between residents of the nation's largest 20 metropolitan areas and inhabitants of rural (non-metropolitan) counties resembled the difference between the South (defined here as the eleven states of the former Confederacy plus West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma) and the North (defined as all other states from the Atlantic coast west to Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri). Between 2000 and 2008, the urbanism gap was somewhat, though not dramatically, larger than the regional gap. By 2016 and 2020, however, the partisan difference between large metros and rural areas had become fully three times as large as the North-South difference, which had visibly narrowed (from 12 to 9 percentage points) from its 2008 peak.

Look inside practically any state in the country and you'll find blue dots corresponding to its densent and most populous urban centers, each surrounded by a sea of red rural hinterlands. The regional divide has declined since 2008 because the urban precincts of the South have grown bluer over time while the rural territories of the North have gotten redder, both shedding some of their sectional distinctiveness in the face of a consistent nationwide trend. This gave Donald Trump the ability to flip a few northern states with significant rural populations from blue to red in 2016 (such as Iowa and Wisconsin), while Joe Biden likewise outperformed previous Democratic nominees in Georgia and Texas in 2020 by winning the large metro areas of greater Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston—none of which had been carried by Barack Obama in his 2012 victory.

In a widening electoral conflict between urban and rural America, one might think that it would be clear which side holds the strategic advantage. More than twice as many voters live in one of the top 20 metro areas as reside in all rural counties combined, and the results of the new 2020 census reveal that the American population is becoming more collectively metropolitan at an accelerating rate. Even in states where they control the post-census redistricting process, Republicans will face the challenge of needing to accommodate the declining numbers of their loyal rural constituency.

But as the figure above reveals, Republicans' plight as the rural party of a increasingly non-rural nation has so far been balanced out by the fact that rural America has moved toward the GOP at a faster pace since the 1990s than urban America has shifted away. When combined with the structural biases of the electoral college and Senate in favor of rural voters, the current Republican popular coalition can easily remain fully competitive in national elections. The intensifying conflict between city and country has had a number of important consequences for how each party operates, which voters it attracts, and which states and districts it is likely to win, but it does not show any signs of ending the perennially close competition for control of the federal government that has become a distinctive characteristic of our current age.

The Power Center in the GOP Isn't Just Trump, It's the Conservative Media

Donald Trump is still the Republican Party's spiritual leader in exile. Most other Republican politicians don't dare express criticism of Trump in public, ambitious candidates troop to Mar-a-Lago to seek his endorsement, and his style of resentment politics continues to gain adoption even among former detractors in his party. But Trump's repeated denunciations of the infrastructure legislation being developed in the Senate by a bipartisan "gang of 20" do not yet seem to be having much of an effect on its amount of Republican support; the bill survived its first test vote on Wednesday evening when the motion to begin consideration passed with the votes of 17 Republican senators, including minority leader Mitch McConnell.

This reflects something important about the nature of Trump's internal power within the GOP. The main conduits through which Trump exerts control over other Republicans are the conservative media outlets with which he has maintained a close alliance ever since his 2016 nomination. Trump is much more effective at imposing his preferences on the party when the Republican electorate is made aware of those preferences by the informational sources they trust the most.

When Trump was president, and before he was banned from social media, we often heard about how he had uniquely harnessed the power of Twitter. But it wasn't his tweets themselves that were especially powerful (only a small slice of the American public would have seen any of them directly), it was his tweets as amplified by other media platforms with much larger popular audiences. Republican members of Congress enjoyed much more political leeway to reject or ignore President Trump's policy proposals than they did to explicitly disapprove of his personal behavior, because substantive differences with Trump did not usually receive much attention from the media—including the conservative media—while personal differences could turn into headline news.

Trump is no longer allowed to tweet, but he still issues statements that resemble his old social media posts. Now, however, his goal of attracting widespread attention for these messages is even more dependent on the decision of others with louder bullhorns to give them publicity.

Some of the Senate Republicans participating in the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations, like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, have already survived confrontation with Trump or his conservative media allies. Others, like Rob Portman and Richard Burr, are not planning to seek another term and may not care much what the Fox News audience thinks about them. But a few Republican members of the "gang of 20," like Todd Young of Indiana or Mike Rounds of South Dakota, might well be made uncomfortable if their names and faces repeatedly led off the top of Tucker Carlson Tonight broadcasts as accused enemies of Trump and the conservative cause.

Fortunately for them, the infrastructure bill simply hasn't been promoted to Republican supporters in the electorate as a critical test of ideological purity. The attention of Carlson and his fellow conservative media personalities is mostly trained elsewhere these days, on the various cultural concerns that have come to dominate the agenda of the popular right. This may cause Trump some frustration. But if the energy of conservative activists and voters has indeed shifted in recent years from opposing increases in government spending to fighting the contemporary culture war, Trump—as well as his friends in the right-of-center media world—surely bears considerable responsibility for encouraging this change in priorities.

How Should We Judge the Harris Vice Presidency?

More than 200 years after its creation, the vice presidency remains the least defined, and outright oddest, major political office in the United States. With almost no formal powers but the critical responsibility of needing to be prepared to assume the leadership of the nation at any moment, vice presidents occupy a position that, like the electoral college that selects them, was a clumsy 1787 solution to a practical problem of constitutional mechanics.

Like the presidency, the vice presidency has evolved over time, and no longer resembles the description of its first historical occupant as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." But it can still be an awkward position to hold and a difficult one to evaluate from the outside. How can we judge whether the vice president is doing a good job without a shared set of expectations about what the job actually is?

Joe Biden has explained repeatedly that he wants Kamala Harris to be the "last voice in the room" when major decisions are made. In the early months of the current presidential administration, it wasn't hard to find sympathetic press stories emphasizing the "large role" or "central role" or "integral role" that Harris was expected to play in the Biden White House. The model for her vice presidency, Biden and his aides often said, was Biden's own experience serving under Barack Obama, when he was considered to be an unusually successful and influential vice president by historical standards.

But it's impossible for Biden and Harris to replicate the relationship that existed between Obama and Biden. Harris is simply not situated in the same place that Biden was as VP, and the implications of this difference have already begun to emerge only five months into her term. For one thing, the unique governing contribution that Biden could make was clear from the moment that he was chosen as Obama's running mate. As a six-term senator who had chaired the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees, he brought extensive national policy-making experience and a collection of valuable personal relationships, both on Capitol Hill and around the world, to an administration whose leader had served only briefly in federal office. 

Moreover, Biden was also widely (and, as it turned out, incorrectly) believed to have abandoned his own presidential ambitions after 2008, which was another important asset to his vice presidency. He benefited from the presumption that his judgments and actions were motivated by sincerity and loyalty, rather than by angling to benefit his own future political prospects. And nobody would have thought to argue that Biden as vice president should intentionally distance himself from involvement in this or that thorny issue or crisis in order to protect himself politically for a future campaign.

In contrast, Harris is widely viewed by party leaders and media figures as highly likely to run for president as Biden's heir apparent in 2024 or 2028, but as lacking a clear domain of unique authority to bring to the current administration. She isn't an old Washington hand like Biden, Dick Cheney, or George H. W. Bush; she doesn't have a signature set of policy priorities like Al Gore; she doesn't provide close long-standing personal ties to a key party constituency like Mike Pence. So any substantive responsibility that Harris takes on will inevitably be viewed by other political elites in terms of its strategic implications for her presumed future presidential candidacy, rather than as a reflection of sincere dedication, interest, or expertise.

We're already seeing this happen with Harris's role as the Biden administration's point person on Latin American migration, the subject of her first trip abroad earlier this month. Conventional wisdom in Washington agrees that the situation at the southern border is indeed a serious national problem that deserves urgent attention from the top levels of the executive branch. Conventional wisdom in Washington also seems equally certain that Harris is making a big mistake by getting anywhere near it. I recently spoke with one national reporter who suggested to me that, because of its potentially risky politics, the migration issue must have been assigned to Harris involuntarily. That doesn't seem to me like an act that would be in character for Joe Biden, and at least one media report suggests that Biden and Harris thought taking the lead on addressing the regional conditions causing migration would be an opportunity for her to shoulder an important responsibility and gain international experience. But some of Harris's own sympathizers are openly worried that she is being "set up to fail" by the president, walking into a political "trap" consisting of "the most difficult policy challenges in 21st-century America."

This prevailing sentiment may be right about the strategic calculations here. And it may also be right about Harris's political acumen, which seems to be suffering a declining reputation after her initially positive reception in Washington as a charismatic rising star in the Obama mold. (Note how many people think that someone who was just elected to national executive office could really use some good career advice.) 

But Harris's dilemma is not simply a product of her supposed naivete about her own political interests or Biden's supposed insensitivity to them. Rather, it is a natural consequence of her new position—where holding the status of potential president-in-waiting is often seen as more important than whatever the occupant might be expected to accomplish while waiting to be president. If it were otherwise, perhaps a vice president who tackled a difficult national issue would be praised, not second-guessed, for addressing the governing challenges of today rather than merely protecting her personal ambitions for tomorrow.

It seems unsatisfying to judge the success of a vice presidency solely on the grounds of whether the incumbent managed to use the position to elevate herself into a different one. But the lack of independent responsibilities or a consensus job description for the office has prevented the Washington political community, or the American electorate, from forming an alternative widely-accepted set of standards. Harris herself says, both publicly and (apparently) in private, that she views her vice presidential role as being a substantively engaged and personally loyal governing partner to Biden, not just a once-and-future presidential candidate in her own right. To consider how well she seems to be meeting her own stated vision for the office is not the only valid way to evaluate her performance. But it seems like a thoroughly fair one, regardless of whether her further aspirations are satisfied in the years to come.

The ACA Survives, in One More Victory for Boring Old Liberalism

Plain vanilla American liberalism hasn't been particularly fashionable for a long time, and it certainly isn't now. Anyone who regularly consumes high-status media like NPR or the Wall Street Journal, or who spends any time at all in the Twitterverse, could well conclude that today's politics is mostly defined by a battle between a highly intellectualized, social identity-oriented, self-consciously "anti-establishment" left wing on one side and an array of conservative critics, both Trumpist and anti-Trumpist, on the other.

But when we shift our attention to what the government is actually doing, we see a policy-making apparatus that continues to be dominated by a familiar pragmatic liberal tradition representing the historical legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. The Affordable Care Act is one of this tradition's most important recent achievements, if it's appropriate to refer to a law passed more than a decade ago as "recent." And the Supreme Court's 7–2 decision, announced Thursday, upholding the ACA against what may well be the last in a series of major legal challenges only confirms the resilience of the center-left policy state in the face of dissatisfaction on both ideological sides.

The ACA is complicated. It's inelegant and kludgy. It was designed to patch up the most urgent perceived flaws in the existing health care system rather than to tear it down completely and construct a more efficient and coherent successor. It is easy for its strongest detractors to hate, but hard for even its strongest defenders to love.

And yet the ACA remains a representative model of policy-making because it had two critically valuable qualities: enough initial support to be enacted in the first place and a big enough constituency to protect it from subsequent retrenchment. For all of the well-argued critiques directed its way by dissenters on the left and right, neither side has demonstrated the ability to transform a purer ideological vision into achievable and sustainable policy. Decades of progressive attempts to replace the current health care system with a universal single-payer alternative have yet to bear fruit. Conservatives' philosophical opposition to government involvement in health care provision has historically been a politically potent force when working to block liberal reform proposals before they passed, as in 1994, or when mobilizing an electoral backlash immediately after enactment, as in 2010. But after Republicans gained full policy-making power in 2017, general anti-government sentiment turned out to be insufficiently strong to persuade enough politicians within the party to rescind the ACA's specific benefits once they had actually started flowing to the public.

This same pattern arises in a number of other issue domains besides health care: entitlement policy, education policy, environmental policy. The decades-long conservative project to redefine government's role in society has been largely unsuccessful, except for several rounds of tax cuts (never balanced by corresponding spending reductions) and a few smaller victories on the margins. Donald Trump abandoned previous Republican support for Social Security and Medicare reforms that had always been more effective at attracting damaging Democratic attacks than in producing actual legislative achievements. But Trump was hardly the first Republican leader to depart from shrink-the-government doctrine in search of votes. 

Conservative victories often amount to the successful obstruction of liberal initiatives, or even just a reduction in the rate of government growth, rather than actual rightward shifts in the direction of policy. As popular conservatism becomes more consumed with symbolic and cultural battles, such as the current conflict over the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, the movement's traditional primary objective of rolling back the modern welfare state is either moving down the agenda or increasingly delegated to the conservative judiciary rather than the elected branches of government. (As Thursday's ruling showed, judges may not always be much more eager to take on this assignment than executives or legislators have been.)

In the other ideological direction, an increasingly visible strain of progressive activism has certainly had a measurable effect on perceptions of the American political climate. But so far, its ability to directly impose policy has been mostly restricted to non-governmental institutions controlled by the highly-educated cultural left, such as media companies and liberal arts colleges. The new progressive style has yet to find a secure foothold in elective politics, even in Blue America—where are the socialist state governors? the leftist big-city mayors?—despite plenty of confident assertions that the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the AOC-aligned "Squad" foreshadow the near-term future of the Democratic Party. Conflicts in various left-dominated municipalities over police reform and defunding in the Black Lives Matter era, as well as other similar issues, suggest that there are still many unanswered questions about how this particular ideological framework can and will be converted into specific governing choices.

Traditional pragmatic liberalism is a perennial rhetorical target for people who think of themselves as committed to loftier ideals. On the right, social conservatives like Ross Douthat criticize it for lacking "a clear sense of moral purpose," suggesting that in our time it has become "somewhat exhausted." Purist activists on the left echo these themes, speaking of an age marked by the supposedly catastrophic failures of "neoliberalism" and representing the onset of "late capitalism"—implying that a non-capitalist future is surely soon to arrive.

But old-fashioned half-a-loaf liberalism has proven tough to replace. It's not just that revolutionary change is difficult to achieve in the American political system, though it is. There are also plenty of important constituencies invested in conventional liberal policy-making—classes of credentialed work-within-the-system subject matter experts, institutionalized interest groups that prize partial victories over none at all, and a large number of regular voters who hold moderately left-of-center views on domestic affairs and are wary of socialism and laissez-faire-ism alike. While critics on all sides yawn with impatience for the era of boring old liberalism to end, the boring old liberal ACA has just further entrenched itself, boring old liberals Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are working to enact more boring old technocratic incrementalist liberal policies, and boring old liberalism just keeps muddling through to prevail once again.

The Biden Administration's Demographic Diversity Is Where the New Progressivism Meets the Old Democratic Party

History was made on Wednesday when the daily White House briefing was delivered by Karine Jean-Pierre, the chief deputy press secretary, filling for press secretary Jen Psaki. The briefing itself was not unusually newsworthy. But Jean-Pierre was the first openly gay or lesbian person ever to fill the role, and the first Black woman to do so in three decades. The Biden administration proudly publicized this milestone, which attracted significant media notice including a post-briefing televised interview with Jean-Pierre by MSNBC's Joy Reid.

The White House's enthusiastic promotion of Jean-Pierre's turn at the briefing podium fits a larger pattern. Biden and his team have been especially devoted to presenting themselves as commited to increasing demographic diversity in government. This theme dates back to the 2020 campaign; Biden promised to choose a female vice presidential nominee near the end of the Democratic primaries and ultimately signaled, prior to the selection of Kamala Harris, that he would probably name a woman of color as his running mate. Since then, Biden has claimed credit for unprecedented aggregate representation of women and racial minorities in senior administration positions, as well as a long list of individual history-making appointments: the first-ever female treasury secretary and director of national intelligence; the first-ever Black secretary of defense; the first-ever Native American and openly gay Cabinet members; the first-ever transgender sub-Cabinet appointee; the first-ever all-female White House communications team. (Biden has also promised to name the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, but an opportunity has yet to arise.)

This emphasis can be seen as attempting to satisfy contemporary progressive activists' intense interest in categorizing individuals by social identity and judging the fitness of an organization by counting the members of historically disadvantaged groups within its ranks. But there's nothing new about a president, especially a Democratic president, working to ensure the visible representation of his party's major constituencies. Franklin Roosevelt was the first chief executive to appoint a woman to the Cabinet, and Lyndon Johnson the first to appoint a Black Cabinet secretary. Bill Clinton, hardly a left-wing purist, promised "a Cabinet that looks like America" during the 1992 campaign, and ultimately appointed the first-ever Asian-American secretary and the first women in history to serve as attorney general and secretary of state.

For Biden, attending to and publicizing the demographic composition of his administration can simultaneously accommodate the traditional organized interests of his party and appeal to ideological activists who increasingly prize social group diversity as a core political value. With narrow congressional majorities and the Senate filibuster presenting serious long-term obstacles to the administration's ambitious legislative agenda, Biden's appointment decisions may turn out to be an important way for him to satisfy the priorities of multiple blocs of supporters.

Of course, diversity in government can mean more than one thing. Biden's administration contains no top Republicans or independents, and the only member of his Cabinet whose educational credentials are limited to a single bachelor's degree is Marty Walsh, the secretary of labor. The dominant substantive ethos of the Biden presidency is a technocratic liberalism that appears to prevail across its senior personnel regardless of ethnic or gender identification. But this merely reflects the current state of the larger Democratic Party, where fundamental ideological divisions have eased over time even as the number of component social groups seeking representation only continues to grow.

Biden at 100 Days: An Interview with The Signal

Graham Vyse of the new online publication The Signal called me yesterday and we chatted about the record of the Biden presidency at the 100-day mark. Normally, my interviews with reporters yield a quotation of a sentence or two in a larger news story, but this time our discussion was turned into a more in-depth Q&A covering many different aspects of the current political moment. You can read an edited transcript of the interview here; the site requires an email address to sign up but access to the piece is free.