The Dubious Theory That Working-Class Voters Want Candidates Who "Look Like Them"

Like many other center-left parties across the Western world, the Democratic Party has experienced a significant decline in support among working-class voters over the past two decades or so—whether class is measured by household income, occupational status, or educational attainment. This trend has confronted Democrats with a particularly acute electoral challenge in parts of the country where blue-collar white citizens constitute a majority of the voting population, including much of the Midwest and interior West as well as small towns and rural areas across most of the nation.

This partisan realignment is primarily driven by the rising salience of cultural conflicts, Compared to citizens with socioeconomic advantage, working-class voters are more patriotic, nationalistic, traditionalist, and skeptical of social change; they also consistently hold more conservative preferences on subjects like abortion, LGBT rights, gun control, environmentalism, and immigration. As the public image of the Democratic Party has become more associated with cultural liberalism, it has lost its formerly durable popular reputation as primarily concerned with representing the political interests of the working class.

If winning a greater share of the working-class vote in the future requires the party to become more moderate on cultural issues, liberal Democrats would be forced into an unappetizing choice between ideological purity and electoral success. But if another path exists to reverse the party’s growing unpopularity among this key voting bloc, such a dilemma might be happily avoided. Thus an alternative hypothesis has attracted considerable acceptance among progressive activists and primary voters in recent years: Democrats can appeal to blue-collar Americans by nominating performatively “working-class” candidates who nonetheless champion progressive issue platforms.

This idea has a long history, but its most prominent recent manifestation was the Senate campaign of Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman in 2022. Fetterman became nationally famous for dressing casually and speaking plainly, with his tattoos, hooded sweatshirts, and running shorts featuring prominently in press coverage of his candidacy as supposed authentication of his Everyman identity. To some observers, especially supporters on the left, Fetterman’s victory served as proof of concept for the claim that liberalism in a Carhartt wardrobe was a formula for success in a critical battleground state.

Unfortunately. it’s very difficult to analytically isolate Fetterman’s presentation of self from the other factors that might have contributed to his election in 2022; he faced a weak carpetbagging opponent, and Democrats nationwide performed better than the president’s party usually does in a midterm election (probably due to the Supreme Court’s unpopular Dobbs ruling issued that summer). But another test of the theory arrived two years later with Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. Democratic supporters and sympathetic media figures celebrated Walz as a “regular midwestern dad” who wore flannel shirts, went pheasant hunting, and had coached high school football, and was therefore an ideal ambassador to blue-collar and rural voters.

It didn’t work. The Harris-Walz team was the worst performing presidential ticket in rural America in modern history, receiving just 32 percent of the total vote in non-metropolitan counties nationwide. Vice presidential nominees usually don’t matter much to electoral outcomes, and this was likely true in 2024. But it’s fair to say that Walz did not electrify the campaign trail or dominate in his debate against J. D. Vance.

This year, Graham Platner is the leading test case for the dress-down-and-win hypothesis. Platner’s profile as a bearded and tattooed military veteran turned oyster farmer with a sharp-edged speaking style and strongly progressive political views attracted early support from Bernie Sanders and several labor unions. While his actual “blue-collar” credentials are somewhat arguable (he attended two private prep schools and has received regular financial assistance from his attorney father), Platner’s candidacy caught fire among Maine Democrats. He succeeded in driving Maine’s sitting governor Janet Mills from the primary race and now stands as the presumptive opponent to five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But the relative political novice has had some skeletons emerge from his closet since he declared his candidacy; even the tattoos turn out to be a bit of a problem.

While we wait to find out whether Platner’s flaws render him unacceptable to the Maine general electorate, it’s worth considering how much of the strategic argument for candidates like him is founded on assumptions that working-class voters respond very powerfully to superficial signals of “blue collar” identity (like personal appearance or language style), and that nominating candidates with these attributes is a more effective path than ideological repositioning on substantive policy matters to winning elections in competitive constituencies. After all, the most popular politician in our lifetimes among small-town Americans is a super-wealthy business tycoon from New York City who only takes off his neckties when he’s playing golf on the courses that he owns.

A common touch is surely an asset in politics; this is one reason why Elizabeth Warren underperforms other Democratic candidates in Massachusetts elections. But it’s not the only thing that’s important to voters, even those of modest social status. We should be suspicious of the implication that working-class citizens care more about vibes than policy, especially when such suggestions come from well-educated white-collar activists who themselves hold very strong ideological commitments. Whether or not it’s offensive condescension in the guise of sympathy, there’s just not much evidence that it’s true.

One person who has come to agree is John Fetterman himself. Fetterman has continued to insist on maintaining his casual fashion style while serving in the Senate, but he responded to Donald Trump’s 2024 victory in Pennsylvania by starting to break with other Democrats on multiple issues. His constituents have noticed, now perceiving him as significantly more moderate than the rest of his party. This reinvention may doom Fetterman in the 2028 primaries—if he indeed runs for a second term as a Democrat—but it’s a tried-and-true method for winning general elections in a competitive state. Just ask Susan Collins.

Republican Governing Mistakes Are the Great Partisan Equalizer

The Democratic Party faces a set of serious challenges. It has lost its former popularity among white voters without college degrees, a significant share of the national electorate that has shifted since the 1990s from mostly voting Democratic to supporting Republicans by a 2-to-1 ratio. The results of the 2024 election suggested that this trend could extend to other ethnic groups as well, especially Hispanics, and that younger men of all races might have become alienated from the party. While Democrats have made partially offsetting gains among college-educated voters, this countervailing trend has not been sufficent to maintain the party’s traditional numerical advantage among the American public or to counteract an increasingly pro-Republican structural tilt in Senate elections. Like other center-left parties around the world, Democrats must contend with the growing tension between the demands of their culturally progressive activist population and the more moderate preferences of the casual supporters they need to win national power.

But there is an important factor that has so far prevented the Democratic Party from losing its ability to contest elections on an equal footing: the perennial Republican struggle to govern. In a strict two-party system where electoral competition is a zero-sum game, that’s turned out to be an important asset.

President Trump’s job approval rating now sits at about 40 percent on average, a historically low figure for this point in a presidential administration. Trump is being weighed down by negative evaluations of the national economy, with Americans expressing particular dissatisfaction with high inflation and declining affordability on his watch. Unsurprisingly, given how midterm elections tend to serve as a referendum on the performance of the president, Democrats have moved into a steady lead in congressional polling even as the party itself remains fairly unpopular.

It’s not always fair to blame—or credit—the president for the nation’s economic health. But Trump has implemented well-publicized policy changes that are not only opposed by most citizens, but were also predicted by experts to increase inflation and reduce growth. Just as economists could explain in advance that Trump’s tariffs would be much more likely to produce higher prices than employment benefits, specialists in the politics of the Middle East easily foresaw that attacking Iran would lead to immediately noticeable spikes in fuel prices and indirect effects on other consumer costs. Many voters may not fully understand exactly how the Iran war leads to rising prices on goods other than gasoline—it requires rare knowledge, for example, to be aware that the Hormuz blockade will also make food more expensive by constricting the worldwide supply of crop fertilizer—but since they reliably hold the president responsible for managing the national economy, he is likely to be punished anyway. Trump is also aggressively pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which could also have the effect of compounding the inflation problem.

When a president’s poll numbers start to slide, much of the Washington commentariat diagnoses a public relations crisis and dispenses the traditional remedy: better messaging. It’s true that Trump probably would be well-advised to express more sympathy for Americans’ concerns about affordability and to develop a potentially persuasive rationale for the conflict with Iran. But the real problem he faces is the consequence of his policy decisions, not a lack of clever spin. Political scientists can sometimes express cynicism about the capacity of voters to keep political leaders properly accountable for their governing choices, yet history is full of policy failures that became political disasters. At least some of the time, it’s in the interests of politicians to get the substance right.

Republicans have realized major electoral benefits over the years from subjecting policy technocrats and other intellectuals to rhetorical attack and budgetary defunding, which have become more frequent as the party has harnessed populist resentments among voters without college degrees. Conservatives characterize the community of credentialed subject-matter specialists as skewed to the ideological left, prone to arrogance and condescension, and not as reliably correct about the world as they claim. These are all valid criticisms.

That doesn’t mean, however, that refusing to develop substantive knowledge about complex issues, or to listen to those who have it, will produce a record of successful governance. Yes, the experts are wrong sometimes, but not as often as those who dismiss everything the experts say. The George W. Bush administration, the Tea Party Congress, and the first Trump term all suffered from political weaknesses that stemmed from policy failures, handing electoral gifts to the Democratic opposition. Recent events suggest that Republican leaders haven’t been studying this history—and thus may be doomed to repeat it this November.

Five Lessons from the 2025 Election Results

1. “Unless the president is unusually popular, the party holding the White House will suffer significant losses in off-year elections” is a very well-established pattern, so nothing about the Democratic electoral victories in New Jersey, Virginia, and other states yesterday should be treated as shocking or even unusual. But it’s always valuable to confirm that some of the old rules of politics still apply, even as other aspects of our political world have changed. And for all its normal predictability, this thermostatic backlash effect still seems to catch media commentators and other political professionals by surprise. In part, this is because so much attention during the first year of a presidential term is focused on the failure and subsequent internal dissension of the opposition party, making what should in fact be a fully expected rebound of its electoral fortunes seem like a dramatic plot twist.

2. One of the reasons why Trump has been treated as politically stronger, and the Democrats politically weaker, in his second term than in his first has been that we haven’t seen as visible a popular oppositional movement emerge in 2025 as we did in 2017. Yes, there have been anti-Trump protests, marches, and hashtags, but nothing to the scale of what happened eight years ago, and major institutions like universities and corporations have taken a more accommodationist tack to conservative populism than they did in the peak “Resistance” era. But yesterday’s results demonstrate that 2025’s less prominent expressive opposition on the left does not necessarily indicate, or produce, less successful electoral performance for Democratic candidates—or even lower levels of voter participation. This raises the fascinating, and I think quite unresolved, question of how much self-styled “movements” actually affect the outcomes of general elections for top political offices.

3. Based on exit polls and results in particular localities, it’s clear that both Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia performed much better than Kamala Harris in 2024 among Hispanic and Asian-American voters, either matching or exceeding Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. There are three plausible interpretations of this change: (a) minority voters’ growing support for Trump does not—at least yet—apply to other Republican candidates when he isn’t on the ballot; (b) many have become “nature-of-the-times” swing voters who punished Democrats for disappointing stewardship of the national economy in 2024 and are now punishing Republicans for the same thing; (c) Republican gains among socially conservative racial minorities between 2016 and 2024 are now being reversed, perhaps because of the more aggressive immigration enforcement policies and rhetoric of the second Trump term. We’ll need more data and more elections to better understand the causal factors behind this trend (assuming it continues).

4. Zohran Mamdani is poised to become a well-known national figure, in part because both supporters and critics will have a strong incentive to provide him with generous publicity. For various reasons, however, the mayoralty of major cities is normally a political ticket to nowhere—even for politicians who aren’t constitutionally ineligible to run for president. Mamdani is the latest in a number of economically and socially progressive candidates to win election in big northern cities, which is an important development in its own right but a long way from indicating what the “future of the Democratic Party” might be. Mamdani has undeniable political talent, but was also blessed with competing against several unusually unappealing opponents—beginning with an incumbent mayor whose four years of flagrant blundering opened the door to his candidacy. The governing choices he makes will be fascinating to watch.

5. Perceptions matter in politics whether or not they match reality, and the perception that yesterday’s results constituted a “blue wave” (in part because expectations were set by polling that underestimated Democrats’ performance) is likely to have important consequences for a range of topics from the resolution of the government shutdown to candidate recruitment in the 2026 midterms. But it’s as easy to overstate the magnitude of Democratic victories this year as the Republican victories of last year, and indulgence in the former is not the ideal response to indulgence in the latter. The best evidence indicates that we remain in an era of polarized and closely matched parties, meaning that the emotional response of attentive partisans on both sides rises and falls much more dramatically than the actual strength of the parties themselves. And no election is ever the final word on anything; in this country, there’s always another one right around the corner.

In the 2024 Elections, It's a Man's Man's Man's Republican Party

One of the most important consequences of Donald Trump's political ascendance in 2016 was the effect it had on the political engagement of women. They played a leading role in the "Resistance" movement of anti-Trump activism in the 2018 and 2020 elections, which often portrayed Trump as uniquely threatening to women's interests in both his substantive policies and personal behavior. The number of female candidates in the Democratic Party made a noticeable jump in 2018, the first election after Trump became president, and Democratic primary voters seemed especially motivated to express their aversion to Trump by nominating women for Congress and other major offices. The Democratic House majority elected that year contained a record number of women, and in 2020 a majority of non-incumbent Democratic nominees were female for the first time in American history.

Less predictably, the proportion of women nominated by the Republican Party also increased during Trump's presidency. Women rose from 13 percent to 22 percent of all Republican House nominees between 2018 and 2020, and jumped from 18 percent to 33 percent of all non-incumbent nominees. Media reports revealed that Republican officials and interest groups, worried about stereotypes of a male-dominated party, had invested in efforts to recruit more women to run for office. The representation of women in the GOP still lagged well behind the Democrats, but seemed to be on a similar trajectory.

However, the parties have since diverged. The picture for Democrats is of relative stability. Since 2018, the proportion of Democratic House nominees who are women has remained between 42 and 48 percent, as depicted in the figure below. But Republicans proved unable to sustain the growth of female nominees achieved in the 2020 election. This year, 84 percent of Republican House nominees, and 83 percent of non-incumbent nominees, are men.

In Senate and governors' races, both parties have produced a fairly steady pattern of increased female representation since the 2000s, but the Republicans experienced a decline in female Senate and gubernatorial nominees from 21 percent in 2022 to 16 percent in 2024—the lowest proportion of women nominated by the party since 2016:

The 2024 election has exhibited especially overt "gendered" elements that are hard to ignore. Trump, facing a female opponent for the second time in his political career, made his entrance to the Republican National Convention this summer to the accompaniment of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," while Harris prefers a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—both of whom have endorsed her campaign. Commentators and analysts discuss the possibility of a record gender gap and the possibly central role of abortion and trans rights in shaping voters' preferences. Even the candidates' media outreach strategies reflect gender differences, with Harris appearing on podcasts hosted by Alex Cooper and Brene Brown that are especially popular with women while Trump targets the mostly male audiences of Joe Rogan and Logan Paul.

But even a historically unprecedented partisan divide between male and female voters in 2024 is unlikely to match the dramatic contemporary gap in gender representation separating Democratic from Republican politicians. For the Democratic Party, a future of relative gender parity among its elected leadership is realistically within sight. But for Republican politicians, it's still very much a man's world.

Democratic Convention Wrap-Up: 16 Years Later, It's Still Obama's Party

A few notes on the week the Democrats just had in Chicago:

1. 20 years after his national emergence as a keynote speaker at the 2004 convention, and 16 years after he won his first presidential nomination, Barack Obama remains the defining face of the contemporary Democratic Party. The 2024 convention demonstrated the potency of Obama's legacy in three major respects.

• On policy: the convention presented Harris as a center-left candidate in the Obama mold, consistently liberal on both economic and cultural issues but not doctrinaire in manner and maintaining a quiet distance from the Sanders/Warren "progressive revolution" platform that some observers have viewed as a harbinger of the party's future. The convention programming consistently emphasized practical incrementalism over ideological transformation. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech on Monday night did not take a distinct ideological tack from the rest of the party, and nobody was in the mood to stir up factional conflict.

• On representation: Obama's demonstration that white voters in swing states could support a person of another race for high political office (not at all an obvious assumption when he first ran for president in 2008) has, in the years since his election, unlocked the door to a steadily widening stream of non-white candidates who have sharply increased the demographic diversity of the Democratic Party's, and the nation's, leadership. Harris is, of course, a beneficiary of this trailblazing, but the convention stage this week was occupied at various points by many other Obama legatees: Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Wes Moore, Angela Alsobrooks, Ruben Gallego, Hakeem Jeffries, Catherine Cortez Masto, Andy Kim, and so on. But like Obama, Harris prefers not to invoke her race (and gender) explicitly in a cry for historical justice, but instead assumes that voters will notice it anyway and hopes that they view it as a symbol of positive change.

• On tone: Obama has made it unmistakably clear over the years that he doesn't like self-righteous, scolding, negative-affect political rhetoric, and he thinks it's politically counterproductive when it comes from the left. His address on Tuesday night echoed this point, albeit indirectly enough to ensure that "Obama trashes wokeness" wouldn't be the big media story of the evening. Harris obviously agrees. Her acceptance speech last night, as well as the bulk of the speeches over the four nights of the convention, were welcoming to non-progressives and explicitly presented a positive and patriotic view of the country, complete with repeated "USA" chants and signs in the crowd. This is not "1619 Project" progressivism, portraying the country as enduringly shamed by its history of injustice; this is instead a reaffirmation of Obama's preferred framing of the United States as a nation that can be proud of the racial progress that it has made and of the example that its multicultural democracy can now offer the world.

2. Harris is clearly a fan of short speeches. Since starting her campaign, she's tended to speak at her public rallies for only about 20 minutes ot so. Last night's speech was 37 minutes long, which turns out to be the shortest acceptance address since Walter Mondale's in 1984 (not counting Biden's in 2020, which had no in-person audience due to the pandemic and hence no breaks for applause). This offers a contrast with her opponent, who has delivered the three longest acceptance speeches in history. In a digital age of shrinking attention spans, perhaps Harris sees strategic value in relative brevity.

3. Of course, a shorter speech means leaving some things out. Harris's autobiographical narrative emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general but skipped over her tenure as vice president almost entirely. The reason is clear—with Biden's approval ratings hovering around 40 percent, she needs to win over some Biden critics and has decided to present herself as a new face in politics, unburdened by what has been. But this isn't a risk-free strategy. She also needs voters to view her as qualified for the presidency, and discussing her vice presidential experience could be helpful in passing that test.

4. In general, journalists don't like conventions all that much. For them, being stuck in a crowded arena while a parade of politicians deliver partisan boilerplate for hour after hour is boring and annoying; the excitement among the press corps provoked by the (false) rumor that Beyonce might made a surprise appearance at last night's session partially reflected media members' lack of interest in the people who were actually on the schedule. But for citizens who aren't already saturated in politics every day, the conventions can serve as a useful window into the political world. A non-expert who spends an hour or so watching both parties' conventions will usually get a pretty good picture of each side's main messages and how they differ. Conventions are also important for the internal operations of the parties as complex political organizations—a quadrennial national gathering of top leaders and activists where information can be shared, relationships can be built, and party business can be settled. Conventions, much more than debates, are truly essential milestone events during every presidential campaign, and they shouldn't be judged only by the superficial entertainment value of every speaker at the podium.

What the Tim Walz Pick Tells Us About Kamala Harris

Every four years, public speculation about the identity of the vice presidential nominees tends to focus on governors or senators from competitive states that may hold a pivotal position in the electoral college. But almost every time, presidential candidates wind up choosing running mates who don’t come from electoral battlegrounds. This should be a clue that presidential candidates don’t place as much emphasis on the potential ability to deliver a home state as conventional wisdom assumes. But that raises the question of what they do value in a VP, and why.

The 2024 Democratic veepstakes threw this puzzle into especially sharp relief. An unusual number of the party’s supposed current rising stars represent presidential swing states, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. With an extremely narrow margin in the national polls and a uniquely truncated timeline for settling on a running mate, it seemed natural to many in Washington that Kamala Harris would turn to one of these prominent figures to enhance her chances of building an electoral vote majority. But she opted instead for Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was not nationally well-known before his selection and who comes from a state that Democrats were already favored to win. Once again, a presidential candidate passed over the battleground states when selecting a VP.

There are four main reasons why this pattern tends to happen.

1. Running mates can’t be counted on to deliver their home states. It’s unclear from the evidence exactly how much of an electoral bonus a party can expect to receive from selecting a home-state VP, but it’s likely to be no more than a couple of percentage points under the most favorable circumstances. The idea that a swing state can be “locked up” by putting its governor or senator on the ticket is simply a myth. Some advocates of Shapiro’s selection argued that there is a non-minimal probability that this year’s election could come down to a few thousand ballots in Pennsylvania, and that even a modest “friends and neighbors” vote for him might therefore decide the entire election. There’s logic to this argument, but it’s still hard for campaigns to game out the probabilities; if running mates could guarantee a 5-point bounce in their home states, presidential candidates’ calculations would undoubtedly be different. According to CNN reporting, the Harris campaign decided from its own polling that putting Shapiro on the ticket would not provide enough of an advantage to justify his selection.

2. Presidential candidates think in terms of voting groups, not individual states. Presidential candidates need to win multiple swing states, not just one. This encourages them to focus on the potential ability of a running mate to attract specific subgroups of voters located across the entire electoral battleground. Donald Trump selected the pious Mike Pence not to win over people from Indiana (he was already assured of carrying the state) but instead to motivate conservative evangelicals whether they lived in Florida or Pennsylvania or Iowa; Barack Obama picked the experienced Joe Biden to reassure persuadable voters across every geographic region that he would be well-equipped to govern if elected. This year, the Harris campaign clearly hopes that Walz’s plain-spoken, regular-guy persona will help them limit the desertion of working-class whites that has endangered the Democratic Party’s competitiveness in exurbs and small towns from coast to coast over the past two decades.

3. The party has its say too. The last thing that presidential nominees want in the heat of an electoral campaign is an internal fight within their party. To this end, they aim to select a running mate that will inspire unity and enthusiasm across all major party factions. In addition, they seek insider intelligence about various potential choices that will help them avoid choosing someone who turns out to have a major political or personal fault. Extensive consultation with other key party actors helps them achieve these goals. As I argued in my piece four years ago about Biden’s selection of Harris, Biden’s lifelong instinct to act as a loyal creature of the Democratic Party mainstream made him very sensitive to pressure from other Democrats to add a woman of color to his ticket—and convinced him that Harris in particular was the best choice. This year, it seems clear that Walz had an active chorus of internal proponents, especially among House Democrats who knew him well from his six terms of congressional service between 2007 and 2018, that Shapiro couldn’t match. Like Biden, Harris appears to solicit and value input from peers in pursuit of a unified party, and it’s likely that these voices in her ear helped convince her to settle on Walz.

4. Presidential candidates want governing partners, not just campaigning partners. Our perpetually election-obsessed political world may only be thinking about the VP selection in terms of its potential effect on the outcome in November, but presidential candidates are also envisioning what life might look like after they win. It’s only natural that a nominee with vice presidential experience of her own will have especially strong preferences about what kind of vice president she would like to have. And personal chemistry is a legitimate consideration; tension between the president and vice president is in nobody’s interest. Multiple news reportssuggest that Walz won out over Shapiro and Kelly in part because he clicked better with Harris and her staff, and because he struck her as someone who would be a more loyal member of her administration (Walz apparently said that he held no ambitions of his own to become president).

So what picture of Kamala Harris emerges from the VP selection process? In general, she acted like a typical presidential nominee—who cared more about appealing to an electoral subgroup than trying to target a particular battleground state, who was responsive to feedback from other members of her party, and who prized personal compatibility as well as electoral strategy. But that doesn’t mean that she made the right choice. The historical record of success in vice presidential selection is rather mixed, and she was denied the usual benefit of having several months after locking up the nomination to gather information and weigh alternatives. But even well-chosen running mates are valuable less for the modest number of voters they might attract than for their ability to share the heavy burden of governing if victory is achieved.

Did Dumping Biden Make the Democrats Un-Democratic? Yes...and No

For the first time since the current presidential nomination system was created in 1972, a candidate who accrued the majority of pledged delegates will not be the nominee of his party. Instead, Democrats will deliver their nomination to a different candidate who entered no primaries and won no delegates.

Some prominent figures have accused the Democratic Party of violating the standards of democracy by jettisoning its presumptive nominee after the end of the primary season. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas charged party leaders with “ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes.” Former ambassador and acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell argued that “undermining democracy should never be condoned.” Tech mogul Elon Musk asked, “Shouldn’t the nominee be decided by a party vote? Democracy etc.” Several critics, including Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and venture capitalist David Sacks, referred to Biden as the victim of a successful “coup,” while House speaker Mike Johnson even suggested that Democrats might not be able to legally replace Biden’s name on state general election ballots this fall.

Of course, these dissenters are all Trump supporters, not neutral observers. They are undoubtedly frustrated to watch Biden withdraw from the race just as Republicans had become increasingly confident of defeating him, and have clear partisan motivations for depicting Democrats as acting unfairly or hypocritically.

But self-interested arguments are not necessarily wrong, and in another time (specifically, 1968) it was liberal Democrats who claimed that the nomination of a candidate who didn’t compete in presidential primaries inherently lacked democratic legitimacy. The chaos that ensued in Chicago that year when Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Democratic nominee over the angry objections of anti-Vietnam War activists was the catalyst for the creation of the current nomination system, in which most convention delegates are selected by primary electorates rather than state party leaders. Advocates of nomination reform, which soon spread to both parties, argued that they were replacing a process that was controlled by corrupt insiders and bosses acting in secret smoke-filled rooms with a fairer alternative that was open, egalitarian, and sensitive to the views and interests of regular Americans. More recent attacks by members of the political left on the hypothetical ability of superdelegates to influence Democratic nomination outcomes have similarly been premised on the argument that there’s something fundamentally unfair about party leaders using institutional power to counteract the “will of the people” as measured by the results of primary elections.

If practicing democracy is merely a matter of adopting decision-making procedures that allow for mass participation while constraining the influence of party elites, the post-1968 reformers and the critics of superdelegates could convincingly claim that they were acting to advance democratic values. But, then, so too can today’s conservative detractors who are complaining about the Biden-to-Harris switcheroo. After all, millions of Democratic voters in all 50 states expressed their preference for Biden to be their party’s nominee this year by a lopsided popular margin and an overwhelming landslide in the delegate count. When a coordinated pressure campaign organized by a network of powerful politicians, donors, and strategists succeeds in elbowing such a candidate aside in favor of an alternative nominee whom nobody voted for, an infringement of procedural democracy has indeed occurred. (Biden himself made exactly this argument in a letter to Democratic members of Congress several weeks ago, when the dump-Biden movement was first gaining steam.)

But in practice, Democrats don’t seem to agree that their voices have been unjustly silenced by a nefarious cabal of scheming insiders. According to last week’s New York Times poll, 91 percent of Democratic respondents approve of Biden’s decision to leave the race and 92 percent currently back Harris for president. There is far more evidence of excitement than disillusionment; the self-reported enthusiasm of Democratic supporters has suddenly spiked over the past week, producing parallel surges in financial donations, volunteer activity, and media consumption.

Harris is also a more popular candidate than Biden across the broader electorate, as measured by personal favorability ratings and head-to-head trial heats against Donald Trump. Rank-and-file Republicans and independents don’t share the dissatisfaction with Biden’s departure expressed by Cotton, Grenell, Musk, and company; as the Times recently noted, the view that Biden did the right thing by dropping out is the rare contemporary political belief that unites Americans of all partisan persuasions. The violation of a long-settled procedural norm first adopted in the name of bolstering democratic legitimacy—the deference that the modern nomination process is intended to show to the ballots of primary voters—has thus produced an outcome that has simultaneously energized party members and gained widespread approval in the public at large.

Democratic leaders proved responsive to the changing preferences of the citizenry, measured not just by months-old elections that Biden won without serious opposition but also by more recent polling that showed declining support for the president both inside and outside the Democratic tent. If a party’s decision to cast aside the results of its own primaries is so demonstrably popular—even among many voters who participated in them—while delivering the American electorate a more desirable choice of candidates for the White House, perhaps representative democracy has indeed been served after all.

One of the many lessons we can draw from these unprecedented developments—and, really, from the last decade of American politics—is that strict deference to ostensibly democratic internal party processes like primary elections does not necessarily bolster the health of the nation’s democracy in a larger sense. Our parties bear a responsibility to conduct their operations with a degree of fairness and openness, but they also have the duty to supply Americans with skilled, qualified, and appealing candidates for public office. As critics of the current nomination process have argued, primary voters are not always any better at selecting such leaders than party bosses were in the bygone era of the smoke-filled room. Violating normal procedural practices may sometimes produce substantive outcomes that more closely reflect the interests of citizens both inside and outside the party. Surely, that can also be viewed as a case of democracy in action.

Biden Decides to Drop Out: The View from Political Science

Honest Graft has been on a long hiatus since last year—for good reasons that will be further discussed soon!—and it’s great to be back. Before the last few weeks, it seemed like 2024 might wind up being one of the least eventful national campaigns in recent memory. But now…well, here we are once again in “making history” mode.

Joe Biden’s abrupt decision to leave the presidential race and the imminent choice of a replacement nominee are big topics that will undoubtedly hold our attention for the next few weeks. Unprecedented developments like these aren’t just important because they liven up a long campaign season and provide fascination for easily bored journalists and scholars. By giving us brand new case studies and data, they help us better understand how politics works. So here are a few initial lessons we students of American parties can draw so far from these events. There are surely many more to come.

1. Presidents don’t just exercise power over parties; parties also exercise power over presidents. This is a familiar view among political scientists, but it doesn’t always receive enough acknowledgment by journalists and citizens who often view the president as the center of gravity around which the rest of the political system orbits. We have just witnessed a coalition of congressional party leaders, financial donors, professional strategists, media figures, and party-aligned voters convince a sitting president to abandon a re-election bid in the midst of the campaign season. That’s a very impressive show of influence, and exactly how that influence was brought to bear on Biden will deserve extensive examination for what it tells us about who holds internal power within the party and how they use it. (We’ll discover, I suspect, that Nancy Pelosi continues to be a tremendously important figure in Democratic Party politics; she’ll almsot certainly go down in history as the most important single Democratic figure of the past 25 years—and possibly the last 50 years—who never served as president.)

2. Joe Biden was the first president we’ve had since George H. W. Bush who wasn’t a dominant, charismatic personality. At times, that quality served him well. He didn’t inspire the personal attention—and divisiveness—that each of the last four presidents did, which allowed Americans’ focus in the 2020 and 2022 elections to linger on the vulnerabilities of his Republican opponents. But it also meant that he couldn’t count on a large reservoir of sentimental devotion among Democrats that could protect him once he looked politically vulnerable. Democrats never fell in love with Biden, but they hired him in 2020 because they thought he could do the important job of defeating Trump. Once it looked like he wouldn’t be able to accomplish the same task again this year, it was time to find somebody else who might have a better shot. Joe Biden, as it turned out, would not given the chance to go down in romantically doomed defeat.

3. The perennial number-one fantasy of political media members is to have a contested national convention with genuine uncertainty about the choice of nominee. Coincidentally, that’s also most party leaders’ number-one nightmare. The rapid consolidation of multiple party officials’ and delegates’ support for Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement over the course of the day, including key members of all major Democratic subgroups from progressives to labor champions to suburban moderates to the Black and Hispanic caucuses, doesn’t mean that these leaders have all suddenly decided that Harris is an amazingly strong candidate—however generous their public praise of her might be. Instead, it reflects the view that the party can’t afford more delay or infighting and that she’s the obvious, broadly acceptable heir apparent. It’s likely that most Democratic insiders privately concede that Harris begins as the underdog in the fight against Trump. But they had begun to worry that renominating Biden might lead to a thoroughly disastrous election in November that would not only cost them the White House but a slew of House and Senate seats as well. If Harris can at least motivate Democratic voters to turn out at high rates and keep the margin close at the top of the ticket, congressional Democrats will feel justified in their decision to push Biden aside in favor of her.

New Interview at The Signal on the Generation Gap in American Politics

 I recently spoke to Michael Bluhm at The Signal about the uniquely pro-Democratic skew of millennial and Gen-Z voters, and how this trend fits within larger demographic changes within the American population. An edited transcript of our conversation is now available.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: The Debt Ceiling Crisis Can Be Averted Only by Muddling Through

As the federal government draws closer every day to an unprecedented crisis over the debt ceiling, it's become apparent that averting default will require Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy to choose a messy solution over the allure of a symbolic partisan victory, as I argue today in my latest piece for Bloomberg Opinion. (The article is also available via the Washington Post.)

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Republicans Blame the Schools For the Liberalism of the Young

The efforts of Republican politicians and conservative leaders to restrict material deemed ideologically unacceptable from public schools and libraries have attracted a great deal of attention recently. As I explain for Bloomberg Opinion, the idea that these institutions have become machines of liberal indoctrination allows conservatives to explain why younger Americans are mostly left-of-center politically without holding their own movement responsible for its lack of appeal among rising generations. This piece is also available via the Washington Post.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: The Parties Are Still Polarized on Economics Even Though the Class Divide Is Fading

 It used to be easy to explain the relationship between the voting constituency of each party and the positions its politicians took in policy debates: Democrats are the party of the poor and favor big, redistributive government, while Republicans are the party of the rich and favor small, business-friendly government. But even though economic class is no longer a reliable guide to how Americans vote, party leaders remain committed to very different policy goals and visions—foreshadowing a bitter debate over the federal budget this year, as I explain today in Bloomberg Opinion. (The piece is also available via the Washington Post.)

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Whatever Happened to the New Democrats?

 Simon Rosenberg, one of the most prominent operators within the New Democrats of the 1980s and 1990s, has announced the closing of his organization NDN (formerly the New Democrat Network) and proclaimed the end of the era of the New Democrats. I wrote today about what the New Dems' rise and fall can tell us about how parties adapt to changing political times for Bloomberg Opinion (reprinted by the Washington Post).

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Why the Two Parties Talk So Differently About Education

 In today's piece for Bloomberg Opinion, I explain why Democrats tend to view education as an economic issue, while Republicans have come to treat it as a cultural issue. This difference between the parties reflects two distinct perceptions of class conflict in America: is education a way for the economically disadvantaged to find opportunity, or is it a system by which cultural elites impose their values on regular Americans? The column is also available in the Washington Post.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Biden's Had Success with Congress, But He's No LBJ

Some Democrats, justifiably happy with the legislative productivity of the 2021–2022 session of Congress, have gotten a little carried away lately when describing its supposed transformational importance. In today's column for Bloomberg Opinion, I draw on data showing that the last Congress was not historically exceptional in its lawmaking acoomplishments, and suggest that Biden's perceived achievements were made possible by the previous success of Barack Obama in enacting major health care reform in 2010. The piece is also available on the Washington Post site.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Why Are Democrats More United? The Voters Did It

The Democratic Party is more unified these days than it was in the past—and is certainly less openly divided than the Republicans, who just took five days to select a Speaker of the House. The main reason for this newfound internal harmony is the evolving behavior of the American electorate: the moderate/conservative dissident bloc of Democrats representing rural constituencies has mostly disappeared from office, replaced by more ideologically orthodox Democrats from the suburbs. This change has made party leaders' job easier and has eased the chronic factionalism that is now more evident on the Republican side of the aisle, as I explain further in my latest column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Another "Year of the Woman" in the 2022 Elections

The number of women running for Congress and governor spiked upward in 2018 among Democrats, and then rose again in 2020 within both parties as Republican leaders responded by recruiting their own slate of female candidates. It remains high in 2022, even though the original cause of this surge—the presidency of Donald Trump—no longer exists. For Bloomberg Opinion this week, I consider whether an enduring rise in the number of office-seeking women will turn out to be an important legacy of Trump's election, and identify two reasons why it may well rise even higher in 2024.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Why the Democrats' Policy Accomplishments Don't Necessarily Help Them Win This Year

In my newest piece for Bloomberg Opinion, I explain that Democrats should not expect to be rewarded by voters for their recent policy accomplishments this fall, as voters have historically turned against the ruling party in midterm elections regardless of—and sometimes because of—its legislative productivity. For Joe Biden, the political payoff from policy changes like the climate change bill and the student debt forgiveness plan is more likely to arrive when he asks his fellow Democrats to nominate him a second time in 2024.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: How Dr. Fauci Became a Polarizing Figure

In my latest piece for Bloomberg Opinion, I explore how the retiring Anthony Fauci—who started off as a universally admired voice in the early weeks of the COVID pandemic—became a partisan figure in American politics. The root of this evolution lies in the two parties' differing attitudes towards experts who draw on their credentials to assert authority over policymaking; Democrats are inclined to defer to "the science," while Republicans are likely to rebel against what they see as liberalism in the guise of objectivity.

The Democrats Don't Appear Doomed, Unless Losing Half the Time Means Doom

Since Ronald Reagan's first victory in 1980, the United States has held 11 presidential elections and 10 congressional midterms. In total, over those 21 federal contests:

• Republicans have won the presidency 6 times and Democrats 5 times.

• Democrats have won a majority in the House of Representatives 11 times and Republicans 10 times.

• Republicans have won a majority in the Senate 11 times and Democrats 10 times. (This counts the post-2000 Senate as having a Democratic majority, though Republicans controlled it for several months in early 2001.)

• Democrats have achieved unified control of the presidency and Congress after 3 elections: 1992, 2008, and 2020. Republicans have also achieved unified control after 3 elections: 2002, 2004, and 2016 (plus those few months in 2001). The remaining 15 elections produced divided party government in one permutation or another.

These numbers form a picture of consistent, and fairly remarkable, long-term parity between the parties, reinforced by the narrow margins by which most recent presidential and congressional elections have been decided at the national level. The record of the past 40 years suggests that Democrats and Republicans can each expect to achieve unified control of the presidency and Congress in about one out of every seven elections, most likely holding a cross-branch governing majority for just two years at a stretch before the next election re-establishes the condition of divided government—which has been the norm of our age.

This might seem to be a boringly self-evident set of observations. And yet, those of us who have actually spent most of this period experiencing each election in sequence while immersed in associated debates and media coverage have been subjected to a constant series of arguments, theories, and analyses that claim the existence or imminent appearance of an enduring advantage for one party or the other. Promoting hypotheses of "electoral locks" over particular institutions and repeatedly proclaiming nascent realignments or even revolutions, some of the most distinguished political analysts of the era have repeatedly been tempted to assume that the short-term trends of the immediate past will extend into the long-term future. All the while, actual electoral outcomes have continue to rapidly and repetitively bounce back and forth between Democratic and Republican victories at equal rates over decades of history, even while the internal coalitions, policies, strategies, messages, and candidates of both parties have undergone substantial change.

On Friday, the New York Times published a column by liberal journalist Ezra Klein profiling the Democratic political strategist and data analyst David Shor. Shor has attracted a reputation as something of a renegade, though I'd guess that many of his conclusions are quietly shared by a substantial proportion of professional consultants in both parties. His contrarian image stems more from his willingness to publicly argue in front of social and online media's younger, well-educated, ideologically progressive audience that the left-wing cultural opinions now ascendant within that audience are likely to weaken Democratic mass appeal among working-class voters if they become popularly associated with the party and its candidates.

We are, of course, currently in what history tells us is a rare and temporary period of unified Democratic rule, likely to end as soon as 2022 given the narrow margins of control in Congress and the losses normally suffered by the president's party in midterm elections. But Klein and Shor are neither congratulating Democrats for achieving an uncommon success nor cheering on the leftward policy shifts that the victories of last November have made possible for their side. Instead, they are looking into the future with terror.

Invoking Shor's analysis, Klein's column repeatedly employs apocalyptic phrases to describe the Democrats' hypothetical fortunes in upcoming elections: "truly frightening," "without any hope," "sleepwalking into catastrophe," "on the edge of an electoral abyss." A "deeply pessimistic" view of the Democrats' position is not unique to Shor, Klein writes, but is widely shared among analysts (including, presumably, himself).

Given the urgency of such language, one might expect Klein and Shor to be forecasting the imminent end of our long era of partisan parity, to be succeeded by a new phase of American politics marked by unobstructed Republican rule. But they don't explicitly argue that Republicans will win national elections at a higher rate in the future than they have in the past, and they certainly don't claim to envision a durable GOP governing majority. Though the results of the statistical model Shor has built to predict every election from now until 2032 are not revealed in detail (ambition, at least, is not in short supply here), the likelihood of Democrats losing unified control next year and facing challenges in winning it back quickly thereafter appears to be a sufficiently dire prospect to provoke dramatic expressions of anticipatory lamentation—even if such an outcome is, by historical standards, tediously unexceptional.

Many of the specific points made by Klein and Shor are sound and even persuasive. The current geographic distribution of the parties' mass coalitions gives the Republicans a structural head start in winning a majority in the electoral college and especially the Senate, though (as the results of 2020 demonstrated) this advantage falls well short of guaranteed perpetual victory. But if lacking unified federal control is plunging into an "abyss," then the Democratic Party has been sunk in that abyss for all but three two-year periods since 1980. Defining the failure to achieve a cross-branch governing majority as a "catastrophe" would suggest that Democrats—and Republicans too, for that matter—are in an electorally catastrophic state 86 percent of the time.

I suspect that's not what Klein really means. Most likely, he simply views the post-Trump Republican Party as sufficiently dangerous to the values he prizes that any impending Republican victory, even just to restore divided government and block the Democrats' legislative progress, represents disaster. Thus, Democratic leaders and their supporters cannot afford to appreciate the rare achievement of their recent electoral success or the policy changes that flow from them, and certainly have no right to adopt a philosophical detachment about the inevitability of frequent alternations of power in an age of evenly-matched national parties. There's a five-alarm fire in the engine room of American democracy, he implies, and the Republicans are pouring fuel on it. Any setback for the Democratic side is ruinous.

Regardless of the validity of that argument, it engages questions that are distinct from merely estimating each party's probability of victory in upcoming electoral contests. And if the nation is indeed in such peril, it doesn't seem realistic to expect Democratic politicians and operatives to solve the problem by adopting a sufficiently powerful set of policies and messages to shut the Republicans out of power until they change their ways, whenever that might be. An age marked by persistently close elections means that the outcome in this or that specific contest can indeed hang on the calculated choices of candidates and campaigns, and Shor has a number of justifiable ideas about which strategies will maximize Democrats' chances of victory. But partisan parity also means that both sides are going to lose sometimes, no matter what they do. If that's catastrophic, than catastrophe is inevitable.

Given the disappointing record of previous attempts to identify nascent partisan trends in one direction or the other, I admit to holding a strong default assumption that this parity will continue until the evidence really starts to build over multiple elections that American politics has entered a different era. There are simply too many moving parts in the parties' coalitions and too many contingent factors influencing electoral outcomes to gain much confidence in foreseeing future developments, and even smart arguments made by smart people drawing on smart data sources can quickly fall apart when the political world changes. If predictions must be made, the safest bet remains that each party will narrowly win roughly half the time, and that divided government will continue to be more frequent than instances of single-party rule. For now, I leave to the judgment of others the question of whether that likely pattern indicates impending doom—for either party, or for the country itself.