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: 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.

Can Republicans Win Back Congress Next Year by Running Against "Cancel Culture"? Sure They Can

There's a popular view of the last few weeks of American politics that goes something like this: Under Joe Biden's leadership, the Democratic Party is not only easing the current national crisis by handing out $1400 checks and distributing COVID vaccines to American citizens, but has also already enacted some of the most ambitious liberal policy change since the Great Society, making Biden a potentially transformational president after just two months in office. And what are Republicans doing while all this historical achievement is going on? Ranting and raving about "cancel culture."

This account isn't necessarily wrong as a simple description of recent events, though it's really too soon to evaluate the long-term importance of a American Rescue Plan Act that has been law for less than a week. As I recently remarked to Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, the lack of a sustained conservative attack on the bill eased the political pressure on moderate Democratic members of Congress who might otherwise have worried about its $1.9 trillion cost: "the case against Democrats [right now] is being made on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, not the debt." Leading conservative media voices and prominent Republican politicians alike have rallied to the defense of these pop-culture figures and other symbols of traditional Americana supposedly in danger of permanent suppression by the censorious left; Rep. Jim Jordan argued last month that "cancel culture . . . is the number one issue for the country to address today."

But the cancel-culture preoccupation isn't necessarily a mistake for Republicans—at least if their main objective is electoral success, not substantive influence. Polls have consistently shown that Biden's COVID response efforts gain wider popular approval than any other major policy or presidential quality. Meanwhile, as Harry Enten of CNN recently pointed out, the assertion that political correctness has "gone too far" receives broader agreement from the American public than the Republican Party's positions on many other political issues. Rather than trying to convince voters that legislation containing immediate four-figure cash payments for everyone in their family is actually a bad idea, it's strategically easier to simply move the partisan battle to more favorable terrain.

Democrats are hoping that the Republican politicians who opposed the Rescue Plan will be punished at the polls next year. But history suggests that voting in favor of an unpopular bill is more likely to inspire a backlash than voting against a popular bill—especially one that passed anyway. Members of congressional majorities often hope to be rewarded by the public for enacting the policies they like, but anger tends to be a much stronger political motivator than gratitude. And the margins of control in the House and Senate are so narrow that even a mostly content electorate that was not particularly outraged by the supposed extermination of certain favorite childhood possessions could still easily hand power back to the GOP in 2022.

The Republican pivot to "cancel culture" outrage may not matter much for the party's immediate electoral fortunes, and might even be a better strategic option for a midterm message than the alternatives. But it's much more noteworthy as a marker of what GOP sees itself as standing for these days. Since Obama's second term, Republicans have increasingly retreated from offering specific alternatives to Democratic domestic policies, and have invested much more energy in emphasizing symbolic cultural differences between the left and the right. Whether or not this shift influences the outcome of any particular election, it has very significant implications for the manner in which both parties govern when it is their turn to lead the country.

Why So Many Conservatives Believe the 2020 Election Was Stolen

It was easy to predict before the 2020 election that Donald Trump would never personally acknowledge that he lost fairly, if indeed he were to lose. This expectation was apparent enough from any casual observation of Trump's behavior over his entire career in public life. Trump had even made accusations of widespread illegal voting in 2016, immediately after his surprising electoral success, so there was little reason to wonder whether he would dismiss the validity of any contest in which he was actually defeated.

What's become clear in the weeks following the vote is that this view is spreading widely within the Republican Party. A Monmouth University poll found that 77 percent of Trump supporters believed that Joe Biden's victory was due to fraud. Lawsuits and protests in multiple states have sought to overturn the results of the election or visit revenge on the officials responsible for counting the votes. Attuned to the winds blowing within their party, most Republican members of Congress either openly deny that Biden is the rightful president-elect or simply refuse to explicitly acknowledge Trump's defeat, a play-it-coy strategy that is reminiscent of many Republican elected officials' treatment of the "birther" conspiracy theory during the Obama administration.

In a provocative recent piece, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative critic of Trump, confirmed the popularity of the stolen-election theory on the American right—even among those whom he describes as "people I would not have expected to embrace it." Searching for explanations for this development, he not only lays responsibility on Trump's own claims and those of the president's vocal allies in the conservative media, but also describes a pre-existing skepticism of bureaucratic, academic, and journalistic institutions fueled by the underrepresentation of conservatives within their ranks. This perceived exclusion, Douthat argues, naturally encourages an anti-authority mentality on the right that easily leads to a search for alternative forms of knowledge—or "knowledge"—fulfilling a psychological demand for challenging the official accounts of emotionally unwelcome events. In other words, the very insistence of the "liberal media" and "liberal experts" that Trump was unambiguously defeated in a fair election is breeding a kind of reflexive resistance to the idea among those who distrust these traditional sources of information.

The dynamic that Douthat describes is likely an important part of the story. But there's another reason for the appeal of claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump that draws a bit more on conservatives' own long-held working theories of electoral politics.

The landslide victories of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s convinced many conservatives that there was no tradeoff between ideological purity and popular success—to the contrary, that an unambiguous embrace of the conservative cause brought reliable electoral reward. Subsequent Republican losses in presidential elections have often been explained away as cases when the party was rejected by the electorate after straying from its true ideological path, thereby reducing the participatory enthusiasm of the Republican base while causing other voters to lose respect for the GOP's wavering devotion to its own supposed principles. This view cites George H. W. Bush's loss in 1992 after violating the "no-new-taxes" pledge that he was elected on four years before; the Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 after the George W. Bush administration deviated from small-government doctrine on domestic policy; and the back-to-back defeats of John McCain and Mitt Romney, both dismissed in retrospect as imperfectly loyal standard-bearers for the conservative movement.

Had Trump also lost in 2016, conservatives could have easily explained his defeat without revising this theory; simply pointing in the direction of Trump's politically inconsistent personal history and various rhetorical heterodoxies during the campaign would have allowed them to claim that he, too, failed because he wasn't a faithful enough conservative. But once elected, Trump began to preside over a strongly ideological administration that quickly and enduringly achieved both the committed support of leading conservative media figures and a remarkable, arguably unmatched degree of mobilized passion within the Republican popular base. If Republican presidential candidates only lose when they turn their back on conservatism and disappoint their own party's grassroots supporters, Trump's presidency seemed like it was custom-built to avoid such a fate.

On top of this, the belief that voter fraud is a serious problem in American elections, and that it is perpetrated in particular by liberal Democrats in big cities, has long been prevalent among conservatives. For years before the 2020 election, this claim has been used to justify the passage of voter ID laws and other restrictive measures by Republican-controlled state legislatures despite the absence of hard evidence substantiating it.

Even without Trump's own accusations further stirring the pot, then, the situation was ripe in 2020 for many conservatives to believe that the only way the president could lose would be through a fraudulent election, and that Democrats had both the means and the inclination to commit such fraud. The narrow popular margins in pivotal states, the record amount of mail-in voting, the late reporting of urban vote piles, and the victory of an opponent (Biden) whom few conservatives view as a particularly wily or charismatic adversary all serve as additional fodder for this conspiratorial thinking, but it would probably have spread after a loss of any size or scope. Rather than revisit decades of assumptions about the administration of, and dynamics of vote choice in, American elections, it is psychologically easier to simply conclude that any defeat of a conservative popular hero must have been rigged by unscrupulous liberals.

Partisans on both sides are susceptible to conspiracy theories in the wake of political disappointment; claims of biased voting machines circulated for a time among Democratic supporters in the wake of George W. Bush's 2004 re-election, for example. But most Democrats subscribe to foundational assumptions that, though they may also be factually incorrect at times, allow for the possibility of electoral defeat that is at least legally—if perhaps not morally—legitimate. Rather than assert outright theft, they more commonly accuse Republicans of cynically exploiting popular prejudices or riding waves of corporate cash to victory, or blame their own side's candidates and advisors for blowing the race through strategic incompetence. (Even the 2020 results, by no means a total failure for Democrats, have inspired plenty of internal recriminations.) Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to assume that a valid Republican defeat must be the electorate's punishment for the sin of ideological impurity. If Trump gave the American public the steadfast conservatism it supposedly craves, it's emotionally satisfying for them to conclude that maybe the voters didn't actually intend to end his presidency after all.

Solving the COVID Crisis Requires Bipartisanship, But the Modern GOP Isn't Built for It

American politics is famously polarized these days, but it's hard to envision any solution to the COVID pandemic and associated economic crisis that doesn't require a lot of bipartisan agreement. Democratic and Republican officeholders need to cooperate in order to enact economic aid legislation and other measures designed to ameliorate the effects of the outbreak. Supporters of both parties need to respect the authority of state and local officials to impose restrictions on public gatherings in order to slow the spread of the virus. And the future expiration of these stay-at-home orders will not produce an economic rebound unless Democrats as well as Republicans feel safe enough to resume their normal consumption activities.

As my political science colleague Frances Lee points out in Insecure Majorities, her excellent book on the modern Congress, breakdowns in bipartisanship often benefit the party out of power, by denying the ruling side the policy achievements and broad popular legitimacy that it would gain from productive cooperation. Tamping down partisan divisions in order to focus on fighting the virus and helping those affected by the deteriorating economy thus especially serves the interest of the Republican Party, the current holder of the presidency. November's election will serve as an unavoidable referendum on President Trump, and citizens' perceptions of his performance in handling the COVID crisis will not only influence the outcome of the presidential race but will extend to congressional and even state-level contests as well.

Under the current circumstances, then, we might expect an incumbent president to pursue a strategy of staying above the partisan fray, reassuring Americans of all political preferences that he was committed to protecting both their health and their wealth from the current threats while finding some common ground with the leaders of the opposition. But Trump's instincts—especially in moments of potential vulnerability—compel him to attack his perceived enemies and ratchet up the general level of conflict. He has even suggested at times that he will condition federal aid to states and localities on the amount of deference he receives from their elected officials. There has been no apparent attempt by his administration to build credibility with the public outside the 45 percent or so of Americans who already like and trust the president.

Trump's personality is what it is. But his combative style is shared by many of his partisan allies. Other major elements of the Republican party network, such as conservative interest groups and the conservative media universe, are increasingly promoting Trump's position that the threat of the coronavirus is exaggerated and that prevailing social distancing restrictions are excessive. Familiar Republican targets—not only Democratic politicians but also scientific experts and the mainstream media—are under fresh attack from an American right that has become suddenly anxious about the president's chances of re-election during conditions of national economic catastrophe.

The contemporary Republican Party has been built to wage ideological and partisan conflict more than to manage the government or solve specific social problems. So perhaps it shouldn't be shocking that an array of subjects, from what medical treatment might help COVID patients to how important it is to take measures protecting the lives of the elderly, have been drawn into the perpetual political wars. But leading conservative figures like Trump, Sean Hannity, and the Heritage Foundation will find it much easier to persuade existing supporters to take their side in a fight with "liberal" scientists, journalists, and public safety authorities than to win over the American public as a whole.

Republicans need a party-wide reset of priorities. There has seldom been a time in recent political history when daily partisan point-scoring has been rendered more irrelevant. The general election is far enough away that good policy is good politics: the best way for the ruling party to serve its own electoral interests is to work as hard as possible over the next seven months to render COVID manageable and prevent economic freefall. The widespread public confidence that will be necessary for "normal life" to resume simply can't be jawboned back into existence via daily press conferences, radio broadcasts, or Fox News monologues. If Republicans lose the battle with the coronavirus, they won't have much of a chance to win the fight against liberalism.

Honest Graft on the Factually! Podcast

On the latest episode of the Factually! podcast, I chat with host Adam Conover about American political parties, voters, polarization, health care, and why Sean Hannity scares more politicians than Chris Hayes. It was a fun, wide-ranging conversation and you can listen to it here or via the usual podcast apps.

Honest Graft in the Washington Post: Why Trump Didn't Get His Wall

Today in the Washington Post, I explain why the Republican-controlled Congress of 2017–2018 didn't fund Trump's border wall when they had the chance, and why Republicans are better off keeping immigration as an issue than trying to implement their favored policy solutions.

Ten Years Later, the Democrats Are Still the Party of Obama

In the wake of a "wave" election, it's always more fashionable to emphasize change over continuity. Despite plenty of talk these days about electoral realignments, resurgent socialism, and the political coming-of-age of a potentially transformational millennial generation, however, neither of the two parties looks all that much different now than it did before November 6—even if the national balance of power between them has shifted. To the extent that the 2018 campaign brought internal change to either side, it has mainly served to reinforce the existing nature of each party—and to render the parties even more dissimilar from each other.

A few years ago, in the aftermath of Bernie Sanders's presidential candidacy, I expressed skepticism that the Sanders brand of politics represented a likely future path for the Democratic Party. While Sanders himself mounted a more successful challenge to Hillary Clinton than many analysts had initially expected, his disinclination to emphasize policy issues outside his core agenda of economic redistribution—and, relatedly, his difficulty in making greater inroads within several key party constituencies—ultimately limited his appeal. Sanders was also ill-positioned to consolidate influence within the structure of the Democratic organizational network after the 2016 nomination race in order to reorient the party toward his own priorities over the long term. Barack Obama had become the face of the Democratic Party during the preceding eight years, and I suggested that future Democrats would likely continue to follow his political approach even as Obama himself prepared to leave public office.

Now, a full decade after Obama's first election and nearly two years after his presidency ended, Obama-style politics remains alive and well. Indeed, the Democratic Party continues to be molded in Obama's image even though he no longer serves as its official leader. The candidates who led the Democratic electoral resurgence in 2018 collectively represent a new cohort of mini-Obamas, reflecting the enduring influence of his strategy and style in a number of specific respects:


1. The personification of "change." Obama's decision in late 2006 to seek the presidency after less than two years in the Senate was viewed by contemporary observers as a very bold, if not risky, move. Conventional wisdom suggested that voters might deem Obama unprepared for the job, or scoff at his lack of legislative accomplishments. Instead, Obama turned his inexperience into a political strength in his races against both Hillary Clinton (in the Democratic primaries) and John McCain (in the general election), separating himself from an unpopular class of veteran politicians while promising to offer a different, more hopeful future. His personal biography—relative youth, recent arrival on the national scene, absence from the partisan wars of the previous years—thus reinforced his central campaign message in an unusually effective manner.

Many of the successful Democratic candidates in 2018 also credibly, and potently, positioned themselves as political outsiders opposing "career politicians" or "a broken Washington." Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the newly-elected Democrats in the House of Representatives lack previous experience in elective office—including 80 percent of those who captured seats previously held by Republican members. Like Obama in 2008, this Democratic freshman class is also unusually young, with 14 members under the age of 40 and a median age of just 45.


2. Acting liberal, but not talking liberal. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama did not openly distance himself from, or pick fights with, the left wing of his party, and he generally took firmly liberal positions on major policy issues. At the same time, however, he consistently declined to portray himself as guided by a comprehensive ideological value system. While Democrats in safe party seats have become more likely over the past few years to identify themselves as "liberals" or "progressives" and to push for ambitious left-wing initiatives like single-payer health insurance, Democrats in competitive races mostly followed the Obama playbook in 2018 by running on specific proposals that would represent incremental left-of-center shifts—or even by defending the policy status quo against Republican-imposed rightward changes—instead of offering a more transformational vision.


3. A party of the metropolitan North, not the rural South. Though it had been in motion for a full half-century, the pro-Republican realignment of the South further accelerated during the Obama presidency. The mobilization of anti-Obama backlash in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections wiped out most of the remaining moderate Democratic officeholders in the South (as well as the rural Midwest and West). Despite an otherwise favorable electoral climate, Democrats mostly failed to make up this lost ground in 2018, and even suffered further defeats in the Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota Senate races, plus two House seats in outstate Minnesota. The most promising geographic terrain for the post-Obama party to make countervailing gains is now clearly located in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas, home to many highly-educated voters who have been drifting away from the GOP since the 1990s but who are especially alienated by Trumpism.


4. Demographic diversity. It's important to remember how rare it was in the pre-Obama era for non-white politicians to be elected, or even to run competitively, in majority-white constituencies. Obama himself was only the fourth African-American since the end of Reconstruction to win a statewide election for senator or governor  when he was elected to the Senate from Illinois in 2004, and there was considerable skepticism in many corners that a minority candidate could win the presidency up until the very day of the 2008 election. But the number and geographic reach of non-white nominees has continued to rise in subsequent years, and the 2018 contests produced an abrupt spike in the number of successful minority candidates. Democrats of color newly elected to the House from majority- or plurality-white districts include Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, Antonio Delgado of New York, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Lauren Underwood of Illinois, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Sharice Davids of Kansas, Lucy McBath of Georgia, Colin Allred of Texas, Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico, and Joe Neguse of Colorado, while Andrew Gillum of Florida and Stacey Abrams of Georgia ran near-miss campaigns for governor.

It seems quite apparent that working to increase the demographic diversity of elected representatives has become a priority for many Democratic activists and voters across racial, religious, and gender lines in the post-Obama era. This year also produced a record number of female candidates for office on the Democratic side, representing a sharp popular backlash to Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the next session of Congress, white men will constitute less than 40 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House for the first time in history—but will remain about 90 percent of the Republican conference.


5. Health care, health care, health care. More than eight years after it was enacted, Obama's signature legislative achievement is still a highly salient issue in American politics. But while Democrats found themselves on the political defensive over the Affordable Care Act in the years after its passage, the unpopular Republican attempts to roll back the ACA's provisions once Trump took office fundamentally reshaped the partisan dynamics. The Wesleyan Media Project found that while Republican candidates were much more likely than Democrats to mention health care in their advertising in every election between 2010 and 2016, in 2018 it was Democrats who couldn't stop talking about the issue—invoking it in more than 50 percent of all television spots. Even with Obama long departed from the White House, Obamacare remains an extremely hot electoral topic.


There are other ways in which Obama's legacy continues to shape the Democratic Party—for example, a number of newly-elected congressional Democrats are Obama administration or campaign alumni, including Kim, Underwood, Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and Deb Haaland of New Mexico. In general, the changes evident on the Democratic side in the Trump era have brought the party even more in line with the politics of its most recent president than it was when he first ascended to the White House. But as the 2020 campaign begins to stir, the durability of Obama's brand of Democratic politics will soon face yet another historical test. Will Democratic voters choose another Obama-esque figure? Or, perhaps, will they signal their support for their ex-president by nominating his own former second-in-command?

In the Democratic Party, Even "Anti-Politicians" Tout Policy Credentials

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the large congressional freshman classes elected in the Republican midterm landslides of 1994 and 2010 was the sizable proportion of new members in both years who had never before held elective office. These "citizen legislators" effectively harnessed longstanding public suspicion of Washington and temporary time-for-a-change popular sentiment to cast themselves as untainted outsiders rather than professional politicians, successfully jumping directly to Congress without climbing the traditional career ladder via town councils and state legislatures.

On the Democratic side, candidates have historically been less likely to adopt the persona of the insurgent outsider, and Democratic organizations have normally preferred to recruit and reward candidates for Congress who have previously served as elected officials. (From the party's point of view, potential congressional nominees who have already attained positive name recognition among voters, who have built extensive fundraising networks, and who can boast a successful track record in managing political campaigns have normally been considered the safest bets to perform well in general elections.) Thus even the national Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 did not produce freshman classes packed with self-styled "anti-politicians" who had won their seats by advertising their status as electoral newcomers.

This year, however, many of the Democratic nominees in competitive districts lack previous elective experience—a pattern that could foreshadow a more reformist House if the 2018 elections return the Democrats to power. But these new Democratic "amateurs" are still not exactly the mirror images of their Republican counterparts. As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report recently wrote after interviewing twelve Democratic challengers in pivotal House districts:

Only four of the 12 hold elective office or have ever run for office. Most of the others, however, are policy veterans. Some worked in the Obama White House or other branches of the federal government during the Obama era. Others worked as advocates in their states/districts on issues ranging from voting rights to child advocacy to housing issues. In other words, they aren’t your local dentists or lawyers or business owners who suddenly got "fed up" or "activated" to service. Their lives have long been defined by activism of one sort or another.

Walter doesn't name the specific subjects of her interviews, but it's not hard to identify candidates who fit this description. Here are a few examples of Democratic House candidates who have never held elective office but have served in government or as policy activists, all from competitive seats that the Cook Report currently classifies as "Tossup" or "Lean Republican/Democratic" in the coming election:

Katie Hill (California 25): Anti-homelessness non-profit organization executive

Lauren Baer (Florida 18): Former State Department staffer

Lauren Underwood (Illinois 14): Former Heath and Human Services Department staffer

Cindy Axne (Iowa 3): Former state employee and local education activist

Elissa Slotkin (Michigan 8): Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense, CIA analyst, and White House national security staffer

Susie Lee (Nevada 3): Education non-profit organization executive

Andy Kim (New Jersey 3): Former White House National Security Council member and State Department staffer

Tom Malinowski (New Jersey 7): Former Assistant Secretary of State and White House National Security Council member

Leslie Cockburn (Virginia 5): Journalist, author, and environmental organizations board member

Abigail Spanberger (Virginia 7): Former CIA operations officer

It appears that even non-traditional congressional candidates get ahead in the Democratic Party by promoting themselves as holding relevant political or governmental experience, even if it's not specifically elective experience. Voters in Republican primaries chiefly demand ideological qualifications, but voters in Democratic primaries also value policy expertise—a natural asymmetry given that Democratic constituencies have a much greater perceived interest in effective government action. (Recall that in the liberal fantasyland of the West Wing TV show, the Democratic president was a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor who also spoke four languages and was an excellent chess player with a mind for trivia.)

Even the non-"career politician" bloc among future House Democrats is therefore likely to have less of a purist, insurgent character than was displayed by the aggressively anti-establishment Republican freshmen of 1994 and 2010. At the same time, the first order of business for newly-elected Democratic members after the November election will be a leadership vote that could well result in a shakeup deposing one or more of the current regime. So while they won't have come to Washington to attack government itself, this potential new generation of first-time legislators may still be in a position to bring immediate change to Capitol Hill.

Democrats Don't Need Unity to Win Elections: New Op-Ed in the New York Times

In every election year that I can remember, media pundits have spent a lot of time worrying (or crowing) that the Democratic Party is sabotaging its chances of victory. And, of course, 2018 is no different. As Matt Grossmann and I write today in the New York Times, Democratic disunity isn't an electoral disadvantage—though the developments of 2018 point toward serious future internal fights over which policy issues should receive top priority once the party regains power in 2020 or beyond.

What We Can Learn From the Demise of Trump's Infrastructure Plan

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed what had already been apparent for months: Congress is not going to enact infrastructure legislation this year. In its early weeks, Trump treated infrastructure investment as a major goal of his presidency; as recently as January's State of the Union address, it served as one of the primary elements of his proposed legislative agenda. But the details of the plan remained vague, enthusiasm among congressional Republicans was palpably limited, and periodic attempts by the White House to talk up the issue always seemed to be derailed by unrelated distractions of its own making.

Even in a conventional administration, "presidential initiative hits dead end in Congress" is hardly an unusual story. But the death of the infrastructure proposal also tells us something about the current state not only of the Trump presidency, but of the wider Republican Party.

Most national political leaders, most of the time, have historically operated under the assumption that they will be rewarded by the electorate for delivering widely popular policies and benefits; in the pithy words of Bill O'Reilly, voters are thought to "want stuff." This inclination tends to provide a brake on ideological extremity, encouraging members of the majority party to resolve their internal differences in order to amass a collective record of productivity and accomplishment. The ability to claim credit for working the system to provide funding for projects in their home states and districts was once seen as a significant advantage for incumbents running for reelection—and even as an explanation for the structure of Congress itself. Previous presidents have likewise habitually advanced policy priorities that were popular with average voters—from Bill Clinton's crime bill and welfare reform to George W. Bush's prescription drug benefits and public education funding—even if they departed at times from party orthodoxy.

But today's ideologically-oriented Republican Party increasingly rejects this logic. Rank-and-file Republicans, increasingly afraid (with good reason) of primary challenges from the right, are reluctant to support centrist or bipartisan legislation regardless of its overall popularity. Legislative leaders, who normally concern themselves with protecting the party's majority by playing to key voters in competitive seats, must now also keep a worried eye on their own right flank. The Senate majority leader has been cast as a sellout to conservatism by members of his own party in several Republican primaries this year, while the speaker of the House is departing from Congress rather than endanger future political ambitions by risking his reputation for ideological fidelity.

The president has found it politically useful to sell himself in public as a get-it-done Mr. Fix-It rather than a conservative thinker—and, indeed, media coverage during the 2016 campaign mostly adopted Trump's own framing of himself as a maverick outsider dedicated to "making deals" rather than upholding philosophical principles. But Trump hasn't placed much emphasis on backing up such pronouncements with action once in office, instead amassing a strongly conservative record in both personnel and policy matters.

Failing to pass an infrastructure bill might deprive Trump and congressional Republicans of a political advantage heading into the 2018 midterm elections. Spending more money on infrastructure is much more popular with the American public than Congress's actual priorities this session: cutting taxes on the wealthy and attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Imagine a President Trump who planned to spend the coming summer touring the country, triumphantly demonstrating his patriotic dedication to rebuilding the nation with each well-televised ribbon-cutting ceremony. Other Republicans, too, would have received tangible benefits to offer voters whose disapproval of Trump's personal behavior might have been tempered by his success in demonstrating effectiveness in office—to the endless frustration of Democratic congressional challengers.

Instead, Republicans have made a different choice. Party leaders are desperate to avoid further alienating a skeptical party base that they believe is already dissatisfied by the lack of spending cuts in the March omnibus appropriations bill, and that might treat additional "pork barrel" legislation as an outright ideological betrayal. Most top Republican politicians, including Trump himself, are daily consumers of Fox News and conservative talk radio who worry more about stimulating high turnout among Republican voters than about attracting electoral support from outside the party; as a result, they wish to avoid doing anything that might lead to critical coverage from right-of-center media. Most, Trump presumably excepted, are also themselves committed conservatives whose personal political beliefs would also discourage support for a major federal infrastructure initiative.

The demise of Trump's infrastructure plan thus represents both a revealing window into the current Republican Party and a collective political bet placed by Republican politicians on the smartest strategy for contesting the 2018—and, perhaps, 2020—elections. One notable characteristic of the Trump era is a growing perception that voter support, at least on the right, is best sustained via symbolic appeals rather than policy deliverables. The GOP's adherence to this hypothesis may ultimately risk a fatal backlash led by the rest of the public against a presidency that has so far offered more drama than substantive accomplishment. But it surely holds a natural allure to a president who seems much more inclined to verbal volatility than applied action, and it may prove to be a sufficient way for Republicans to rally their own side in the coming electoral battles with an energized Democratic opposition.

Party Asymmetry in the Trump Era: Op-Ed in the New York Times

Not long ago, I wrote about the lack of a "liberal Tea Party" in the Trump era. In our latest op-ed piece for the New York Times, Matt Grossmann and I delve deeper into this question—and explain why being a member of the anti-Trump "resistance" requires you to keep your weekends free for one protest march after another. As veteran Honest Graft readers will know, this argument draws upon our 2016 book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats.

Why The "Liberal Tea Party" Doesn't Exist (And Why Some People Think It Does)

As we head into the 2018 primary election season, some reporters and pundits have raised the question of whether Democratic nomination contests will turn into activist-fueled ideological purity tests—in other words, a liberal version of the Tea Party movement that has so famously roiled the Republican Party over the past decade. But it's hard to sustain the case that the Democrats are about to undergo a leftward lurch driven by a demanding party base. Conor Lamb, the newest member of the House Democratic caucus, just won a special election in Pennsylvania after running a campaign in which he opposed gun control and pledged not to support Nancy Pelosi for party leader. Last night, the socially conservative, anti-ACA incumbent Dan Lipinski narrowly won renomination from a safely Democratic district in the Chicago area. In the Senate, meanwhile, 17 Democrats recently joined Republicans to support a banking deregulation bill strongly opposed by Elizabeth Warren and other economic liberals in the party. If a partywide leftist purge is indeed imminent, it's quite well-disguised.

Matt Grossmann and I explained in Asymmetric Politics why the Democrats are much less vulnerable to ideological purification campaigns than Republicans are, and we summarized our argument in this piece for Vox Polyarchy. Part of the story is that the American left simply lacks much of the institutional infrastructure that promoted and sustained the Tea Party rebellion on the right, such as powerful ideologically-driven media sources, interest groups, and financial donors. (The number of politically active leftist billionaires is....not large.) But it's also true that many Democratic voters simply don't think of politics in ideological terms or prize doctrinal fidelity over other qualities—such as perceived electability, group identity, or ability to deliver concrete policy achievements—when making their choice of candidate.

So if there isn't much evidence of a "liberal Tea Party," why is anybody talking about it? One reason is that the assumption of party symmetry is deeply entrenched in the minds of many political observers, who expect any trends on one partisan side to inevitably appear in comparable form on the other. Another is the well-documented tendency of media coverage to frame stories in ways that emphasize conflict, or at least the possibility of conflict ("if it bleeds, it leads"); for example, this recent Politico article does its best to hype the existence of a "Democratic civil war" exacerbated by Lamb's victory even though there's nothing in the actual piece that justifies using such hyperbolic language.

A third is that Republicans, facing a poor electoral climate this year, have adopted the talking point that their fortunes will be salvaged by a raft of extremist opponents nominated by far-left Democratic primary electorates. House Speaker Paul Ryan brushed off Lamb's victory last week by claiming that "this is something that you're not going to see repeated, because they didn't have a primary [referring to Lamb's selection by a local Democratic committee to compete in the special election]. They were able to pick a candidate who could run as a conservative."

But there's something else at work here as well. Purist leftism, to the extent it exists in America, is especially concentrated in the circles—metropolitan, well-educated, highly internet-active—in which many media members themselves travel. Based on their own anecdotal experiences, or at least their social media feeds, it's easy for them to start thinking that left-of-center politics is consumed with protests of ideologically unpalatable campus speakers, debates over whether Bruno Mars is guilty of cultural appropriation or whether RuPaul is prejudiced against the transgender community, and endless relitigation of the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders presidential race as a proxy for the direction of the American left as a whole. (In reality, as my research shows, Clinton and Sanders supporters in 2016 were split much more by age, race, and party identification than they were by ideology.)

Put simply, the online left is not representative of the Democratic Party. Visitors to local Democratic caucus or committee meetings in most parts of America will find that the public employees, union officials, trial lawyers, nonprofit association administrators, and African-American church ladies who actually constitute the party's activist backbone are, by and large, neither preoccupied with ideological purity nor in a state of rebellion against its current leadership. And though the election of Donald Trump has surely angered and energized the Democratic base, there's no particular reason to think that anti-Trump sentiment will lead to an internal ideological transformation. 

The scholars Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol, who are studying the citizens—especially the women—newly mobilizing against the Trump-led GOP, report that a strong sense of pragmatism prevails among their subjects. "This is not a leftist Tea Party," they explain. "It is not a Sanders versus Clinton redux [or] Occupy Wall Street-type questioning of liberal democracy . . . [T]he metropolitan advocates to whom the national media turn . . . at times exaggerate the left-progressive focus of the activism underway and overestimate their own importance in coordinating it." Instead, Putnam and Skocpol find a lot of middle-aged suburban professionals moved to act by their horror of Trump and determined to work strategically to oppose him. "At the current pace," they predict, "it seems likely that the pop-up leaders and grassroots groups of 2017 will, by 2019, have repopulated the local layer of the Democratic Party in much of the country."

The logic of Asymmetric Politics doesn't imply that one party is inherently in better shape than the other, but rather that each side has its own distinctive set of problems. The Democratic Party is suffering from a number of contemporary weaknesses, made undeniable by its inability to defeat a deeply flawed Trump candidacy in 2016. But Democrats remain well-positioned to avoid the specific pathologies that have recently plagued the Republican opposition: endless primary challenges to veteran incumbents, Freedom Caucus-style legislative rebellions, the elevation of cable news hosts into positions of power over elected officials. Jettisoning the assumption that one party is simply a mirror image of the other would not sacrifice the balance and objectivity of news media coverage, but it would greatly improve its accuracy.

The GOP Made Trump More Conservative—But Trump's Also Making the GOP More Conservative

The single biggest pearl of Beltway conventional wisdom to suffer irreversible tarnish in 2017 was the notion that Donald Trump stood for an iconoclastic "populism" poised to redefine the dominant governing ideology of the Republican Party. Trump's past support for Democratic candidates and policies, his weak ties to conservative elites in Washington, and his infrequent rhetorical devotion to the American right's familiar themes of limited government, constitutional fealty, individual liberty, and traditionalist sexual ethics convinced many political analysts during the 2016 campaign that he represented a dramatic break from his adopted party's existing ideological legacy. Critics ranging across the political spectrum from National Review to Barack Obama reinforced the dominant news media judgment that Trump was not a regular conservative—and voters ultimately agreed, perceiving Trump as significantly closer to the ideological center than previous Republican presidential nominees.

But the existing Republican Party has exerted a strong gravitational pull on Trump, who seems to lack many personal substantive commitments and who does not command a larger faction of allies within the GOP dedicated to shifting its platform away from standard conservative positions. Indeed, Trump's record in office so far can be fairly described as the most consistently conservative of any president in modern history, as he has proven to be much less inclined than Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, either George Bush, or even Ronald Reagan to pursue centrist or bipartisan initiatives in select policy domains.

And in at least one major area, it's Trump who's pushing other Republicans in a conservative direction rather than vice versa. The extensive attention devoted by the mainstream media to Trump's verbal departures from conservative doctrine on topics like trade, Medicare, and the Iraq War in 2016 somewhat obscured the fact that on his signature issue—immigration—Trump quite conspicuously ran to the ideological right of the rest of the Republican presidential field, to say nothing of the Democratic opposition.

While Candidate Trump's invocations of economic populism and military non-intervention have not often guided the policy positions of President Trump's administration, his commitment to reducing the number of immigrants residing in the United States has only deepened once in office. The Trump campaign mostly emphasized combating illegal immigration via more aggressive internal enforcement and a "big, beautiful wall" across the Mexican border, but the Trump presidency is also pursuing a significant cut in legal immigration rates and proposing reforms to the criteria governing the process of granting authorization to would-be residents. Attempts by congressional Democrats and a few breakaway Republicans to provide "DREAMers" with legal status in exchange for increased border security funds have now foundered in Congress due in large part to newfound presidential demands over the past few weeks that major reductions to lawful immigration also be included in the deal.

To be sure, the Republican Party as a whole has not yet openly embraced Trump's call for slashing legal immigration rates. Even some supporters of the Senate legislation endorsed by Trump are not publicly defending the very provisions in the bill that would implement such a policy, and business interests within the Republican Party network are unlikely to be satisfied (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already expressed its opposition). But the bulk of congressional Republicans, including top leaders in both chambers, have backed the Trump administration's proposal to resolve the DACA issue by rolling it into a larger reform bill that would otherwise shift immigration policy in a more restrictive direction on the legal and illegal fronts alike, while opposing the narrower DREAMers-for-security-dollars swap negotiated by a bipartisan Senate group.

There are political risks to the Trump approach. Previous Republican presidents departed from ideological purity because they also prized racking up legislative achievements and appealing to voters beyond their party base. Trump is making a very different bet—though not necessarily an incorrect one—that holding to a tough line on immigration will either compel Democrats to make further concessions or keep an issue alive that works to his electoral advantage even if he can't (accurately) claim progress in constructing his famous border wall. The pragmatic, deal-making, I-can-fix-it Trump we heard so much about during the 2016 campaign still makes occasional appearances for the benefit of the cameras; only last month this Trump publicly told Congress he'd sign any bipartisan agreement on DACA and "take the heat" from his supporters for doing so. But the Trump who actually governs, the Trump who shot down the bipartisan agreement with which he was then presented in a fusillade of anger, is best understood as the increasingly ideological leader of an increasingly ideological party.

The Asymmetric Politics of Trump's Dreamers Deal

Late last night, Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi triumphantly announced that they had reached an agreement with President Trump over dinner at the White House under which Trump would support legislation shielding the "Dreamers," immigrants brought unlawfully to the U.S. as children, from deportation in exchange for enhanced border security measures (though not Trump's famous "wall"). While there is still considerable confusion about the details of what was and was not explicitly agreed to (confusion stoked in part by members of the Trump administration who probably oppose the deal and are trying to undo it), Trump's willingness to enter a legislative bargain with top Democrats to enact a more liberal immigration policy has predictably taken Washington by surprise.

There will be plenty written in the days and weeks ahead about how this development reflects Trump's own unique personality, unsteady command of policy, and strong feelings of resentment towards Republicans in Congress. Stripping away the individual eccentricities of the current incumbent, however, leaves us with a self-identified conservative Republican president cooperating with congressional Democrats to move domestic policy to the left—which is hardly an unprecedented development. Our Asymmetric Politics framework can explain why Republican presidents seek such agreements, and why Democrats in Congress are also open to them.

One of the most reliable challenges facing Republican leaders is the relative unpopularity of conservative policies among American voters, especially in the domestic sphere. Even many citizens who consider themselves to be conservative Republicans do not support the substantial cuts to public benefits and programs that conservative doctrine prescribes. Despite years of promises, Republicans have so far failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in large part because of worries from members representing swing districts that revoking health insurance from millions of Americans would prompt a serious backlash, and even pro-repeal politicians—Trump included—repeatedly denied that their replacement plans would result in a loss of coverage despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

Recognizing this danger, previous Republican presidents have found signature issues on which to break with their party's ideological orthodoxy by protecting or introducing popular left-leaning policies. George W. Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act and the Medicare Part D prescription drug program; George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, an expanded Clean Air Act, and a raise in the minimum wage; and Ronald Reagan reached bipartisan agreements on immigration, transportation, and Social Security. As Matt Grossmann and I pointed out last month, Trump's record in office up until now has been distinctive for its comparative lack of significant left-of-center policy initiatives, despite ubiquitous media characterizations of Trump as possessing significantly less ideological or partisan fidelity than his Republican predecessors.

Trump knows as well as anyone that symbolic appeals to general anti-immigrant sentiment in the mass public can be electorally powerful, especially in Republican primaries. But he also realizes that a specific policy change subjecting the Dreamers, an especially sympathetic group, to mass deportation would be very unpopular. Though he acquiesced to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other immigration hawks in ordering an end to the DACA program earlier this month, Trump immediately sent signals that he was eager to come to an agreement with Congress to preserve the Dreamers' legal protections.

Some observers find it unusual not only that Trump would be willing to make such a deal, but that Democrats would take him up on it:

Slightly surprised Dems are working w/ Trump--even to advance their own agenda. Their attitude might have been: "Why give him ANY wins?"

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) September 14, 2017

The idea that engaging in blanket opposition to a president's policies, regardless of their inherent merit, is smart politics because it causes voters to become disillusioned with the effectiveness of the incumbent administration was a major premise of Republican strategic behavior during the Obama years. Here again, though, the two parties are not mirror images of each other. Democrats don't like Trump any more than Republicans liked Obama, but they are much more likely to remain open to opportunities for policy-making cooperation than their partisan counterparts were during the previous administration.

The main reason for this, as we explained in Asymmetric Politics, is that the Democratic Party is a social group coalition, not an ideological movement. Democrats correctly perceive their constituents as more interested in achieving real-world policy accomplishments furthering their concrete group interests than in remaining true to abstract ideological doctrines or engaging in obstruction for purely electoral aims. Most Democrats are willing to share credit, even with the detested Trump, if they can successfully find a practical solution to the Dreamers' current legal predicament. They came to Washington to legislate, and will happily do so if they can deliver the policies favored by their own partisan base.

We are, of course, a long way from an actual bill hitting the president's desk, and there are many ways that the current agreement can fall apart. But if Trump maintains the capacity to learn from experience, he would do well to take note of the lesson offered by this week's events. He can be a consistently conservative president, or he can be a legislatively productive president. Maybe he'll wind up being neither. But it's really hard to be both.

What's a President Gotta Do to Be Called a Conservative These Days?

Donald Trump's conservative credentials have been disputed by all sides from the moment that he emerged as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in the summer of 2015. The editors of the National Review denounced him as a "philosophically unmoored political opportunist" in a special anti-Trump issue early last year, while both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama characterized Trump as unfaithful to conservative principles during the 2016 general election. Trump's success in capturing the Republican nomination and then the White House prompted some observant analysts on both the left and the right to conclude that the Republican Party is no longer the party of conservatism and that a realignment of the entire American party system is now underway.

We are now two months past the presidential inauguration—and while there have been a number of surprises and unprecedented acts both large and small, the actual policies and personnel of the Trump administration have emerged with some clarity. What they add up to, at least so far, is as conservative a presidency as any in modern history. Trump has endorsed an orthodox conservative legislative agenda on taxes, regulation, and health care (including a major cut to Medicaid)—and has even apparently pressured Paul Ryan to revise the House health care bill in order to address objections from hard-line conservatives. His budget proposal calls for shifting billions of dollars from domestic discretionary programs to national defense, prompting opposition even from some conservative members of Congress. On foreign policy and immigration, Trump only differs from other Republicans to the extent that he has staked out positions further to their ideological right.

Trump's hiring and appointment record tells a similar story. His cabinet is filled with conservative stalwarts like Jeff Sessions, Tom Price, Ben Carson, and Betsy DeVos. Prior to his selection as Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney helped to depose John Boehner as Speaker of the House because he viewed Boehner as insufficiently devoted to conservatism. Neil Gorsuch, Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, is a Federalist Society-style conservative jurist. Top Trump aides Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are likewise firmly on the right end of the ideological spectrum, and palace-intrigue accounts of the Trump White House indicate that Bannon, Miller, and their allies nearly always prevail in internal disputes.

One reason for the strong right-wing character of the Trump administration is that a party, and even a presidency, is much bigger than one person. The Republican Party is increasingly controlled by ideologically-oriented politicians, activists, and media outlets, and Trump needs to work with, and maintain support from, his fellow partisans in order to govern. During the 2016 campaign, Trump sometimes promised to address policy goals that didn't fit within conservative doctrine—increasing public infrastructure spending, renegotiating trade deals, providing childcare assistance, lowering prescription drug costs—but few other Republicans, in Congress or elsewhere, share these priorities. Declining either to pressure his fellow partisans to modify their views or to build a bipartisan coalition with Democrats, Trump has yet to emphasize any of these issues since taking office.

Another explanation lies with Trump himself. There is little reason to believe that Trump is unshakably devoted to the tenets of conservative political philosophy as a personal value system. But Trump demonstrates two other characteristics that attract him to the pursuit of ambitious conservative policies: (1) a desire to project strength, decisiveness, and success by achieving large-scale—one might say "big-league"—political change; and (2) an eight-year-long resentful preoccupation with Barack Obama that has continued without abatement into the new administration, perhaps suggesting to the current president that any dramatic reversal of a policy supported by his predecessor is by definition a worthy and politically advisable act.

The gap between Trump's own public statements and his administration's actual issue positions is sufficiently large that some people are starting to wonder if Trump even understands the content of the legislation that he has endorsed and is pushing through Congress. Reporters are fanning out to the hamlets and hollows of Middle America to find Trump supporters of modest means who would be disadvantaged by the president's budget and health care proposals. How, wonders the Washington pundit class, can Trump possibly reconcile his populist appeal with his efforts to simultaneously enact a upper-income tax cut and revoke health insurance from millions of less fortunate Americans?

Trump might bet that voters will reward bold policy change for its own sake, regardless of its specific consequences. Or, perhaps, he retains confidence in his ability to successfully sell anything he does to a segment of the electorate that he once claimed was so loyal that it would still support him even if he shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue. It's also quite possible that he will deny responsibility for any unpopular provisions of the policies that he endorses, instructing voters to direct their blame toward Congress, the courts, or the federal bureaucracy.

Trump may be trapped between campaign rhetoric on one side and political realities on the other, but the entire Republican Party is in a similar predicament. The congressional GOP has also been forced to grapple with the challenge of suddenly fulfilling years of breezy promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act (and to replace it with an unspecified better, cheaper alternative) without spurring a popular backlash that could endanger its control of the legislative branch in next year's midterm elections. Today's health care debate is merely one example of a larger political problem that Republican leaders have faced for the better part of a century. Perennial conservative pledges to implement significant reductions in the scope of federal power are often frustrated by the inconvenient complication that even voters who say they don't like the government do like most of the specific things that the government actually does.

Trump the candidate was shrewd enough to recognize this fact, which is why he committed himself to maintaining current Social Security and Medicare spending levels while guaranteeing all sorts of other government-provided goodies to his supporters. But Trump the president will need to be even shrewder in order to escape voter anger for seeking to cut popular federal programs and benefits in contravention of his campaign-trail promises. The current occupant of the White House may be a newcomer to the conservative cause, but he has adopted its central ambitions as his own. Now he must reckon with the most formidable obstacles to its success.

How the New Health Care Bill Confirms the Asymmetry of the Parties

Matt Grossmann and I write a fair amount about health care in our book Asymmetric Politics because it's a political issue that represents a particularly effective example of our main thesis: that the Democratic Party is organized as a coalition of social groups while the Republican Party is controlled by an ideological movement. Now that the House Republican leadership has released its health care reform proposal—the long-promised plan to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act—it is clearer than ever that the two parties are fundamentally different in character.

The Democratic Party is composed of a number of discrete social groups, each of which pressures party leaders to support and enact policies designed to ameliorate specific perceived problems faced by the group. For decades, Democratic constituencies have demanded that their party act to provide health care benefits to vulnerable populations—a goal that was addressed by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, the Children's Health Insurance Program in the 1990s, and the Affordable Care Act in 2009–2010.

By and large, Democrats are less concerned about the mechanics by which a policy is implemented than they are about the real-world effects of that policy. For example, the Affordable Care Act did not reflect an overarching ideological vision for the nation's health care sector, but instead was designed to minimize disruption to the existing system (in order to increase its chances of passage through Congress) while extending insurance and other benefits to a greater proportion of the public.

Democratic leaders worked for years to negotiate compromises with a range of powerful stake-holders in order to develop a bill that had a chance of passing into law, in order to achieve at least a degree of policy-making success. Pragmatism, not purity, is the dominant style of governing among Democratic politicians, and even liberals within the party who preferred a single-payer system to the relatively inelegant Obamacare apparatus supported the legislation as a partial victory and the best realistic option available to address the practical concerns of their constituents—rather than torpedoing the entire effort in the name of ideological principle.

The Republicans, as one might observe these days, work differently. The bill that Paul Ryan and his congressional allies have released is not the product of extensive deliberation among interest groups, health care providers, or policy experts. Nor is it designed to achieve a particular outcome with respect to the quantity or quality of coverage available to the public. Instead, the legislation is primarily motivated by the goal of reducing federal involvement in the provision of health care to the extent that is politically possible, repealing the individual mandate (deemed unconstitutionally coercive by contemporary conservative ideology) and imposing significant cuts to the federal Medicaid program.

Much has been made of the fact that the House plans to begin legislative action on the Ryan bill without a score from the Congressional Budget Office estimating its total cost and projected effect on the number of Americans with health insurance. This decision supposedly reflects the desperation felt by Republican leaders to push the bill through the committee process as quickly as possible, as well as an expectation that the CBO's numbers, when they come, will indicate that the bill would cause a sizable rise in the proportion of uninsured citizens.

But the lack of interest in the CBO score also demonstrates what the central purpose of the bill actually is. For Democrats, the point of enacting the ACA was to increase the number of Americans who had health insurance, and any legislation that failed to significantly reduce the ranks of the uninsured was, by that standard, not worth passing. Validation from outside experts that the ACA would indeed fulfill the goal of coverage expansion was thus necessary in order to maintain party support.

Republicans, in contrast, are much more indifferent to the question of what effect their own replacement bill will have on the number of insured Americans. An unfavorable CBO score will be politically damaging, to be sure, but is less likely to influence their evaluation of the inherent merits of the legislation. (Reducing the size of the Medicaid program is fully consistent with the ideological objectives of the party—a feature, not a bug.)

Some liberals have responded to our characterization of the Republican Party as fundamentally ideological by arguing that Republicans don't really adhere to a coherent value system but rather merely do the bidding of wealthy citizens and big corporations. But the Ryan bill can't really be explained on that basis. The rich do benefit by receiving a large tax cut, but if Republicans only cared about that issue they would have chosen to pursue a politically easier path of merely cutting taxes on the wealthy while leaving health care alone. Similarly, it's far from clear that insurance companies are getting much out of the Ryan bill; in fact, the repeal of the individual mandate might well lead to a market "death spiral" that would raise insurance premiums and reduce the number of customers.

But perhaps the strongest current evidence in favor of our argument about the differences between the parties is the unique power of ideologically purist activists and pressure groups within the GOP. In what is surely the biggest political news of the day, one conservative organization after another—the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity—has announced its opposition to the Ryan bill, claiming that it doesn't go far enough in repealing the ACA and reducing the government's role in the provision of health care.

Of course, these groups' criticisms only make it more likely that Ryan's reform bill will fail and the ACA will remain in place, squandering a potential opportunity to move federal health care policy further to the ideological right. As we argue in Asymmetric Politics, it is time to devote more serious attention to the fact that the increasing power of the conservative movement and growing electoral success of the Republican Party over the past few decades have not yet come close to achieving the major retrenchment in domestic policy that the American right has been nominally dedicated to pursuing for most of the last century.

When Republican officeholders repeatedly shrink from risking the popular backlash that would naturally arise from large-scale implementation of their ideological commitments—note how the House GOP has acknowledged that simply repealing the ACA without replacement would invite electoral disaster—the unelected elements of the right respond by attacking them for betraying the Republican Party's conservative principles, threatening their defeat in primary elections and forcing them to make increasingly ambitious future promises that in turn are even more difficult to satisfy in practice. Regardless of where one's own sympathies might lie, observers across the political spectrum should be able to agree that this is not a fertile political environment for the prolific enactment of sound public policy.

The Informational Divide in American Party Politics

Democrats and Republicans not only disagree about which public policies are desirable, but increasingly differ as well over which sources of information are reliable—and, therefore, which facts are really facts. It's hard to understand Donald Trump's rise without noting conservative citizens' increasing rejection of the power of scholarly experts and the "mainstream media" to determine what is and is not true. Today, Matt Grossmann and I write in Inside Higher Ed about "how information became ideological"—and the particular challenge that this trend poses to the traditional role of universities as intellectual authorities seeking to inform policy debates.

Interview With Me About Asymmetric Politics

I recently spoke with Sean Hennessey of the Boston College Office of News & Public Affairs about Asymmetric Politics, my new book with Matt Grossmann about the key differences between the two major parties. An edited transcript of our conversation is posted here on the BC website.

More Guest Blogging This Week at Vox

As the Asymmetric Politics media blitz rolls on, Matt and I will be blogging this week under the kind auspices of Lee Drutman at Polyarchy, part of the Vox website. I'll update this post with links on a daily basis as our pieces appear over there:

Part One (September 12): The Liberal Failure of Political Reform

Part Two (September 13): The Mess of Health Reform: Trying to Achieve Democratic Goals Through Republican Means

Part Three (September 14): Why Primary Elections Scare Republican Politicians More Than Democrats

Part Four (September 15): Why Democrats Have No "Freedom Caucus"