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: 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: What the Freedom Caucus Gets Right About the GOP

The extended process of electing a House speaker last week put Republicans' internal divisions on public display. Democrats and leadership-aligned Republicans had ample opportunity to attack or mock the band of holdouts, many affiliated with the House Freedom Caucus, who prevented Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker until the 15th round of balloting. But for all their grandstanding, the holdouts have a point about how Republicans fail to deliver on their government-cutting promises—which portends more conflict ahead, as I explain in today's column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Trump's Critics Call Him Unelectable. Will Voters Listen?

The disappointing results of the 2022 midterms have awakened concerns among some Republicans about their party's occasional tendency to nominate weak candidates in key races. Some of these party leaders now fear that another Trump nomination in 2024 will drag down their party once again—but as I observe in Bloomberg Opinion today, Republican voters aren't nearly as accustomed as Democrats to accept that a tradeoff exists between electability and other party goals.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Bad Candidates Were Only Part of the GOP's Problem

 The Republican Party's unexpectedly disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections has inspired some finger-pointing at its flawed slate of Senate nominees in key states (and the former president whose endorsement helped these candidates gain nomination). But as I argue in a new piece for Bloomberg Opinion, candidate quality was not the only reason why the GOP underperformed last week. The results are consistent with a larger party image problem that extended beyond a few unappealing candidates.

What a Republican Congressional Majority Might Do: An Interview with The Signal

In an extended interview, I spoke with Graham Vyse of The Signal about what to expect from a hypothetical Republican congressional majority next year. It's likely to be an eventful Congress; as I observed in the interview, "The last time there was both a Democratic House and a Republican president in the United States, the president was impeached twice. The last time there was a Republican House and a Democratic president, the Republican speaker got run out of town by his own party."

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Republicans and Corporate America Split on Culture, Ally on Economics

In today's column for Bloomberg Opinion, I investigate the Republican Party's proclaimed "divorce" from big business. Corporate America and the populist Trump-era GOP have indeed found themselves on opposite sides of the culture war. But they still have much to agree on when it comes to economic policy, so their relationship looks more like a strained marriage than a permanent split.

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: 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.

Some Lessons and Questions After the Kansas Abortion Referendum

1. Since the Roe v. Wade decision, the typical American's position has been "abortion should be legally permitted for some reasons but not others." This remains true even in many conservative-leaning states, like Kansas, where a majority of elected representatives are pro-life.

2. Neither party fully represents this view, but the Dobbs decision has abruptly shifted the terms of political debate from whether abortions should be made modestly harder to get (a somewhat popular position) to whether they should be banned almost entirely (much less popular). This puts Republicans in a riskier position than they were in before Dobbs.

3. Republicans could partially mitigate this risk by moderating their abortion positions. But the trend within the party has instead moved toward greater ideological purity. Not only are there fewer pro-choice Republican candidates than there used to be, but a growing number of pro-life Republicans now oppose carving out exceptions to legal prohibition (e.g. to protect the woman's health) that were once considered standard doctrine within the party.

4. The abortion issue will almost certainly work to the net advantage of Democratic candidates this fall compared to an alternative timeline in which the Dobbs ruling did not occur. Dobbs forces Republicans to defend a less popular position than before, and it also provides an extra motivator for Democrats to turn out in a midterm election when they otherwise might have felt some ambivalence. How much of an advantage, however, is unclear; odds are still against it having a transformative effect on the overall outcome.

5. The overturning of Roe also makes abortion a much bigger issue in state and local politics than it ever was before. We will now start to find out what the effects of this change will be. They, too, are difficult to predict with confidence.

6. By increasing the electoral salience of abortion, an issue on which higher levels of education are associated with more liberal views, Dobbs will probably work to further increase the growing "diploma divide" separating Dem-trending college graduates from GOP-trending non-college whites. The best-educated county in Kansas is Johnson County (suburban Kansas City), where 56 percent of adults hold at least a bachelor's degree. Johnson County voted for George W. Bush in 2004 by 23 points, for John McCain in 2008 by 9 points, and for Mitt Romney in 2012 by 17 points, but was carried by Joe Biden in 2020 with an 8-point margin over Donald Trump. It voted against the pro-life referendum on Tuesday by a margin of 68 percent to 32 percent.

7. After the unusual national focus on politics during the Trump years, it would be reasonable to expect a bit of a collective withdrawal—a "vibe shift," perhaps—as Americans adjusted to the less aggressively newsworthy Biden presidency by spending more of their time and attention on other matters. But the remarkably high turnout rate for the Kansas referendum (held at a normally sleepy time of year for politics) raises the possibility that mass political engagement will remain at elevated levels despite Trump's departure from office. It's another thing to keep an eye on as we head into November.

Why Disney Couldn't Stay Out of the Culture War

In late March, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his fellow Republicans who control the state legislature enacted a law that prohibits “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity" in "kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The bill, dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law by liberal opponents, has attracted substantial national attention over the past few weeks. Given both DeSantis's potential national political ambitions and the prospect of parallel legislation passing in other Republican-governed states, it's likely that this issue won't fade quickly.

Activists on the left have achieved increasing success in persuading major corporations headquartered in red states to publicly oppose conservative legislation in the areas of race, gender, and culture—such as the decision by Delta Air Lines and the Coca-Cola Company to criticize a Republican-enacted law changing voting practices in Georgia after Donald Trump's narrow defeat there in 2020 (the passage of which also resulted in the relocation of the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver). Since the Walt Disney Company is surely the major American corporation best identified with the state of Florida, Disney was destined to become a similar target of pressure once the anti-"Don't Say Gay" effort became a national liberal cause. As a result, the company has found itself in a partisan entanglement that it had very much wished to avoid.

Regardless of where one might personally stand on this issue or any other, it seems natural to expect major corporations to avoid taking sides on controversial political topics—especially those that don't directly affect the financial bottom line. Isn't it just smart business to avoid alienating even one potential customer? And yet the trend of companies weighing in on culture-war issues—and, crucially, on the left side of these issues—is on the rise, even though they have faced threats of reprisal from conservatives for doing so. Disney offers an illuminating case study that demonstrates why this is happening.

Since the locus of conflict here is a law passed in the state of Florida, we might be forgiven for thinking of Disney in this particular case mostly as a theme-park company—albeit a theme-park company that operates the largest single-site employer in the United States. But Disney is really an entertainment conglomerate that, in addition to its famous company-branded tradition of animated features, encompasses ABC and ESPN television, several major film studios (including Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel Studios), and the streaming services Disney+ and Hulu. It makes most of its money not by selling tickets to the Magic Kingdom but by producing and distributing "content," to use the unpoetic term of the age.

The generators of this necessary content reside in an artistic and creative community that is both overwhelmingly liberal on cultural issues and increasingly attuned to day-to-day political developments via social media platforms and other channels of information. Disney needs to care about its reputation among these people, or it risks losing talent—both direct company employees and the outside writers, actors, producers, and directors with which it does business—to its industry competitors. And so any market pressure to avoid publicly opposing measures like DeSantis's law, lest it alienate conservative consumers, inevitably bumps against a different kind of market pressure: to avoid being perceived as unsupportive of the culturally liberal ethos that enjoys general consensus in Hollywood and, increasingly, among well-educated professionals elsewhere.

It's not surprising that Disney has handled this issue with palpable uncertainty and lack of ease. The company initially stayed quiet as the bill advanced through the Florida legislature, declining to join an open letter of opposition signed by 150 other corporations. But when some of its own employees began to protest against Disney's official silence, its CEO responded with an apologetic company-wide email message that called the legislation a "challenge to basic human rights." After DeSantis signed the bill into law, an official Disney statement announced that "our goal as a company is for this bill to be repealed by the legislature or struck down by the courts."

Yet the furious ensuing response from some conservatives confirmed Disney's instinct that the issue presented political risk in both ideological directions. DeSantis mocked the company as "woke Disney" while suggesting that various state-level exemptions and tax breaks that favor its financial interests might be repealed in retaliation—a threat echoed by some of his legislative allies. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute accused Disney of a "campaign to embed left-wing sexual politics into its children's programming" and even suggested that it was a haven for sex criminals. Disney is now a frequent target of criticism from conservative media outlets, which seem to be taking particular delight in ridiculing the company's well-guarded "family-friendly" brand reputation.

The Disney case is not unique. As the culture war continues to rage, corporations, like other major institutions led by well-educated professionals with progressive social sensibilities, will increasingly align with the values of the Democratic left. This development, in turn, is bound to introduce new tensions into the relationship between big business and its traditional political allies in the Republican Party—especially as Republican politicians continue to take a more populist tack in the era of Trump. While it may be good business sense to proclaim that "the customer is always right," corporate leaders are finding out that in politics, "you can't please everybody" is a much more fitting axiom.

There Will Probably Be Presidential Debates in the Future...But It's OK If There Aren't

News broke on Thursday that the Republican National Committee was threatening to require its future presidential nominees to pledge to boycott general election debates organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has produced the debates every four years since it was formed by representatives of both major parties prior to the 1988 election. This threat, conveyed in a letter to the debate commission from RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, is being made amidst a set of demands for changes to the commission's membership and policies (the complete letter is available here). Republican dissatisfaction with the debate organizers has been apparent since at least 2016, and is in some ways a manifestation of the Trump-era party's larger suspicion of political institutions that are not under its direct control.

It's possible that this means there will be no fall debates in 2024 for the first time since the 1972 election. But we're still far from that point—despite some headlines suggesting otherwise—for a number of reasons.

First, the RNC is making demands that, in principle, the debate commission could find a way to satisfy, including an earlier start to the debate schedule, term limits on commission members, and public neutrality of commission members toward the candidates. The commission will be understandably reluctant to look like it's acquiescing to threats from one of the parties; on the other hand, in the end it would rather hold debates than not hold them. Nothing in McDaniel's letter looks like an ultimatum that would be impossible for the commission to address in some form.

Second, the parties lack control over the presidential nominees once they have been formally selected at the national conventions. Party organizations can require all kinds of signed pledges or commitments from candidates, but they lose the ability to enforce them once the nomination is granted. (If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2024, and then decides he wants to attend the fall debates, would he let a previous pledge to the RNC stop him?) Responding to McDaniel, debate commission co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf—himself a former RNC chair—noted that the commission communicates and negotiates directly with the campaigns themselves, not the national parties: "we don't deal with the political parties [and] never have . . . we work only with those candidates for president and vice president who meet the criteria" for participation.

Finally, winning the presidency is the primary purpose of the national party committees, and has been since these committees were formed in the 1800s. Once the national ticket is selected, parties pursue this goal by becoming the loyal agents of their candidates. If participating in a debate boosts the campaign's chance of victory—perhaps the nominee is running behind in the polls and needs an opportunity to shake up the race—it would be entirely out of character, as well as an act of political malpractice, for the party to attempt to deny the candidate such a strategic option or to publicly criticize him or her for taking it.

This post is not intended to be an expression of reassurance. Honest Graft is a long-standing source of skepticism questioning the value of televised debates, swimming against an endless tide of debate-hyping voices in the news media who insist on treating as sacred civic rituals a series of events that have seldom proven edifying or substantively valuable in practice. If no debates occur in 2024 because the RNC, the debate commission, and the Republican nominee all choose inflexibility over compromise, American politics will not suffer. But—for better, or maybe for worse—we're still a long way from that point right now.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2020 Was as Geographically Polarized as 2016, But Biden Did Just a Little Better in the Right Places

The idea of Joe Biden as a depolarizing figure, someone who aimed to transcend rather than exacerbate the nation's political divisions, was both a dominant rhetorical theme of his campaign and a major strategic premise behind his nomination. In particular, Biden was supposed to be uniquely appealing to the type of white, older, modestly-educated, socially traditionalist voter who had wandered away from the Democratic Party sometime between Barack Obama's first victory and Hillary Clinton's last defeat. A candidate who won back a significant share of this electoral bloc while receiving the energized support of the groups alienated by Trumpism—cultural liberals, metropolitan professionals, young people—would be in excellent position to gain the kind of decisive national victory that many polls suggested Biden would achieve.

In the end, that didn't happen. Whatever demographic and stylistic differences distinguished Biden from Clinton or Obama failed to change enough votes to reorder the fundamental electoral constituencies of both major parties. The geographic polarization that has defined 21st century American politics remains fully intact—but a few incremental improvements in Democratic performance turned out to be just strong enough, and well-located enough, to eke out an electoral college majority.

Most states continue to be faithfully Democratic or Republican in presidential elections. By 2016, statewide popular margins had grown to differ with the national popular vote by an average of 20 percentage points, meaning that an election in which the candidates split the national vote 50-50 would produce a typical state margin that was a 60-40 landslide for one side or the other. Biden didn't succeed in healing this particular national divide, as the average state margin remained at 20 percent in 2020:

Below the state level, geographic polarization has been primarily fueled by a widening partisan gap between large metropolitan areas turning deeper blue and rural counties turning brighter red. This divide also remained virtually unchanged between 2016 and 2020. Biden very slightly outperformed Hillary Clinton in the nation's 20 largest metro areas, winning 62 percent of the two-party vote there—the best performance since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he only improved on her 2016 showing in non-metropolitan counties by half a percentage point—33.7% to 33.2%—despite expectations that he would prove to be a much more appealing candidate among the whites without college degrees who dominate most rural electorates. Trump nearly matched his own record rural performance of four years before, winning a greater share of the non-metro vote than even Ronald Reagan had received in his 49-state landslide of 1984:

The main reason why Biden didn't do even better than he did within Top 20 metros was a pro-Trump national shift among non-white voters, especially Hispanics. His biggest single underperformance compared to Clinton in 2016 occurred in metro Miami, but he also lost ground in greater Los Angeles, San Jose/San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Orlando. This trend helped to put Florida and Ohio out of reach for the Democratic ticket, but it was otherwise concentrated in non-competitive states where the party could well afford to lose votes.

In fact, a countervailing rise in Democratic support in 2020 among the voters of metro Atlanta, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Detroit helped Biden narrowly carry four pivotal states that Clinton had lost, while improved Democratic performance in metro Washington, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Boston gave Biden more electoral breathing room than Clinton had had in Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire—all virtually must-wins for a Democratic presidential nominee. So while the overall Democratic vote share in top 20 metro areas only increased very slightly between 2016 and 2020, it was more fortuitously distributed from the perspective of electoral college strategy.

As the second figure above reveals, the biggest aggregate movement toward the Democrats in 2020 occurred within metro areas outside the Top 20. These other 251 metro areas cast somewhat fewer collective votes (41% of the total two-party vote in 2020, compared to 45% for the Top 20 metros). But their lower levels of racial diversity meant that the ongoing pro-Democratic trend among college-educated whites was less likely to be numerically counteracted by racial minorities' movement towards Trump. 

Biden rarely exceeded Clinton's vote share by a dramatic amount in the smaller metros, but he consistently outperformed her by 1–3 percent across the nation (except for a few heavily Hispanic areas in Texas and California). His modest improvement in places like metro Pittsburgh and Harrisburg (Pennsylvania), Grand Rapids and Lansing (Michigan), and Milwaukee and Madison (Wisconsin) turned out to be critical elements of his precarious electoral college majority, and he was also able to carry the single Nebraska electoral vote from the metro Omaha-based 2nd congressional district that, under a plausible alternate scenario, might have given him exactly the number of electors needed to win the presidency.

It's possible that Trump had a unique appeal to certain small-town voters who might be more open to voting Democratic in future elections when he isn't on the ballot. But Democrats' retrospective interpretations of 2020 are more likely to focus on the apparent patterns of defection among urban minorities than the attrition of rural whites, which is a longer-term trend with fewer obvious implementable solutions. The continued decay among less-educated white citizens presents Democratic leaders with serious challenges in building a sustainable national electoral advantage, given this constituency's especially important geographic distribution. But if the culture wars have so alienated these voters that even Scranton Joe can't win them back, Democrats may conclude that, win or lose, the party's future inevitably lies in another direction.