That Grover Norquist Quote Was Wrong Then...and It Just Keeps Getting Wronger

Back in early 2012, influential conservative interest group leader Grover Norquist delivered a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in which he addressed the then-raging Republican presidential nomination contest. "We are not auditioning for Fearless Leader," argued Norquist:

We don't need a president to tell us what direction to go; we know what direction we want to go. . . . The Republicans in the House have passed 24-plus bills that create jobs and opportunity and strip out regulations. We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. . . . [We just need to] pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become the president of the United States . . . [and] to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

It's important to understand the context in which Norquist was speaking. The front-runner for the 2012 Republican nomination was former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who was facing criticism at the time from hard-liners on the right for his previous departures from conservative ideological purity. Norquist was, in effect, giving a campaign speech on Romney's behalf, telling conservative activists that Romney's personal views or past record in office shouldn't trouble them because Paul Ryan and other congressional conservatives would be in charge of policy under a Romney presidency, and Romney would faithfully go along with their sweeping plans to reshape the federal budget and welfare state. (This was before Romney received the Republican presidential nomination and chose Ryan himself as his running mate.)

The Norquist speech was perfectly serviceable as a piece of strategic campaign rhetoric, but it is much less valuable as a characterization of how politics actually works. Unfortunately, the idea that the Republican-led Congress was a humming engine of policy change stymied in its objectives only by Barack Obama's veto pen received rather more credit than it deserved in the ensuing years, with the memorable "enough working digits" quip often quoted to suggest that the election of any Republican president would itself be sufficient to usher in a new conservative policy revolution.

Congressional Republicans from Ryan on down did their part to promote this view, as captured by this Washington Post curtain-raiser published on New Year's Day that portrayed the GOP as counting down the days until Trump formally took office in order to immediately begin the methodical implementation of an ambitious legislative agenda. But today, less than two months after the current session of Congress began and barely one month into Trump's presidency, several major policy items—repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, tax reform, immigration reform, entitlement reform, and so forth—already face an uncertain future on Capitol Hill. Hopes are beginning to dim that the current Congress will indeed produce the bonanza of conservative policy achievements that Norquist envisioned.

So what went wrong?

The first problem with the Norquist quote was its substantial overstatement of the degree to which the congressional Republican Party was indeed a prolific font of policy-making. Congress in the Obama years was in fact quite unproductive in historical terms, and while Ryan in particular jealously guards his reputation as a self-described "policy guy," he prefers to lead by generating piles of "frameworks" and "summaries" rather than bringing specific legislative language up for votes on the House floor.

This approach can be successful at avoiding costly internal party fights and unpleasant trade-offs by effectively sweeping the annoying details and controversial aspects of policy change under the rug, but it has kept many key substantive questions from being resolved and has left the congressional GOP some distance away from the actual enactment of major legislation. Even the "Ryan budget" that Norquist singled out for specific praise in his 2012 speech relied on conveniently underspecified entitlement cuts to make its numbers work, which was hardly an accidental oversight by a party leadership that wishes to avoid politically inconvenient attacks on its long-term vision for Medicare and Medicaid.

Republicans did write and approve ACA repeal legislation that Obama vetoed in early 2016, but that too was a politically-motivated "message bill" intended as a campaign stunt rather than an actual test run for Republican health care policy-making—as confirmed by the fact that the Republican leadership is not planning to re-pass the same bill this year but has instead committed itself to an alternative strategy of "repeal and replace." Indeed, Republicans still don't seem to know what they want to do about health care nearly seven years after the ACA's passage, and increasingly deep divisions within the party are starting to threaten the prospect of fundamental reform surviving the legislative process this spring.

Even if the current Republican Congress were a bit more policy-oriented, however, the Norquist argument would still be deeply flawed as a characterization of how policy change has historically been enacted in the Untied States. There are several good reasons why Congress seldom takes the lead in enacting major legislation without significant presidential involvement. For one thing, some degree of internal disagreement is inevitable even if both congressional chambers are controlled by the same party—and only the president has the standing and capacity to resolve these disputes.

More fundamentally, members of Congress don't want to invest time and energy into developing legislation without the assurance of presidential support and political cover. Who wants to spend six months or more writing a bill, unavoidably casting some tough votes along the way, only to see it vetoed or its most controversial provisions disowned by the president? (Imagine how enthusiastic congressional Democrats would have been about passing the ACA if they thought Obama might blame them for including unpopular provisions like the individual mandate in the bill while taking credit only for the things voters like, such as coverage expansion and insurance regulations.)

Congress doesn't necessarily want the White House to boss it around or micromanage every detail, but presidential leadership in a larger sense is an absolutely necessary condition for effective legislating. And this is where Trump makes the congressional GOP's significant existing problems even worse.

Trump is habitually vague about his actual policy views on the major issues before Congress, from tax reform to health care. In part, this reflects Trump's limited personal familiarity with the substance of issues and (perhaps naive) apparent belief upon his ascension to the presidency that policy problems are easy to solve; his remark yesterday morning that "nobody knew that health care could be so complicated" inspired a mocking response in the media, but probably reflects a sincere realization that he's a bit out of his depth.

But Trump is also instinctively cagey, often demonstrating what seems to be a characteristic wariness of committing to specific policy objectives because of a fundamental fear that he's setting himself up for failure. What we've seen so far of the Trump administration also reveals it to be understaffed and inexperienced, with nobody apparently empowered to speak authoritatively for, or negotiate on behalf of, the president.

The result has been a blizzard of mixed signals. Republicans on the Hill still don't understand whether Trump will propose his own health care, infrastructure, or tax reform plans, what his major objectives are on these issues, what minimum provisions he will or won't accept, and which policies are his top priorities.

Presidential addresses to Congress, like tonight's event, are valuable opportunities for presidents to provide clarity on such matters. Publicly committing to a specific legislative agenda helps to convince Congress that the president is personally invested in its passage—and would thus share in the responsibility for any failure in enactment. Presidential agenda-setting does not guarantee legislative success, of course, but it is almost always a necessary condition for it.

For all of Trump's surface boldness and big talk, he has so far been a curiously risk-averse president when it comes to identifying specific policy objectives. But if Trump expects Congress to do the heavy lifting of policy-making and deliver him one bill after another on a platter, he is likely to wind up with few legislative achievements to show for his time in office. If he really does want to sign a lot of major legislation, a president needs a lot more than just the working digits to hold the pen.

A President Misjudges His Audience

Whenever a major political event occurs or news story breaks, it's only a matter of time before political commentators shift from a discussion of the topic itself to predictions about its "political" implications—by which they usually mean its presumed effect on the attitudes of the typical American voter. "It's true that all of Washington is obsessed today with [a new international treaty / a congressional budget agreement / a missile test launch by a band of Nova Scotian separatists]," they'll ask each other, "but do you really think this issue is important to the average [factory worker in Ohio / factory worker in Michigan / factory worker in Indiana]?"

Accusations that the political media devote too much attention to poll-driven "horse race" journalism and not enough to the substance of policy are neither new nor entirely invalid. But the political implications of current events are hardly irrelevant or frivolous subjects of analysis—after all, how can Americans understand their political system without understanding politics? Neither "substantive" nor "political" coverage should be produced, or consumed, to the exclusion of the other—we need plenty of both to be properly informed about what's going on in the world.

The real problem with "political" analysis is that it is too often restricted to dissecting the results of past polls or speculating about the results of future polls. In truth, the subject of politics encompasses much more than the collective opinion of the mass public at any given moment. If we insist on judging the importance of political events through the narrow lens of whether or not they cause immediate, measurable shifts in citizen attitudes, we often risk missing the real story.

As you may have heard, President Trump held a long and contentious press conference yesterday that left the press with a lot to chew on—not least because journalists themselves were primary targets of Trump's anger and sarcastic contempt. One instinctive response to such a development is to engage in extensive debate about whether or not the average voter, or even the average Trump supporter, will feel more or less warmly toward Trump because of his behavior on Thursday. Did Trump hurt himself in the eyes of John and Jane Q. Public by his blustery performance? Did smacking around the press instead merely endear him further to the denizens of middle America who installed him in the presidency? Or do "real people" (a Washington phrase that, even though it is usually used half-seriously, still contains an off-putting element of unwitting condescension) not care either way, because they have other things to occupy their attention?

But this reflexive how-does-it-play-in-Peoria mentality misses the true story, at least in the present case. Over the past four weeks, a pivotal class of political actors both in this country and around the world has rapidly converged on the belief that the Trump administration is a terrible mess in nearly every conceivable respect. Members of Congress (of both parties), interest group leaders, bureaucrats, federal judges, media figures, foreign leaders, and even top staffers (and would-be staffers) within the White House itself are by all accounts agape with disbelief at this state of affairs, which has no remote parallel in the modern history of the nation.

Trump apparently wished to dispel this conclusion on Thursday, but his antics only reduced his stature still further in what turned out to be a serious political miscalculation. (The New York Times reported that the press conference was Trump's own idea, overruling the well-founded misgivings of his advisors—or at least that's what the advisors ran to tell the Times after it was over.) Trump may not believe that he needs to care about whether or not other political elites—a term I use descriptively rather than pejoratively—view him as competent, trustworthy, honest, patient, strategically acute, or mentally well-balanced. Or maybe he does care, but has no idea how to conduct himself in order to create such an impression.

Either way, the political implications of the press conference have little to do with whatever slight or temporary effect it might or might not have on the president's public approval rating. The most important audience for Trump's appearance was the highly observant set of other influential political figures whose trust and cooperation is essential to the success of any administration, but who have grown increasingly uneasy over the course of the past month. Even if nobody else watched or cared, the president was making a fool of himself before a powerful group of people with considerable capacity to frustrate his policy ambitions and damage his political standing. When even the Kremlin is beginning to waver in its enthusiasm, it's time to wonder how many governing allies the new president will manage to maintain during his time in office.

Trump Cries "Fake News"...But What He Really Thinks Is More Important

Last night, the New York Times added yet another volume to what is becoming, after less than three weeks, a growing journalistic genre: the Dysfunctional Trump White House Chronicles. (Previous installments can be found here, here, here, and here, among other examples.) Predictably, the Washington community immediately began to feast on the juicy anecdotes the Times provided: did Steve Bannon really hornswoggle Trump into appointing him to the National Security Council without knowing it? could it really be true that the staff can't even figure out how to turn on the lights in the Cabinet Room?

Just as predictably, the new president took to Twitter this morning to angrily dismiss the story as "total fiction" and "FAKE NEWS" from a "failing" newspaper. Trump's ebbing credibility ensures that such responses are in turn treated by the press as desperate denials of reality. To be fair, however, any presidential administration would publicly challenge the accuracy of damaging media coverage like this, whether or not it were true—though a more measured pushback delivered indirectly through a press secretary is, admittedly, the more traditional means of doing so.

In the long run, it's less important what Trump says about these stories that what he really thinks. Does he actually believe, as he claims, that the Times simply made the whole thing up? Or does he continue to rail against media bias in public while realizing that his own top employees are repeatedly using the press to send up warning flares about alarming dysfunction within his shop? The sheer volume of leaks alone confirms that this White House is far from running smoothly and is particularly beset by the kind of internal infighting that often springs up in government, especially in the absence of an attentive and engaged leader.

If Trump comes to understand that there really are serious problems with the way his administration operates, he won't acknowledge as much in public—but he will privately order changes designed to address them. (Whether those changes are actually effective is another question.) In the best case scenario, Trump responds by defining clear administration objectives and lines of authority that invest primary decision-making responsibility in the most experienced and competent members of his staff and cabinet, reducing the squabbling and elementary errors that have plagued the first weeks of his presidency.

More troublingly, Trump could decide instead that the biggest challenge facing his administration was not its bumpy record of governing but rather the tendency of some of his aides to pop off to the Times or Post whenever they lose an internal debate or turf battle. When a president decides that the mere existence of leaks themselves is the real problem to be solved, history suggests that big trouble is around the corner.

A Strategic Lens Won't Bring Trump into Focus, So Let's Give Psychology a Shot

It didn't take very long for the signals to arrive that this would be a different kind of presidency. On the first full day of the Trump administration, White House press secretary Sean Spicer appeared before the news media to chastise them for (accurately) reporting that the number of spectators at the new president's inauguration ceremony had failed to equal the crowds drawn by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Lest there be any confusion over whether it was Spicer's idea to immediately risk his own personal credibility by making obviously incorrect claims about a completely trivial matter, Trump himself brought up the issue during his visit to CIA headquarters the same afternoon, bragging as well about the number of times he's appeared on the cover of Time and offhandedly remarking that the United States might re-invade Iraq to seize control of its oil supply.

If anything, the strangeness factor has been increasing ever since. Trump remains visibly preoccupied with indicators of personal power, status, and popularity at the expense of other matters. In a single week, the new president has pretended that he lost the national popular vote due to a non-existent epidemic of voter fraud, compared Chicago to Afghanistan and threatened to send in "the Feds" to impose order, and boasted that his CIA appearance produced the "biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl."

Much remains unknown about how the new administration will operate, but this week has confirmed beyond doubt that Trump, to a greater degree than any other major American politician, eschews rational strategy in favor of personal instinct—an instinct that is largely influenced by emotion, especially negative emotion. And his actions ultimately can only be understood in that sense.

This attribute presents a challenge to journalists and academics alike, who have developed long-standing and elaborate traditions of analysis that treat politics primarily as a series of strategic puzzles. Politicians may—and do—regularly make mistakes or miscalculations, or the world around them can change in a manner that renders previously effective behavior futile or even counterproductive, but the common assumption is that political action is directed toward an identifiable purpose that is perceived to further the substantive objectives or tactical interests of the actor.

Reporters are so predisposed to view politics through this lens that even stunts as clearly nonsensical as Spicer's press statement on Saturday prompt musings about the savvy thinking that might undergird them. Trump's endless attacks on the press and claims of unfair treatment, for example, could in some cases be plausibly interpreted as stoking a politically useful sense of grievance among his supporters, or by cleverly undercutting the power of the news media to contradict factually inaccurate statements made by his administration. And, to some degree, his behavior does and will have such an effect.

But among the most revealing news stories of the past week have been reports sourced from within the White House itself confirming that these matters are private obsessions, not merely public battle cries. Indeed, Trump's claims that millions of illegitimate votes deprived him of a rightful popular victory were first raised in a closed-door meeting with the congressional leadership of both parties, who were likely not reassured as a result that the new president has a firm grip on political reality. In retrospect, the characteristic that allowed Trump to overcome expectations and successfully capture both the Republican nomination and the White House looks less like a unique degree of strategic sophistication on his part and more like a simple ability and willingness to say or do things that other candidates couldn't—or wouldn't.

While Democrats and other critics have responded to the first week of the Trump era with blasts of righteous outrage, some Republicans seem to be experiencing a quieter feeling of queasiness brought on by the dawning realization that Trump's bizarre behavior is not merely an act created for public consumption. The frustrations experienced by the Trump aides who have already leaked damaging material to the Times and Post are undoubtedly spreading more widely within the party. Given the outcome of the last election, one would have expected this past week's retreat by congressional Republicans to be held amid an atmosphere of unrestrained euphoria, yet journalistic accounts paint a picture of a collectively uncertain GOP that is warily attempting to take the measure of its new leader.

Weighing the evidence, it seems as if observers both inside and outside the political world—including those of us studying politics using the tools of social science—need to readjust their assumptions and expectations of presidential behavior if they want to understand what's going on. As one anxious Republican told Politico, "It's surreal. We finally have the White House, and it's this." In order to figure out what exactly "this" is and how it will work in practice, the gaming-out of strategic calculus will need to be complemented even more than usual by insights from the realm of human psychology, where the presence of logic and reason is never taken for granted.

BC Scholars on the Trump Presidency

The Boston College Chronicle asked a number of BC faculty members about their expectations for the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. Yu can find my thoughts among those of my colleagues here.

Asymmetric Politics on the New Books in Poli Sci Podcast

Matt Grossmann and I are guests on the latest edition of the podcast New Books in Political Science, hosted by Heath Brown of CUNY, to talk about our new book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. The podcast episode is available here or via the usual podcasting channels.

You Gotta Fight For Your Right...to Write the Obamacare Repeal Bill

The Republican congressional leadership's ambition to begin the process of dismantling Obamacare within days of Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency has hit a snag. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan had previously agreed upon a legislative strategy of immediately enacting a bill that would ostensibly "repeal" much of the Affordable Care Act (via budget reconciliation legislation, which is not subject to filibuster in the Senate) but would delay its effective date of implementation for at least two years in order to give Republicans in Congress time to develop their long-promised alternative health care reform plan.

Now some fellow Republicans are throwing obstacles in their path. Five members of the Senate majority have introduced an amendment that would effectively delay a vote on repeal until March, while a few others have suggested that the ACA should not be repealed until a replacement plan is ready to be enacted in its place. On the House side, members of the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus have also threatened to oppose the Republican leadership's budget resolution when it comes up for a vote later this week unless they receive more specific information about the nature and timetable of ACA repeal-and-replace legislation. (Passage of the budget resolution through both chambers is a necessary first step to use the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to repeal provisions of the ACA.)

We might expect politicians to get a case of political cold feet about the risk of voting to upend the entire health care industry in potentially unpredictable ways, as well as the potential fallout of revoking public benefits from millions of citizens. Otherwise staunch ideological conservatives like Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rand Paul of Kentucky have objected to the leadership's fast-track approach; it's hardly a coincidence that both senators represent states that have experienced a significant decline in their populations of uninsured residents under the ACA. Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, another state with many ACA beneficiaries, even endorsed the idea that any replacement health care plan should cover more citizens than Obamacare does—a telling concession to the complex political considerations that Republicans now face as they try to square their small-government philosophical predispositions with their electoral survival instincts.

But that can't be the whole story. After all, the House Freedom Caucus is famous for claiming unmatched devotion to conservative principle and for constantly criticizing the Republican leadership from the ideological right. It's hard to envision its members going wobbly on ACA repeal before Trump's term has even begun—especially since they uniformly represent deep red districts with little chance of serious challenge from the Democratic opposition.

What's also going on here is the preliminary round of what may prove to be a significant internal battle within the Republican Party over the legislative specifics of repeal-and-replace. The absence of a party-endorsed replacement plan for Obamacare over the seven years and counting since one was promised by the congressional GOP reflected the difficulties that party leaders faced in uniting Republican members around a single alternative—but this policy void must be filled now that repeal-and-replace has evolved from catchy slogan to legislative agenda. Various key actors within the party will now seek to maximize their leverage over the policy-making process, which often involves threatening or even imposing procedural obstacles to the passage of reform unless and until they gain the opportunity to exert influence over its shape. The Freedom Caucus is not averse to making common cause with Democrats to outvote its own party leadership on the floor of the House, while the small group of Republican senators currently making trouble for McConnell similarly constitute a strategically pivotal voting bloc, given the close margin of party control in the chamber.

Jonathan Chait and Brian Beutler argue that the public maneuvering of the past few days indicates that there probably aren't 51 votes in the Senate to repeal and replace the ACA in anything other than cosmetic fashion. That's true for the moment, though it would be premature to conclude that repeal is doomed to failure. At this stage, it's likely that the senators currently wandering off the leadership reservation are raising public doubts in order to assert control over the reform process rather than to derail it entirely. Tellingly, one of the troublemakers is Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, who might well be expected to seize an opportunity to establish his own independent authority over both the substantive and procedural content of reform. The relatively pragmatic and policy-minded Alexander will be in the position to argue that the only bill with a prayer of passing the Senate will be one that he writes himself, and that his committee—not the House leadership or the hard-line Tea Party bloc—should therefore take the lead in developing the elusive Republican alternative reform package.

Such claims will not sit well with the Freedom Caucus or other Republican factions, which will use similar tactics in order to seek control of the process for themselves. This fight could get messy, and the current GOP congressional leadership does not have an impressive record of successfully uniting its members in support of ambitious, complex, politically controversial policy initiatives. It's not difficult to imagine large-scale reform ultimately foundering due to unresolvable differences between the House and Senate, or between party pragmatists and conservative purists. Over the past few weeks, as the reality of imminent one-party rule has begun to settle upon Washington, a number of Republican officeholders have begun to acknowledge that "repeal-and-replace" is much more complicated in practice than it might have initially appeared.

However, it's very difficult to gauge the prospects for ACA repeal without further insight into the intentions of the new president. Donald Trump holds unique political influence within his party that he could exploit to crack some heads on Capitol Hill and get a deal done (what Republican member of Congress would want to end up on the wrong side of a presidential Twitter rant?). If Trump identifies ACA replacement as a top priority and devotes the necessary attention and energy to the issue during the first months of his presidency, it would be hard to deny the possibility of legislative success—even if it were followed by significant policy complications that would then invite a popular backlash against Republican politicians.

If he really wants fundamental reform to pass, however, Trump will have to assure congressional Republicans that he won't sell them out. There will be some unavoidable political costs to a true repeal-and-replace approach, and GOP members will need Trump to provide them with political cover by sharing these costs. Right now, they are probably unsure of his loyalty—and, based on his past behavior, they have reason to be. 

What happens when citizens, some of them Trump supporters, begin to complain that he and his party are messing around with their health insurance? Does Trump take responsibility for the policy implications of repeal-and-replace, or does he respond to blowback by disavowing the Republican replacement plan and blaming Congress for any unpopular consequences? It would truly be a political nightmare for congressional Republicans if they were to cast tough votes to repeal the ACA only to have a president of their own party join the chorus of critics.

So far, it doesn't seem as if the incoming president has communicated to congressional Republicans that health care reform is in fact his primary legislative objective, or that he will stand with them politically over the months and even years that will be necessary to see it through to completion. One senator even pleaded with Trump this week to clarify his health care ideas via Twitter—which, though it inspired some mockery, would at least have the advantage of publicly committing the new administration to some specific choices and thus send valuable signals to the Hill about how best to proceed.

ACA repeal isn't dead, but it faces little chance of surviving the arduous legislative process without significant presidential investment. Unless Trump is willing to publicly and privately devote himself to the cause (and assume the corresponding political risks), Congress is unlikely to do the heavy legislative lifting required to enact significant further change to the American health care system. If he wants to claim victory over Obamacare, Trump needs to join the fight.

How Obamacare Repeal Illustrates Conservatism's Central Challenge

Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has publicly stood for nothing so much as the proposition that the Affordable Care Act—a.k.a. "Obamacare"—is more than just a misguided set of public policies but is in fact a fundamental threat to cherished values. Congressional Republicans have referred to the ACA as a "stunning assault on liberty" that "tramples on the freedoms of Americans" and is itself "un-American"; former party leader John Boehner warned in 2010 that the legislation would cause an "Armageddon" that would "ruin our country." The implementation of the ACA's provisions over the course of Obama's presidency has done nothing to reconcile the GOP to the act's existence nearly seven years after its enactment, and party members have energetically pursued various attempts to overturn or undermine the law—from judicial challenges to state-level Medicaid expansion blockades to the unsuccessful Ted Cruz-led government shutdown maneuver in October 2013.

Soon after the ACA was passed, Republicans collectively adopted a slogan of "repeal and replace"—committing the party to repealing the hated Obamacare while replacing it with a "better" alternative. Republican politicians have not found much success in specifying exactly what that alternative would be, despite repeated promises over the past seven years that the public unveiling of their own detailed health care plan was just around the corner. Even if the GOP's pledge to enact a different version of health care reform represented a clever rhetorical strategy more than a serious policy position, however, it still contained a key implicit concession. By promoting the idea of a superior legislative replacement (however hypothetical it might be), Republican leaders were acknowledging that the central purpose of the law itself—government-initiated expansion of citizen health-care access—was not per se illegitimate, and that revoking the benefits provided by the ACA to millions of Americans by merely ripping out Obama's reforms by the roots was not a politically palatable stance.

With Donald Trump about to assume the presidency, Republican leaders are now considering how best to translate the "repeal and replace" pledge into a concrete legislative program. This has proven difficult. Congressional Republicans understandably wish to satisfy their own ideological commitments (and the demands of their party base) by moving quickly to pass repeal legislation. But without a replacement proposal ready to go, the current strategic plan involves delaying the actual implementation of repeal for two years or more.

In some respects, advocating such a relaxed timetable is a curious position for a party that has previously characterized the ACA as representing a menacing threat to the very future of America itself. But Republicans have found themselves in a genuine political bind. Repealing Obamacare carries substantial political risks for the GOP; voters seldom reward politicians for denying them benefits that they have previously enjoyed, while the health care industry as a whole could experience substantial disruption due to funding cuts and uncertainty about future federal policy. (Even the kick-the-can-into-2019 approach currently favored by Republican congressional leaders could have the effect of unraveling the individual insurance market as early as this spring, if insurers respond by pulling out of the marketplace ahead of schedule.) With unified Republican control of the federal government arriving on January 20, voters would not be confused about which party to blame for any problems that might occur.

The Republican health care dilemma has become a microcosm of the larger challenge faced by the conservative movement for the better part of a century. American conservatives are committed to the ideal of limited government power as a means of protecting individual liberty, and have repeatedly promised to achieve "revolutionary" reductions in the size and role of the federal state. Yet rolling back the scope of government is very difficult in practice, since most of what it actually does—providing benefits to various classes of citizens—is politically popular. Even conservative politicians maintain an instinct for electoral self-preservation that encourages them to assure constituents that nobody will be left worse off by their policy proposals, and some conservatives have been known to support new expansions of federal responsibility, despite their stated small-government principles, as an effective means of appealing to voters.

Thus the increasing electoral success of an increasingly conservative Republican Party over the past 40 years of American politics has yet failed to result in an overall reduction of federal authority. When conservative activists complain that Republican politicians talk a good game about shrinking government but seldom follow through once in office, they have something of a point. As Matt Grossmann and I explain in Asymmetric Politics, much of the GOP's distinctive governing behavior reflects the enduring gap between the American public's general preference for "small government" in the abstract and its collective support for most specific government activities.

Republicans are therefore simultaneously filled with excitement about the prospect of repealing Obamacare—or, at least, passing legislation that can be sold to the party base as repealing Obamacare—and rife with anxiety about being blamed for any unpopular consequences that might ensue. One interested party has recently communicated some concern on this point. In a series of tweets posted on Wednesday, Donald Trump exhorted Republicans to "be careful" to make sure that "Dems own the failed Obamacare disaster" which, he predicted, would "fall of its own weight."

Trump's words reflect a recognition that the "big-government" ACA has served as a highly effective foil for Republicans during the Obama presidency, but that the partisan calculation is likely to change once the GOP assumes sole responsibility for federal policy-making. Politically speaking, it's much easier to continue to rail against the Democrats from the opposition bench than to start fiddling around with people's health insurance in a way that might put one's own party on the defensive. Of course, if Republicans do receive blame for any changes to the American health care system that inspire a popular backlash over the next four years, such blame will be shared by, and even primarily directed at, the next occupant of the White House—even if his substantive role is limited to signing legislation crafted by his fellow partisans on Capitol Hill. The recent Twitter record suggests that such a realization is dawning on said occupant.

It is still very difficult to predict exactly what health care policies will be enacted by the incoming Congress and presidential administration. Most probably, Republicans will successfully rescind some of the ACA's provisions while leaving others at least partially intact. For Democrats who view the legislation as one of their party's most important and hard-won policy achievements, even an incomplete dismantling of the law will be a heavy blow. Yet anything less than total repeal-without-replacement will result in a federal role in the health care realm that will remain larger in 2020 than it was in 2010—rendering the conservative movement's central goal of reducing the government's reach in domestic affairs that much further away from realization.

Forget the '60s—The Real Generation Gap Is Happening Right Now

Since the election last month, we have seen a parade of analyses examining how Clinton supporters differ from Trump supporters along the dividing lines of race, education, and geographic residence. The persistence of partisan differences by age in American elections, however, has received somewhat less attention. Younger voters, who first demonstrated a notable relative preference for the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, swung even further towards the Democrats in the two Obama elections; Obama carried the under-30 vote by 34 points in 2008 and by 23 points in 2012, according to the national exit polls. At the same time, voters over the age of 50 collectively preferred Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney to Obama in both of his successful national campaigns.

Hillary Clinton may have lacked Obama's (and Bernie Sanders's) personal appeal among younger voters, but she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump according to the 2016 exit polls, while voters over the age of 45 collectively opted for Trump by 9 points—confirming that the contemporary political generation gap will outlast the Obama era. This is a significant divide by historical standards. None of the 1960s-era elections produced a comparable partisan difference, despite the decade's prominent youth-led protest movements and memorable "don't trust anyone over 30" rhetoric. According to Gallup data, Hubert Humphrey led Richard Nixon in 1968 among voters under 30 by only 9 points, 47 percent to 38 percent, while voters over the age of 50 preferred Nixon by just 6 points (47 percent to 41 percent). So Trump performed about as well among young voters in a two-person contest as Nixon did in a three-way race.

Many of the most prominent political issues of our time include a generational dimension separating the left-leaning young from their more conservative elders. Social issues such as gay rights and drug legalization divide Americans sharply by age. The Affordable Care Act drew its fiercest opposition from the elderly—who already enjoyed Medicare benefits and thus perceived little collective interest in expanding health care access to younger citizens. Climate change is of greater concern to those who stand to inherit the planet than those who rule it today. Democratic candidates frequently tout their plans for enhancing college affordability and access to childcare; Republicans seldom discuss these topics. Conservative efforts to lower federal tax rates on high incomes also stand to primarily benefit older—and disproportionately wealthier—voters.

More broadly, the 2016 election exposed a key divide in the American electorate between nationalism and internationalism, between a preference for traditional social hierarchies and an attraction to new social norms. The themes of cultural nostalgia and alienation adopted by the Trump campaign were particularly primed to appeal to older generations feeling increasingly out of place in contemporary society and preferring a bygone past of perceived American "greatness" defined by a rejection of "political correctness" at home and an adherence to military/economic unilateralism abroad. Just as the Brexit referendum in the UK passed over the opposition of a younger generation of Britons much more at ease with European integration than their parents and grandparents, the oldest incoming president in American history assembled a narrow electoral coalition that is heavily weighted toward his own age cohort—and there's no particular reason to believe that he will govern in a manner that increases his appeal to those who did not support his candidacy. A Pew survey released this week found Trump with a favorable rating of just 24 percent among respondents aged 18-29 and 25 percent among those aged 30-49, compared to 47 percent among 50-to-64-year-olds and 54 percent among the 65-and-over population.

Ronald Reagan's famous "optimism" was to some degree an assured belief that the future belonged to conservatives. A more extensive elucidation of this view, complete with accompanying data, can be found in any number of the essays written by Michael Barone in the 1980s for the Almanac of American Politics. Barone viewed Reagan's electoral success as proof that a majority of American voters had come to recognize the fundamental flaws of liberalism and were acting together to push their country in a rightward direction. The Democrats, according to Barone, were the party of declining central cities, out-of-fashion hippie relics, and Rust Belt anachronism; the Republicans were the party of burgeoning suburbs, private-sector innovators, and Sun Belt futurism. Importantly, in Barone's view, conservatives were winning the hearts and minds of younger Americans, who could be expected to take up Reagan's torch and advance it still further through subsequent decades. As Barone and Grant Ujifusa wrote in the 1990 edition of the Almanac, “[t]he young voters of the 1980s, Republican strategists hope, and Democratic strategists fear, will carry their sunny Republicanism into the 2030s and 2040s.”

Young people may still be sunny these days, but Republicanism is decidedly not. The victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama damaged conservatives' confidence that they spoke for an enduring popular majority, and the main conservative objectives of shrinking the size and scope of government, establishing unquestioned American military supremacy abroad, and promoting morally traditionalist attitudes among the American public have all, to varying degrees and for varying reasons, remained unfulfilled in the years since Reagan departed the national stage. When combined with the continuing leftward evolution of American culture in the realms of race, gender, religion, and sexuality, these developments have left many conservatives—including the current president-elect—warning darkly of the imminent destruction of America as we know it, which in turn justifies increasingly aggressive challenges from the right to established political norms and institutions.

Now that it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more Sun Belt than Rust Belt, that is the favored party of revitalized urban metropolises and centers of innovation like the high-tech sector, and that is more attuned to the millennial-generation cultural zeitgeist, older conservatives exhibit a shaken faith in the wisdom of popular majorities. Barone himself has taken to explicitly arguing in favor of the electoral college precisely because it might act—as it did in 2016—to thwart the will of a national plurality that he finds ideologically and demographically uncongenial. Other Republicans have responded to social change by advocating restrictions on access to the ballot that disproportionately affect young and non-white citizens, in order to further tilt the electoral system away from their political opponents.

As the Republican victories of 2014 and 2016 confirm, there is no youth-led "permanent Democratic majority," in part because our electoral rules and institutions tend to provide Republicans with a built-in advantage in close elections. Plus, there are simply lots and lots of baby boomers and pre-boomers, and they vote more reliably than their children and grandchildren. But if the young will respond to Trump's ascendance by resenting the disproportionate political and economic power of the right-leaning old, the old will continue to resent the increasing cultural power of the left-leaning young. The power of the presidency simply does not extend to authority over the national culture, and the institutions that do exert substantial cultural influence—the news media, entertainment industry, educational system, and so forth—can be expected to serve as centers of resistance to Trump and Trumpism. Cultural backlash can be a powerful tool for winning elections, but it's very hard to actually deliver on promises to move an entire society back in time.

Trump and the Myth of the American Presidency

Most political scientists view the American political system as a dense set of interlocking rules, institutions, and actors that interact in complicated and ever-evolving ways. This web of power derives much of its complexity from the fact that the United States is, distinctively, both a separation-of-powers system and a federal system. Our politics not only encompasses many different independent positions and levels of authority but also provides multiple access points for individuals and groups outside the formal structure of the government—including advocacy organizations, media sources, and mobilized citizens—to exert influence over its operations. Even scholars who devote their careers to studying one element of this system—Congress, courts, voters, interest groups, and so forth—must constantly account for the ways in which their subject of interest is affected by the other components of the system.

American citizens acquire in grade school the familiar factual knowledge that their government has three separate branches and a federalist structure. In practice, however, popular attention to the subject of politics focuses overwhelmingly on the office of the presidency and the individuals who hold it—or who seek it during a drawn-out campaign process that lasts for nearly half of the presidential term. Citizens have invested the presidency with meaning and expectations that far exceed the capacity of even its most resourceful inhabitants to fully satisfy, ignoring both the very real limitations of the president's ability to implement major change and the key roles played by other political actors and by the institutional framework of the constitutional system itself.

The campaign that just concluded only further widened the chasm separating the actual presidency from its role in the American imagination. Popular and media attention focused on the race to the White House to the exclusion of all other electoral competition; candidates for the Senate and other important offices only received national press coverage when they said or did something that related to one or both of the presidential nominees. To a greater extent than any candidate in memory, Donald Trump portrayed the presidency as a position of unrestricted power from which he could not only impose sweeping change on national and world politics—singlehandedly bringing back the steel industry from overseas, building a border wall and forcing Mexico to pay for it—but even reverse unwelcome trends in American culture ("When I'm president, we're going to say Merry Christmas again!")

Hillary Clinton was by contrast relatively cautious about over-promising on policy and keen to avoid appearances of grandiosity, reflecting both her own instincts and her understanding of the limitations of the presidency as well as its power. When discussing this or that political issue, Clinton would frequently pledge if elected to do "everything I can" to address the concerns of her audience—a promise to try rather than a promise to succeed.

Yet Clinton, too, ultimately wound up running a campaign that treated the presidency more as an abstract symbol than a position of executive responsibility. She attempted to benefit from popular disapproval of Trump's personal behavior by arguing that he would be a poor role model for the nation's children and would represent a victory for the forces of bigotry and misogyny. Democrats and Republicans came to share the view that the 2016 election did not merely present a choice between two very different visions for what America should be, but forced the electorate to determine which of two possible futures the nation would indeed have—with one path permanently selected and the other foreclosed.

Since the election less than two weeks ago, the nation has experienced an eruption of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim speech and behavior—all presumably fueled by the perception that Trump's ascension to the presidency represents a larger impending transformation of American society (notwithstanding the narrowness of Trump's victory nor his failure to receive a plurality of the national popular vote). These incidents have not been limited to the Trump-friendly regions of the nation; even those of us who live in the "deep blue" precincts of the metropolitan coasts have experienced the same trend. The presumption behind much of this behavior is that America under Trump will look fundamentally different from America under Obama or (hypothetically) Clinton.

As some of his most ardent supporters envision a wholesale change in the social order, Trump himself has spent the same two weeks reckoning with the limits of the office he is poised to occupy. Evidence has surfaced of a rocky transition process and a president-elect who seems more interested in looking after his business interests and engaging in amateur television criticism than in staffing the executive branch. He has also begun to walk back some of his key campaign promises; anyone actually expecting Trump to immediately begin mass deportations, build a border wall, or throw Hillary Clinton in jail once he assumes office is about to be very disappointed.

Most scholars agree that the modern presidency rewards preparation. The most successful presidents have prioritized hiring highly competent subordinates who share a common policy agenda, have placed them at key positions of power, and have moved quickly to take advantage of the honeymoon period at the start of a new president's term, when his popularity and political influence are usually at their peak. It is not at all clear that Trump is equipped to begin his term in office two short months from now with the institutional capacity of the executive branch running at full speed.

We are left, then, with the prospect of an ever-widening divide between the growing symbolic power of the presidency in the American popular imagination and the stubborn reality that the president is merely one element of a political system that often resists bending to his will. All presidents have chafed against the limitations of the office, but Trump's combination of rhetorical ambition and practical inattentiveness presents a particular challenge to the new administration. The news media, which has contributed greatly to propagating the myth of the all-powerful presidency, will reliably cover American politics for the next four years almost exclusively through a Trump-centered lens, which will have the effect of further magnifying his failures as well as his successes. If the president cannot even claim control over Congress and the bureaucracy, what are his chances of making us all say Merry Christmas every December?

Princeton Podcast on Asymmetric Politics

Yesterday, Matt Grossmann and I talked with Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang of Princeton University about our new book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. You can hear our conversation on the latest edition of their podcast, Politics and Polls.

Podcast Interview

Yesterday I talked to Marc Chavannes of the Dutch podcast The Correspondent about the American elections of 2016. You can listen to our conversation here.

Think Politics Will "Get Back to Normal" After Tuesday? This IS the New Normal!

We've reached the stage of the presidential campaign in which everyone who's either a participant or a close observer has reached a state of complete mental overload. Colleagues, friends, and students have frequently remarked over the past week or two that they are desperate for the election to be over. This is especially true of Clinton supporters of my acquaintance, who nurture (perhaps unrealistic) hope that Trump and Trumpism will face a popular rejection on Tuesday that will expel both the man and his brand of politics from the American party system.

Given everyone's frayed nerves, it seems almost sadistic to suggest that less will change after the election that many might wish. If Trump somehow manages an upset, of course, the fallout will be unprecedented—even more so now that the events of the past few weeks have set Democrats up to view such an outcome as an effective hijacking of American democracy by the Russians and the FBI.

The more likely outcome remains a Clinton victory, though by less-than-landslide proportions. But here, too, the potential for political combustion is enormous. The entire Republican popular base is poised to go ka-BOOM in response to the ascension of President Hillary, and Republican leaders will see no choice but to ratchet up the vehemence of their opposition to a level that will even exceed that of the Obama years. For the duration of his presidency, many Republicans have viewed Obama as an arrogant Marxist incompetent who hates America and all that it stands for; they think all those things of Clinton, too, but add to them the belief that she is also a criminal who belongs in prison. The race among Republican members of the House of Representatives to be the first to file articles of impeachment against her promises to be a competitive one, and the GOP congressional leadership will face considerable pressure to engage in even-more-frequent acts of dramatic—and high-risk—confrontation.

We already know what the biggest fight will be. It hasn't received a great deal of attention in an all-Trump-all-the-time campaign, but the vacancy on the Supreme Court promises to serve as a particularly bloody partisan battlefield once the election is over. If the Republicans hold the Senate, it is likely that they will prevent Clinton from filling the Scalia seat for the entire four years of her term. While this would be an unprecedented act, there is simply no political or ideological incentive for any Republican senator to allow the confirmation of a fifth liberal justice. (Democratic hopes that the blockade of Merrick Garland would prove electorally costly to swing-state Republican senators this year seem to have gone unfulfilled, only increasing the likelihood of indefinite GOP obstruction.)

If the Democrats gain a majority in the Senate, the working assumption is that they will jam Garland, or a replacement Clinton nominee, through the chamber on a party-line vote. This is probably correct, but the political cost and pain involved is underappreciated. Any Democratic majority in the Senate is likely to be very narrow—it could even hinge on the vice president's role as a tiebreaker—and dependent on a few pivotal electorally vulnerable senators from normally Republican states, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.

These Democrats will need to join with their more liberal fellow partisans not only to confirm the fifth liberal justice, but to invoke the "nuclear option" preventing a Republican filibuster of the nomination. This involves not changing the formal rules of the Senate—a process that is itself subject to the filibuster—but using a parliamentary point of order, sustained by a simple majority, that the cloture rule does not properly apply to Supreme Court nominations. (The previous use of the nuclear option in 2013 removed the filibuster for lower court candidates but left it intact for the Supreme Court.)

Regardless of what one thinks about the filibuster rule or its increasing use by the Senate minority, removing it by brute partisan force rather than via the normal procedures for modifying chamber rules adds fodder to what will be fierce Republican charges that the whole thing is an illegitimate power grab. If Democrats take majority control in January, they will face the choice of whether to invoke the nuclear option preemptively or wait until Republicans actually filibuster Clinton's Supreme Court nominee. There is some logic to ripping the Band-Aid off quickly, but red-state Democratic senators may prefer to wait for weeks or even months, giving Republicans the opportunity to amply demonstrate their intransigence before "reluctantly" concluding that the nuclear option is an appropriate response.

All of this will play out in an atmosphere of unconstrained partisan-ideological rancor. The stakes are indeed high—the formation of a liberal majority on the Court for the first time in 40 years is understandably unacceptable to pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives alike, while simultaneously representing an important potential legacy for a Hillary Clinton presidency that is likely to be prevented by congressional gridlock from enacting its major legislative priorities.

The election next week will resolve some important questions; the difference between the two presidential candidates is in many respects the biggest in living memory, and one will be president while the other one won't. But the acrimonious nature of party politics in the United States may only be reinforced by the outcome on Tuesday. Once the results are in, many Americans will return to their "normal" routine of only intermittent attentiveness to the world of politics. But those who continue to follow the daily march of events cannot count on the end of the campaign to provide a respite from the perpetual partisan battle.

The "Republican Party" Doesn't Make Strategic Decisions—Individual Republicans Do

The 2016 election is still two weeks away, and yet the likely outcome is sufficiently apparent that news media post-mortems are already beginning to appear. Though the Democratic Party is poised to win the presidency for the third consecutive election, elevating the first woman in history to the office in the process, it is the Republican opposition that is gaining most of the attention these days—and will surely continue to do so once the votes have all been counted. Fascination with what appears to be the picturesque final days of the Donald Trump campaign has expanded to the question of what effect Trump's candidacy will have on his party, both in the short and long term, and what steps Republicans will take to address the internal problems of which Trump is arguably more a symptom than a cause.

It's easy to discuss what "the Republican Party" will, or should, do. But no single authority atop the GOP holds the power to make and enforce strategic decisions on its behalf. There are only an array of individual Republicans, from congressional officers and national committeemembers to interest group leaders and media personalities, who may have plenty of good ideas about the proper direction for the party as a whole but who also have their own constituencies to satisfy and their own careers to advance.

Social scientists use the term "collective action problem" to refer to a situation in which a contradiction exists between the aggregate interests of a group of actors and the personal interest of each individual actor. Just as the mice are collectively safer if they can hear the house cat coming but no single mouse is willing to take the risk necessary to bell it, the current Republican Party is awash in tensions between individual and collective political incentives. Here are three recommendations or predictions that media commentators have frequently advanced for the post-election GOP, which are all probably smart in a general strategic sense but don't always recognize the contradictory interests of key individual actors within the party:

1. The Republican Party should "modernize" in order to expand its electoral appeal. If Hillary Clinton defeats Trump in November, giving the Democratic Party its fifth victory in the past seven presidential elections, many Republican political consultants and outside observers will argue that the GOP will need to take visible steps to increase its popular appeal among key demographic subgroups such as racial minorities, single women, and millennial-generation voters. Because the term "moderate" is often anathema to a party that views itself as the vehicle of conservative ideology, these calls for reform are usually promoted as "modernization" or "reinvention" initiatives.

But individual Republican politicians must still worry about winning primary elections dominated by current, not hypothetical, party supporters, while congressional leaders must similarly satisfy their own rank and file before they consider expanding the party's reach to new constituencies. The post-2012 "autopsy report" commissioned by the Republican National Committee was largely ignored by Republican elected officials in part because its recommendations departed sharply from their own individual political incentives—and this divide has only widened further in the ensuing four years. If Republican members of Congress were already reluctant to support comprehensive immigration reform legislation—one frequently-prescribed remedy for the GOP's dire current standing among Latinos—how many will be more enthusiastic to do so after Donald Trump rode deep anti-immigration sentiment to an upset victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries?

2. The Republican Party should push back against the conservative media. Trump's nomination represents undeniable evidence of the significant power of conservative media outlets within the party, from Fox News and talk radio to websites like Breitbart (which supplied Trump's current campaign chairman). Critics both within and outside the GOP charge the right-wing media universe with misinforming Republican voters and sowing popular anger against the party's traditional leadership, leaving the party uniquely vulnerable to a Trump takeover and its associated problems. "Want to Save the Republican Party?" asks one recent headline in the Washington Post. "Drain the Right-Wing Media Swamp."

Once again, this is easier said than done. Trump's nomination is not the first piece of evidence suggesting that the increasing influence of the conservative media universe is not always a positive good for the governing health of the Republican Party. But which individual Republican officials are willing to lead the charge against some of their own supporters' most trusted sources of information? Today, whenever a Republican member of Congress criticizes a major conservative media figure, it only takes a day or two before the member of Congress has apologized and pledged eternal devotion to the media personality's wisdom and moral leadership. It's hard to envision many Republican politicians sacrificing their own careers for the cause of putting Sean Hannity in his place.

3. The Republican Party should confirm Merrick Garland in the lame-duck session of Congress. If Clinton wins the presidency and Democrats gain control of the Senate, she will be in a position to fill the Supreme Court seat formerly held by the late Antonin Scalia—assuming that Senate Democrats would respond to any Republican filibuster by invoking the "nuclear option" to disallow filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. For this reason, some commentators have suggested—and even predicted—that the current Republican-controlled Senate should or would confirm Barack Obama's choice, Merrick Garland, rather than risk a less palatable nominee replacing Scalia once Clinton takes office.

It's easy to see the logic for this maneuver from the perspective of the Court's composition. Garland has a fairly moderate reputation as a jurist; he is also about to turn 64. If the Senate continues its blockade of Garland's nomination, a future President Clinton could withdraw it in favor of a younger and more left-wing justice, making Stephen Breyer rather than Garland the swing vote on the Court and increasing the probability of a long-term liberal majority.

But Republican senators are not worried about the Court as much as they are about themselves. Confirming Garland after the election would require majority leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley to schedule hearings and a vote on Garland. At least 14 Republican senators would need to vote for cloture (in order to defeat a certain filibuster that would likely represent the first phase of the 2020 Ted Cruz for President campaign) and at least 4 would need to vote in favor of Garland on the floor (or at least abstain from voting). And all of this behavior would be in service of elevating a left-of-center justice to the Court who was nominated by Obama, ending four decades of conservative judicial ascendancy.

Sophisticated conservative intellectuals might understand that such a move was motivated by the goal of avoiding the chance of an even less acceptable hypothetical outcome, but Republican senators would probably be much less confident that their party's primary voters would grasp the strategic calculation at work. For them, the easy choice is to keep Garland bottled up until January and let the Democrats do what they will in the new session of Congress, even if this inaction results in a more liberal Court. And this logic applies more broadly to nearly all of the considerations that arise when discussing the issue of "where the Republican Party goes from here." The Republican Party will collectively go wherever individual Republicans go—which is likely to be, for better or worse, wherever their own personal interests take them.

Post-Debates Recap: Is 2016 An Exception Or the New Normal?

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in the final scheduled debate last night, passing a milepost marking the home stretch of the campaign. The overall dynamics and candidate strategy on display last night closely resembled those of the first two debates. Clinton was once again well-prepped and bent on goading Trump into counterproductive responses on his main points of vulnerability. Trump was once again extemporaneous and free-associative, focusing on broad themes instead of policy details.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump has been badly hurt by the debates. On September 26, the day of the first debate, the FiveThirtyEight model estimated that Clinton was leading Trump by 46 percent to 45 percent in the national popular vote and by 278 to 260 in the electoral vote, with just a 55 percent projected chance of winning the election. Today, Clinton is estimated to hold a lead of 50 percent to 43 percent in the popular vote and 343 to 194 in the electoral vote, adding up to an 87 percent chance of victory on November 8.

This shift no doubt partially reflects other developments that have occurred over the period that the debates were held—especially the Billy Bush tape and subsequent accusations against Trump. And Clinton was already the favorite to win the race even before they occurred. But I think the bulk of the evidence points toward the debates having a significant independent effect on the relative standing of the candidates, especially because they generated negative news coverage of Trump that persisted for days after the events themselves. Trump's refusal last night to commit to respecting the outcome of the election is likewise poised to dominate this week's coverage—to his further disadvantage—which means that the debates may continue to hurt his chances further over the next several days.

If true, the power of the debates to shift public opinion is another way in which the 2016 election departs from the usual pattern. Though debates receive a lot of attention every year, and media figures always spend a lot of time explaining which candidate "won" each face-off, previous research had concluded that the effects of debate performances on the horse race tended to be quite temporary when they existed at all. If Clinton winds up winning the election by a margin comparable to her current lead, we may regard the debates in retrospect as significant events in the trajectory of the race.

Political scientists have taken our share of lumps this election from our critics, largely because most of us didn't expect the Republican Party to nominate Trump (a conclusion which, to be fair, we were hardly alone in reaching). One recurrent point of difference between political science and popular media is that many journalists and pundits tend to interpret electoral outcomes as mostly reflecting the different personalities and strategies of the candidates, while political scientists more commonly emphasize the role of fundamental factors like partisanship and economic performance in shaping the choices of voters. (This view is sometimes caricatured as a belief that "campaigns don't matter," which no political scientist I know has ever claimed.)

If the debates are revealed to be a major factor in determining the vote margin in the 2016 election, however, it's fair to point out that campaign effects turned out to be bigger than some of us assumed. When analysis built on investigation of previous elections fails to hold in a new case, there are three possible explanations:

1. The analysis was flawed even when applied to previous cases.

2. The analysis was sound in the past, but the current case doesn't fit because the world has changed—and future cases will resemble the current case more than past cases.

3. The analysis was sound in the past and will be again in the future, but the current case represents a temporary deviation from the long-term norm.

Our least charitable critics will probably argue that (1) is likely to be true—we just don't know what we're talking about and never did. But as even they must acknowledge, there's plenty of reason to believe that this particular election is just different from previous elections, with Trump's nomination either a cause or a symptom of this difference.

We can even come up with very plausible hypotheses about why the debates would matter more for a candidate like Trump than a candidate like Mitt Romney or John McCain: perhaps voters had less confidence in Trump's ability to do the job of president, rendering a substandard debate performance all the more damaging to his chances. Or maybe the press coverage of Trump has been much more negative than previous candidates over the same period. Alternatively, though it's tempting to rely on a Trump-centric explanation to account for everything that's distinctive about this election, maybe the debates mattered more because of something unique about Hillary Clinton. Perhaps her relatively strong debate performances helped her consolidate the support of younger voters and independents who never liked Trump but preferred Bernie Sanders to Clinton and were won over once the debates focused their attention on the choice before them this November.

The bigger challenge is to distinguish condition (2) from condition (3). In the heat of a campaign's final weeks, when it's very hard to step back and gain a broader perspective, we often assume that the current state of the world will pertain indefinitely into the future—for example, that Trump's particular brand of politics is here to stay in the Republican Party even if he loses the election. Sometimes that's right, but sometimes we're simply in the midst of a temporary departure from the usual order of things. Until we are able to gain the benefit of experience—or, as political scientists might put it, more data—we won't know for sure how much of what's extraordinary about the 2016 election is merely a product of the moment, and how much is a foreshadowing of the new normal.