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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Course Biden Is Running for Re-Election

The Washington Post ran a story on Tuesday about Joe Biden's decision to house his political operation within the Democratic National Committee instead of creating a parallel organization as Barack Obama had done. Obama never had much affection for the DNC, which was not exactly a center of support for him when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008. But Obama's neglect of the party's institutional strength while president in favor of the personal vehicles Organizing for America and Organizing for Action ultimately neither provided major electoral payoffs nor won him appreciation among Democratic politicians and committee members. A party regular through and through, Biden has decided that his interests are best served by remaining integrated with the traditional Democratic organizational apparatus heading into the 2022 midterms, rather than siphoning staff members and donor money into a separate political structure.

The Post report mentions, almost as an aside, that while Biden will wait until after the midterms to build a formal re-election campaign and publicly declare his candidacy, his advisors are "working under the assumption that he will once again top the Democratic ticket in 2024." This might be shocking news to some; I have encountered multiple politically aware people since Biden first entered the 2020 race who presume that he would only seek to serve a single term. But it shouldn't be a surprise at all.

The idea of the self-declared single-term president has had a romantic appeal to editorial-page writers (and few others) since well before Biden became the oldest person in history elected to the job. Like many other ideas with romantic appeal, it is disconnected from political reality. Declaring oneself a lame duck from the early days of an administration is not an effective strategy for a president to build or maintain influence, both inside and outside the party. The perception that you might be there awhile is a much better way to attract talented subordinates, pursue ambitious goals, and pressure members of Congress for support, and the inability to seek re-election is one reason why modern presidents' second terms tend to be less focused and successful than their first.

The main point made by the Post article—that Biden is at heart a loyal party man—also applies to the re-election question. Unless an unforeseen governing disaster occurs, Democratic leaders will perceive that they are far better off with Biden running again, and presumably benefiting from the electoral advantage that incumbents normally hold, than with the risk of a damaging internal fight over the 2024 nomination. Even if Kamala Harris were able to quickly consolidate support within the party as Biden's heir apparent, she would still stand in the general election as both a less tested national figure and as a liberal woman of color seeking the presidency in a highly polarized era.

Leading Democrats who have their president's ear are thus very likely to encourage his intention to seek a second term—and to be terrified that a premature Biden retirement would only further increase the chances of a Trump comeback in 2024. Even if Biden were to have doubts about his ability to serve a full eight years, a successful re-election and subsequent mid-term handoff to Harris, setting her up as an incumbent in her own right before she had to face the voters, would be a much more desirable solution according to prevailing Democratic calculations. And Biden has already shown that he's the kind of president who cares a lot about what other people in his party think.

Yes, health considerations or other events may alter these plans. It's certainly possible that Joe Biden will not still be running for a second term when we get to 2024. But right now? Of course he's running. He's already started.

Biden's Early Moves Reflect the Declining Strength of the Center-Right

The predominant media storyline of the new Biden presidency so far is that it is surprisingly liberal and surprisingly partisan. A Washington community that has long viewed Biden as an instinctive ideological moderate who prides himself on his ability to work with members of the opposite party, and that interpreted his nomination as a decisive defeat for the purist left, has been forced to recalibrate its perceptions in the face of his early governing choices. Progressive observers have found much to cheer so far in Biden's policy and personnel decisions, with some even indulging the hope that his presidency might represent a historical turning point in American politics. Meanwhile, conservative critics have already begun to complain that the new chief executive is failing to live up to his own calls for political unity.

The "moderate" label was always a poor fit for Biden, used mostly as a facile shorthand to denote that his politics differed from those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. As I observed after his selection of Kamala Harris last August, Biden's actual career-long persona is "regular Democrat," with issue positions and priorities that have evolved over the decades in parallel with the mainstream of his party. The appointment of progressives to multiple administration positions—especially at the sub-cabinet and agency levels—and the ambition of Biden's major proposals in a range of policy areas can be viewed as a simple reflection of a recent leftward shift within the Democratic Party as a whole.

But there's another change that's important here. Biden and his team aren't just being pulled by internal partisan dynamics toward a strengthening left wing. They are also much less motivated than previous Democratic administrations to court the approval of the ideological center-right.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama appointed Republicans to their administrations and pursued bipartisan policy solutions in part to build reputations among political elites as mature statesmen capable of rising above mere partisan loyalties. Their primary audience for these decisions was an "official Washington" composed of media thought leaders, think tank staffers, executives and lobbyists, and other political actors who had become accustomed to view Republican rule of the executive branch as the natural order of things (Republicans held the presidency for all but 4 years between 1968 and 1992, and all but 12 between 1968 and 2008) and to venerate right-of-center figures like Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan as the ideal personifications of public service. Much of this official Washington applauded Clinton's and Obama's "responsibility" and "toughness" when they departed from traditional liberal doctrine to pursue deficit reduction at home or military intervention abroad, and sympathetically portrayed non-Democrats within their administrations like David Gergen, Bill Cohen, and Robert Gates as the adults in the room keeping a necessary check on liberal naïveté.

Expectations that the Biden presidency would follow a similar path had caused a certain anticipatory disaffection on the left. But Democratic veterans of the Clinton and early Obama eras see a very different Republican Party when they look across the aisle today. The last decade of American politics, marked by the Tea Party movement and ascendancy of Donald Trump, has convinced even "establishment" Democrats that making concessions outside their party doesn't provide them much benefit—for either producing major policy achievements or realizing significant political advantages. And official Washington has discarded the once-prevalent assumption that the Republican Party is a valuable source of expertise and experience upon which Democratic presidents should productively draw. After the last four years, which party has a better claim to be the adults in the room?

If Biden had defeated Trump by a landslide margin in November, it might have paradoxically tempted him to govern in a more cautious style as a way to keep a wave of new defectors from the GOP inside his coalitional tent. But the last two elections have demonstrated that the anti-Trump Republicans who populate high-status editorial pages and Beltway professional circles are not representative of a numerically populous mass constituency; their approval might make a positive impression within a limited peer group, but it simply doesn't sway many voters. As long as the Republican Party remains devoted to Trump's style of politics if not Trump himself, Democrats may calculate that moderates and conservatives who find Trumpism intolerable will have little choice but to root for Biden's success even if his record is more liberal than they'd like.

The new opportunities for influence granted to the American left by the decaying position of the center-right may turn out to be one of the most unexpected political legacies of the Trump years. Center-right elites used to see themselves as the natural leaders of a "center-right nation." But today they are increasingly abandoned by both partisan sides, facing the realization that they speak mostly for themselves.

In the End, the Trump Presidency Was a Failure on Its Own Terms

The most surprising political development of the 21st century was that Donald Trump became president of the United States. The least surprising development was that he turned out to be bad at the job.

Evaluating presidential performance can be difficult. Some presidents' qualities only become clear long after they leave office, as previously unknown information comes to light and the revelations of history render their decisions more or less justified than they seemed at the time. Ideological predispositions inevitably color our views of political figures, who sometimes rise or fall in retrospective estimation as subsequent intellectual trends shift the grounds on which they are judged—like the renewed emphasis in recent years on the importance of civil rights that has bolstered the reputation of U. S. Grant among presidential scholars while damaging that of Woodrow Wilson. And there is no consensus, even among experts, on what the responsibilities of the president are and what standards are appropriate to determine success in office.

Regardless of these challenges, the general verdict on Trump among historians and political scientists, reporters and commentators, and most of the Washington political community (including, at least privately, many Republicans) is guaranteed to range from disappointment and mockery to outright declarations that he was the worst president in American history. And there is little reason to expect that the information yet to emerge about the internal operations of the Trump administration will improve his reputation in the future. Instead, it's far more likely that there are stories still to be told about the events of the last four years that history will find just as damning as today's public knowledge.

Trump's defenders will respond that the scholars and journalists who claim the authority to write this history are fatally corrupted by hostile bias. It's certainly true that these are collectively left-leaning professions, and that the Trump presidency treated both of these groups as political opponents from its earliest days. So what if we tried for a moment to give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attempting to evaluate his presidency as much as possible on its own terms? Did Trump succeed in achieving what he wanted to do, even if it wasn't what others wanted him to do?

One approach to answering this question involves returning to the 2016 campaign and comparing the positions of Trump the candidate to the record of Trump the president. Trump did deliver on some of his promises once in office: he cut taxes and regulations, he strengthened barriers to immigration and travel from overseas, and he appointed a large number of conservatives to the federal judiciary. But his signature proposals were never enacted, including the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, the significant renegotiation of international trade agreements, a major federal infrastructure investment, and a wall spanning the nation's southern border funded by the Mexican government.

There was also a more general set of failures that didn't concern specific policies as much as a basic approach to the job. While a candidate in 2016, Trump presented himself as an energetic deal-maker who would fight harder than his predecessors in both parties for the interests of the American people. But he turned out to be much less invested in his official responsibilities than in spending his daily "executive time" watching cable television and his weekends playing golf; he was sufficiently self-conscious about this lack of work ethic to inelegantly deny it in public ("President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings") but not to actually alter his behavior. 

Trump's pre-election suggestions that he would attract an all-star team of executive personnel to join the government similarly stood in sharp contrast to the actual staff of his administration, which was by some distance the least qualified and talented group of subordinates assembled by any modern president of either party. (And many key positions were filled by acting appointees or were simply left vacant for months and even years.)

With Trump's evident lack of interest in substantive details, his instinct for combativeness (a universally-acknowledged personal quality which many of his supporters admired), and his apparent difficulties in grasping the motivations of others, the promised knack for deal-making never materialized either. Both major legislative achievements of his presidency—the 2017 tax cut bill and the two rounds of COVID relief in 2020—were, by all accounts, developed and enacted with minimal direct involvement by the president. When Trump did insert himself in legislative negotiations in late 2018 and early 2019 by demanding that Congress approve funding for his border wall, the result was a prolonged government shutdown and subsequent retreat after Senate Republicans abandoned their support for his position.

Of course, politicians occasionally have been known to make promises on the campaign trail that they do not expect to keep if elected. Maybe it's inaccurate to treat public commitments in the midst of a tough electoral race as evidence of a president's true goals. So, based on the actions of the Trump administration once it began, what can we conclude about what it wanted to do and whether it succeeded in doing it?

The primary animating force of the Trump presidency, the juice that fueled the president and his subordinates every day, was the waging of a permanent political war against an array of perceived enemies. The Democratic Party was one such enemy—this was by far the most thoroughly partisan presidency in memory—but hardly the only one. The news media, career bureaucrats, intellectuals and educators, the entertainment industry, and any insufficiently supportive Republican were all dependable targets.

This war was unrelenting, but achieved few victories outside the bounds of the Republican Party (where Trump's influence and threats were most effective at punishing dissenters). Trump's critics spent the past four years feeling sad, angry, offended, and even fearful about the potential destruction of American democracy. But it's hard to make the case that their political or cultural power was weaker at the end of his presidency than it was at the beginning.

Trump succeeded in preventing Hillary Clinton from leading the country, but he wound up empowering Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer instead. He railed against liberal elites who predominate within social institutions like universities, media organizations, and technology companies, but his time in office only saw a continued progression of leftward cultural change in American society and a parallel departure of highly-educated voters from the Republican Party. The conservative intellectual project has not suffered as much damage in many decades as it did over the past four years; conservative thinkers and writers were internally divided into pro- and anti-Trump factions, were exposed as holding a limited ability to speak for the conservative mass public, and were deprived by Trump's behavior of a precious claim to moral superiority over the left. And the fact that the Trump administration is leaving office complaining of being "silenced" and "canceled" by a multi-platform social media ban imposed on its leader is evidence enough of its lack of success in gaining influence over the tech sector.

A final, inadvertantly-acknowledged testimony to the failure of the Trump administration was its prevailing communication style. Both the outgoing president and his succession of spokespeople stood out for two distinctive traits: a lack of commitment to factual accuracy and a perpetually grouchy demeanor. The typical public statement from this White House was a misleading claim delivered with a sarcastic sneer. Of course, no member of the administration would admit on the record that the Trump presidency was anything less than a parade of unparalleled triumphs. But it doesn't make sense to lie so much unless the truth isn't on your side, and there's no good reason to act so aggrieved all the time if you're really succeeding as much as you claim.

Two Weaknesses Exposed on Capitol Hill

The most prevalent conspiracy theory within the Republican Party, promoted for decades by many of its elected officials and opinion leaders, holds that the Democratic opposition regularly steals elections via organized plots of fraudulent balloting and ballot-counting. On Wednesday, January 6, this theory took human form and broke down the doors and windows of the U.S. Capitol in Washington as the officers of the American government fled in fear for their safety, and even their lives.

It's impossible to know for sure how many Republicans actually believe these claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud, how many do not, and how many land somewhere in the middle. But even those who are not sincere adherents can find conspiracy theories to be quite useful. For decades now, accusations and insinuations of electoral dishonesty have accompanied Republican resistance to Democratic initiatives aiming to lower the administrative burdens of voting, and have justified the imposition of voter identification requirements at polling places in a number of states. (Both parties tend to believe, accurately or not, that measures making it easier to vote work to the advantage of Democratic electoral fortunes.)

The results of the 2020 presidential contest supplied even more reasons for Republicans to promote stories of a stolen election. This claim could provide a psychologically satisfying explanation for why a president whom many conservatives admire to the point of hero worship nevertheless failed to win a second term in office. It could allow other figures in the party to demonstrate their solidarity with the president in question, who is well-known for demanding regular gestures of personal loyalty. And it could fuel a simmering anger among conservative voters at the supposed illegitimacy of the incoming president, which could helpfully stimulate high engagement and turnout in future elections.

But when a large population of citizens is told repeatedly by authorities they trust that political power is being improperly seized by a nefarious cabal, many will naturally start to think that they should do something drastic to stop it. And so whatever strategic cleverness might have inspired the repeated promotion of this and other conspiracy theories has been abruptly joined this week by what might be euphemistically called the corresponding downside risk.

The past five years have been especially valuable in revealing where power within the Republican Party does and doesn't reside. Republican members of Congress enjoy substantial internal influence in certain areas: they largely controlled the party's legislative agenda and shaped much of the policy-making during the tenure of the outgoing administration. But in the realm of rhetoric and communication, of speaking for their party and guiding its members, congressional Republicans are clearly at the mercy of a conservative media apparatus that has achieved the ability to dictate what the Republican Party should and shouldn’t publicly stand for.

If being a true conservative requires refusing to deny that the 2020 presidential election was rigged by treacherous Democrats, then Republican politicians will, regardless of their private views, be reluctant to defend the integrity of the electoral system, will support the disenfranchisement of voters from multiple states merely on the basis of improbable claims and rumors dismissed in courts of law by judicial appointees of both parties, and will pile on to demand the resignation of a fellow Republican elected official who was baselessly accused of mismanaging the administration of his state’s election once it became clear that the Democrats had narrowly won there.

The personal calculation at play here is obvious enough, and politicians of both parties can be expected to protect their own interests. But what do these acts add up to, in the end, if not the willful spreading of untruth, and the cession of massive national power to a set of voices who hardly even claim to prize or reward anything more than victory over their political adversaries? Recent events raise the question of whether the inarguable failure of security forces to defend the Capitol has been mirrored by an equally damaging weakness of responsible leadership from those who are supposed, at least some of the time, to lead. Can our form of government count on faithful protection from its stewards regardless of the partisan winds of the moment? Or are civic values, like the buildings that so often symbolize them, vulnerable to being smashed to pieces by those angry that they lost the last fight?

Why So Many Conservatives Believe the 2020 Election Was Stolen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Big Benefits That Trump Provides to Republican Politicians

One widespread assumption of the last four years has held that most Republican members of Congress and other top elected officials privately disdain Donald Trump, view him as a serious political liability foisted on them by misguided voters, and would just as soon be rid of him forever as the leader and dominant personality of their party. This view unites liberals whose own hatred of Trump is so strong that they presume it simply must be widely shared (even by Mrs. Trump), anti-Trump conservatives who insist on maintaining a sharp distinction between Trump and the rest of the GOP, and journalists who have often seen Republican politicians roll their eyes at, or complain on background about, various Trump-related antics.

But the events of the past two weeks confirm that anti-Trump sentiment is by no means widespread among the national Republican leadership. Congressional Republicans have hardly used the opportunity of Trump's electoral defeat to put his presidency behind them. In fact, they have done little to dispel, and in some cases have openly promoted, Trump's own claims that the election was illegitimately decided—even though the acceptance of such beliefs among Republican voters makes it more likely that Trump retains his hold on the party for at least another four years, potentially culminating in a third consecutive presidential nomination in 2024.

The burdens that Trump hangs on his fellow partisans are obvious and well-chronicled. But he also provides some valuable benefits to other Republican politicians that aren't as widely appreciated. Here are three important ways in which Trump keeps many of them satisfied with, and even enthusiastic about, his continued leadership of the party:

1. Ideology. Everybody remembers how little support Trump received from Republican officials when he first ran for president in 2015 and 2016. But a fair amount of that opposition wasn't really based on a moral objection to Trump the man, as has been made clear in retrospect. Instead, it reflected Republican worries that Trump would be an unelectable nominee or that he couldn't be trusted to uphold conservative ideology. Both concerns were soon alleviated: Trump was indeed elected president, and he quickly proceeded to lead the most consistently conservative administration in nearly a century. Whereas even George W. Bush, once a national conservative hero, occasionally pushed his partisan allies in Congress to support ideologically impure legislation (the No Child Left Behind Act, Medicare Part D, comprehensive immigration reform), Trump has left the Republican right with few tough dilemmas and much to cheer. His policy agenda and personnel appointments (including to the federal judiciary) have been almost uniformly conservative, and—despite the "deal-making maverick" persona of his first campaign—he has never shown much interest in forcing his party into compromise with the Democratic opposition.

2. Protection. Beneath the Type-A bravado that many Republicans prefer to adopt in public lies a great deal of fear and vulnerability. The Obama years were a difficult time for Republican politicians, who found themselves the targets of constant criticism from conservative activists. For every veteran incumbent who was seriously challenged in a Republican primary election, many more suffered repeated attacks from angry constituents and conservative media figures who accused them of failing to prevent Obama's rise to power. But the Trump presidency has eased these conflicts. Trump's popularity among the Republican electorate is so profound that an endorsement or word of praise from him is usually enough to protect other Republicans from backlash among the grassroots. And to earn this precious seal of approval, Republicans don't need to take a series of tough votes or alienate important constituencies; they just need to stay publicly loyal to "Mr. Trump" and defend him from his enemies. For most Republican incumbents, who represent safely red states or districts where Trump is popular and Democratic challengers aren't a serious threat, that's a pretty good bargain.

3. Mobilization. Both the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election produced voter turnout rates that hadn't been matched in a century or more. Democrats were able to harness deep antipathy to Trump to mobilize their supporters and win control of the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020. But Republicans flocked to the polls as well to defend Trump, even in a midterm election when he wasn't on the ballot. Though this conservative electoral engagement couldn't save Trump from defeat or keep the House in Republican hands, it did allow Republicans to pick up Senate seats in 2018 and potentially maintain control of the chamber for at least the first two years of Biden's presidency as well—while the unanticipated gains in House races this year make a return to power in 2022 very possible. Trump critics were hoping that the 2020 elections would deliver a national popular repudiation of the Republican Party as punishment for the perceived sins of its leader. Instead, Trump lost an unexpectedly close race for re-election while other Republican candidates benefited from the turnout surge among his devotees and a critical slice of down-ballot support from voters who opted for Biden at the top of the ticket. Never before in modern American history has a party emerged as unscathed from the defeat of its incumbent president.

Enthusiasm for Trump's leadership is, of course, hardly universal within the GOP; the existence of openly critical figures like Mitt Romney and John Kasich suggests the presence of additional anti-Trump Republicans who keep their opposition quiet for reasons of political self-interest. But we shouldn't assume that publicly-stated support for Trump is only motivated by a strategic calculation to pander to the Republican electorate. For many Republicans, Trump's flaws are accompanied by some very real assets, and they can envision a worse future than one where he continues to lead the Republican Party even while in exile.

In the 2020 Elections, Partisan Stability Defeats Expectations of Change

Imagine someone who set off into the Siberian wilderness right after the 2018 midterms, didn't experience any of the 2020 campaign, and returned to civilization today to see the outcome of last week's election. This person would come back to the following results: 

• A close national presidential contest decided by crucial victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

• A set of Senate races that almost perfectly mirrored the presidential results in each state, with the lone exception of Republican moderate Susan Collins outrunning the rest of her party's candidates in Maine.

• A mostly incumbent-friendly set of House elections, with a few of the 2018 Democratic wave's biggest upset winners—Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico—unable to defend their Republican-leaning seats when facing a presidential-year electorate.

• A continuation of the ongoing pro-Democratic shift in the nation's largest metropolitan areas, pushing former "red states" Arizona and Georgia into full partisan competitiveness and reducing the size of the Republican statewide advantage in Texas.

• A partially countervailing solidification of Republican electoral strength in small towns and rural areas nearly everywhere in the country except New England, keeping key states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania highly competitive while shifting Ohio and Iowa further toward the GOP.

If this person were a Democrat, he or she might be perfectly content with an election in which Donald Trump was defeated and Nancy Pelosi's House majority remained intact. Or maybe there would be some dismay that the popular repudiation of Trump was not strong enough to deliver Democrats an outright national landslide that handed the party clear control of the Senate. Likewise, a Republican supporter might mourn Trump's defeat—or conclude that, under the circumstances, the outcome could have been even worse. 

But there would be no reason for our returning wanderer to be surprised about any of the major results of the 2020 election. The outcome represents a doggedly consistent continuation of the basic electoral fundamentals of the last decade or more: closely-matched popular support for each party, severe and growing geographic polarization, rampant straight-ticket voting, and important Republican structural advantages in the electoral college and congressional apportionment, especially in the Senate.

Those advantages meant that Biden's victory over Donald Trump was in fact very narrow; a shift of 1 percent of the vote in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona would have re-elected Trump despite Biden's comfortable lead in the national popular vote. But they also increase the magnitude of Biden's achievement: the defeat of an elected incumbent president for only the fourth time in the last century, and the ejection of a party from control of the White House after just four years in power for only the second time since 1896. And the pro-Republican tilt of our electoral institutions helps to explain why Democrats were unable to grow their margin in the House of Representatives or win a majority in the Senate, which wound up tempering some party members' delight in the election results.

That disappointment was mostly a testament to the power of pre-election polling to sway expectations. Thanks to overly rosy survey results, optimistic Democrats had visions of revolutionary success dancing in their heads: Senate victories in Montana, Kansas, and even South Carolina; breakthroughs in House races in Indiana and Missouri; even Texas turning "blue" for the first time in 44 years. This wasn't just partisan daydreaming; Republican operatives told journalists that their own private polls were as potentially devastating to their party as the publicly-released data.

There's a lesson here beyond the obvious need to re-evaluate the trustworthiness of polling methodology and forecasting models. For all the ways in which American politics seems to have entered a period of rapid and disorienting change, the partisan preferences of the electorate have only become more and more entrenched over time. Events and developments that might seem inevitably transformative, from Trump's election to the COVID epidemic to piles of small-dollar donations raised by congressional candidates from Maine to Alaska, have repeatedly proven to have only minor effects on the voting choices of citizens loyally committed to their existing partisan teams. If we simply assume that this electoral stability will prevail until proven otherwise, we are much less likely to be surprised by what we see.

The Reappearing American Voter

We're almost at the end of the 2020 campaign season, and there will be plenty to say soon enough about the outcome. But before attention turns to the various winners and losers of this year's election, it's worth pausing to recognize something that's already clear: the national turnout rate is certain to be unusually high, perhaps even to historical levels. And that in itself is a remarkable fact.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a widespread concern about the declining proportion of electoral participation. Scholars and analysts spoke of the "disappearing American voter," connecting this trend to a worrisome decay of community engagement and social ties more generally (as in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Americans had become apathetic and cynical about politics, it was said, withdrawing from meaningful civic life to seek refuge in the comparatively mindless world of mass entertainment.

It's not likely that Americans today are less distrustful, or less obsessed with pop culture, than they were 25 or 30 years ago. But they are certainly voting more often. According to calculations by Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, the national turnout rate in presidential elections hit a modern low point in 1996, when 52 percent of eligible citizens showed up to vote. By the 2008 election of Barack Obama, turnout had risen to 62 percent of eligible citizens, the highest share since 1968. Even the 2016 contest—widely viewed as an uninspiring choice between two unpopular candidates—resulted in a turnout rate of 60 percent, comparable to the rates in the supposedly more civically healthy decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

We have several reasons to believe that turnout will be even higher in 2020. The 2018 midterm elections produced a turnout of 50 percent, the highest rate in a non-presidential year since women were granted the franchise in 1920. Unusually high numbers of respondents are telling pollsters that they are closely following the current election, care about who wins, and intend to vote. And many have already voted: the volume of early and mail-in votes is far above that of any previous year (reflecting pandemic concerns and the promotion of alternative voting procedures by many state election officials), to the point that ballot totals in some states already rival or exceed the number cast four years ago even before Election Day itself. If the national turnout reaches 155 million voters, or 65 percent of the eligible electorate, it will be the highest participation rate in more than a century.

There are several plausible contributing factors to the post-1990s rise in turnout, but one surely is the growing perception that elections are very important—that it really matters to the direction of the country whether one candidate or the other becomes president. As it turned out, then, the cure for fading electoral participation was greater partisan polarization and more divisive candidacies. Perhaps this is a worthwhile reminder that in politics, the perceived problems of one era are often solved by the perceived problems of the next.

Second Presidential Debate Recap: At Long Last, a Conventional Partisan Fight

Thursday's event was the fifth general election debate of Donald Trump's political career. It was, by far, the most ordinary of the five.

Yes, there were some of the usual uniquely Trumpian flourishes—the factual hyperbole, the sarcastic mockery of the opposition, the dubious stories of people being moved to tears in his presence. But the relative lack of interruptions and constant cross-talk this time around exposed the familiarity of the actual substantive terrain over which the candidates fought.

Joe Biden acted very much like a typical Democrat. He came to the debate armed with summaries of specific policy proposals to address specific social problems, along with associated facts and figures: a public option for health care, a climate change bill, an immigration reform initiative. He pledged to protect the interests of specific groups within the Democratic coalition, such as labor unions, African-Americans, and the "middle class" more generally.

Trump, for his part, exercised the usual Republican counterstrategy against such an approach. He conceded ground on many of the specific policies, and even tried to outflank Biden at times (as on criminal justice). At times, his attacks did not target the content of Biden's proposals at all, but instead cited Biden's lack of success at achieving them while he was in office. 

But Trump also described Biden's agenda in a more general sense as ideologically radical, associating Biden with left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He warned that Biden's election would threaten the future of America as we know it. And he repeatedly cited various stories and claims that circulate in the conservative media but are less well-known outside its regular consumer base.

That Joe Biden is a walking personification of his party is hardly news. But beneath the idiosyncratic exterior, Donald Trump has himself become an increasingly orthodox Republican over the course of his time in politics. In both his rhetoric and his substantive positions, Trump hews more closely to party doctrine today than he did in 2016, and his instincts in the heat of the debate reflect this evolution.

Many media commentators opined afterwards that the debate didn't break any new ground. That's a reasonable characterization. But one big reason why is that each candidate adopted the traditional playbook of his own partisan team, playing to its perennial strengths and defending against its weaknesses. In a year stuffed with unprecedented developments, it was a rare moment of political conventionality.

Five Years of Graft

Today, October 14, happens to be the five-year anniversary of the first post published on Honest Graft. (The post drew on a presidential primary debate to argue that the contemporary Democratic Party has very much remade itself in the image of Barack Obama, a point that has become a bit of a hobbyhorse around here ever since.) While blogging about the blog itself is not normally the HG house style, it seems like a milestone worth recognizing with a bit of personal reflection. After all, five years is a pretty long lifespan in blog time.

I started Honest Graft with the self-justification that it would be worthwhile even if almost nobody read the posts. For one thing, I often find that writing about a subject helps me figure out what I think about it. Developing a habit of posting regularly about current events more or less as they occurred would compel me to form a point of view on what was going on. I reasoned that this might help me understand politics better, might spark ideas for research, or at least might leave me an electronic paper trail of contemporary analysis that might be useful later on for recalling what important political moments felt like at the time.

In the fall of 2015, I was also an assistant professor with two book projects in progress but no publishing contracts in hand and no certainty of receiving tenure. Practicing my non-academic thinking and writing skills seemed like a prudent use of my limited spare time, in case my academic career didn't work out and I needed to find another job.

Happily, my professional luck improved soon afterwards. Matt Grossmann and I placed Asymmetric Politics with Oxford University Press that December, and the following spring Cambridge University Press mercifully rescued Red Fighting Blue from indefinite purgatory at another publisher. But I kept the blog going even after my promotion: it was rewarding to do, plus American politics had entered an unusually eventful phase that generated a constant stream of fodder for contemplation.

Blogging is much less fashionable than it used to be, and that's a shame. The social media platforms that have mostly supplanted it are an inferior replacement in many respects except the ability to trade quick interactions with friends in other places. Social media too often encourages hit-and-run hot takes or cheap shots at the expense of developing a nuanced line of thought, it rewards trite pandering to partisan or ideological claques, and it has fostered a distinctively adolescent prevailing culture of behavior that is alienating to anyone who prefers a drier, less dramatic style of expression. As its consciously retro and amateurish visual design scheme symbolizes, Honest Graft is a bit of a throwback, but it's still been a lot of fun. I would recommend blogging to anyone who's considered it—especially academics looking for a way to apply their knowledge and skills to topics of contemporary interest.

Honest Graft has introduced me to many people whom I might never have otherwise gotten the chance to meet. Thank you to everyone who's been a regular or occasional reader, shared a post with friends or followers, or passed along a response or a compliment. I appreciate it all, and you've made the blog a very unexpected success. While too many people to name have been extraordinarily supportive over the years, I want to take the occasion of this anniversary to express my gratitude to two great friends of Honest Graft.

The first is John Sides, the co-founder of the Monkey Cage and a professor at Vanderbilt University. John has been a patron of HG from its inception, reprinting some early posts at the Monkey Cage when I was still new to blogging. The Monkey Cage has stood for years as a monument to the value of public engagement, giving specialist scholars a platform to share their expertise with wider audiences to mutual benefit, and both it and John's own scholarship and analysis have set an exemplary standard for those of us who follow.

And nobody has been a more loyal and enthusiastic benefactor than my good friend Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion. Many readers over the past five years discovered HG from one of his links—which makes me proud, because it means that they were reading a sharp and skillful observer of current events who boasts the rare combination of intellectual mastery and outstanding intuitive political judgment. I'm very grateful for his encouragement and generosity.

Thanks again to all of you for clicking and reading, and let's see where the next five years take us...

The New Electoral Map Isn't Very New, But Biden's Lead Keeps the Battleground From Shrinking

We're now in the home stretch of the 2020 presidential campaign, with millions of ballots already cast via early and mail-in voting. The two candidates and their advisors are now making final decisions about where to allocate resources—ad spending, voter mobilization operations, and travel by the nominees and their running mates, spouses‚ and top surrogates—based on their current appraisals of optimal electoral college strategy.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton actively contested 14 states between them in 2016, collectively casting 32 percent of the nation's electoral votes. In the wake of the last election, however, most analysts expected the geographic scope of electoral competition to shrink in 2020. Trump's comfortable victories in Ohio (by 8 percentage points) and Iowa (by more than 9), along with his unexpected strength across the rest of the Midwest, seemed to signal that these two perennial battleground states were no longer pivotal and might be justifiably conceded to the Republicans in the future, while the pro-Democratic shift evident in sections of the Sun Belt from 2012 to 2016 wasn't clearly strong enough yet to push traditionally "red" bastions like Georgia and Texas into legitimate partisan competitiveness.

These expectations were all perfectly reasonable extrapolations from the 2016 results. But they rested on assumptions of another tight contest in 2020, rather than the clear and consistent Democratic lead—now flirting with double digits in the national popular vote—that actually emerged. Joe Biden's overall advantage has allowed him to remain viable in Ohio and Iowa despite their recent Republican leanings while also mounting an incursion into Georgia and Texas, both uncontested by Democratic presidential candidates since the 1990s. The only two states to drop out of the battleground category between 2016 and 2020 were Virginia and Colorado, both already swiftly moving in a Democratic direction but put altogether out of reach for the Republicans by a poor national climate for the party this year.

Contrary to previous suggestions of a shrinking battleground map, then, the presidential campaigns are once again contesting 14 states in 2020 (plus the single electoral vote awarded to the winner of Nebraska's 2nd congressional district). The replacement of Virginia and Colorado with the more populous states of Texas and Georgia means that the candidates are actually fighting over more presidential electors than last time—in fact, as the figure below demonstrates, the battleground this year is the largest in terms of electoral votes since the 2000 election:

Figure adapted from Red Fighting Blue: 

How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics

It's often hard in the moment to separate short-term variation from long-term trends, to distinguish changes that are harbingers of the future from those that are merely temporary deviations from the norm. The assumption that 2016 foreshadowed a more permanent fading of Democratic fortunes in the Great Lakes states as the party built a new regional base in the metropolitan South and Southwest was reasonable enough, but may well turn out to be at least a bit premature. Predictions that the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee would perform better in Arizona (carried once by the party in the last 17 presidential elections) than Wisconsin (carried seven times in the past eight elections) aren't consistent with the polls so far; as of today, the FiveThirtyEight polling average shows Biden leading Trump by 8 points in Wisconsin and 4 points in Arizona. 

Polls so far indicate a fairly uniform swing between 2016 and 2020. Biden seems to be improving on Clinton's performance by a roughly comparable margin pretty much everywhere, though it wouldn't be surprising if this shift turned out to be a bit bigger in the Midwest than the Sun Belt given that he is apparently doing a better job winning back senior citizens and non-college whites from Trump than he is in outperforming Clinton's showing among young voters and racial minorities.

At the same time, it's a legitimately important development that Arizona, Texas, and Georgia are all potentially competitive states in federal elections, even if (at least for now) it requires a 10-point national popular vote margin (and a record-breaking fundraising haul) for Democrats to put all three in contention. The changing partisan alignments of a few individual states should be understood in the proper context of what is overall a historically stable electoral map. But in an era of closely-matched and highly polarized national parties, even small shifts in geographic coalitions can have big consequences for the outcome of elections and the governance of the nation.

Vice Presidential Debate Recap: Nothing Interesting Happened...Thankfully

The vice presidential debate Wednesday night between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris was such a crucial ritual of American democracy—so precious to our electoral process that it had to be held in person despite an active national epidemic—that many leading figures in American journalism found their attention repeatedly distracted by a fly that landed on Pence's head partway through the evening.

Both participants are classic pols with well-crafted classic pol personas that don't compel them to answer questions they don't find it advisable to answer, and the vice presidential debate is always a slightly unnatural format because it mostly involves attacking or defending two other people who aren't in the room. The relative discipline and polish of both Pence and Harris compared to this year's presidential nominees makes it easier for the strategic calculations of both campaigns to come through: Democrats want the election to turn on COVID-19 and health care, while Republicans would rather talk about China and the Green New Deal.

The lower rhetorical temperature compared to last week's presidential faceoff was nominally praised by commentators, but the consensus media judgment that "no minds would be changed" as a result, as well as the fixation on the fly, betrayed a certain general boredom with the proceedings. But because debates are a lousy basis on which to choose a candidate—especially vice presidential debates—this was actually a good sign. There's really nothing wrong with a boring debate, after all. There are worse things in politics than prosaic adequacy.

First Presidential Debate Recap: What Was Said Is Still More Important Than How It Was Said

As a long-confirmed debate skeptic who was thoroughly unsurprised by what happened Tuesday night, I must admit to feeling a bit amused by the theatrically offended responses of major media personalities, whose (normally ample) faith in the civic value of debates was suddenly shaken to the point of wondering whether there would, or should, be a second or third event this year. Nothing that President Trump did or said was any different from what he has done or said in countless press conferences, interviews, and Twitter communications since he became a political figure. But for some reason this thoroughly characteristic behavior is deemed to be a more serious threat to the health of the polity when it occurs on the sacred debate stage than in any other public forum.

I, too, would welcome a calmer and more respectful exchange of ideas conducted with scrupulous adherence to the mutually negotiated ground rules. In the end, though, it's a mistake to focus too much on issues of personal demeanor at the expense of rhetorical substance—how something was said, rather than what was said. Who interrupted whom is not terribly important at a time when the nation is facing multiple simultaneous crises, and when the legitimacy of the election itself is among the topics openly contested by the candidates.

There was a time when Trump was treated as the most fascinatingly spontaneous figure in politics. Compared to other politicians, he certainly seemed that way at first—all the ad libs and digressions and heterodoxies and he-didn't-just-say-that-did-he transgressiveness made him stand out from the scripted, handled pack. But after years and years of the same approach, same arguments, and same obsessions, he's actually become remarkably predictable; the bag of tricks has turned out to be smaller than it looked. Other presidents who have suffered poorly-received debate performances have shown the ability to learn, to adapt, to change their strategic course. But there's little reason to expect anything but more of the same in the next two debates, which leaves the Trump campaign mostly where it was before tonight: hoping that their current opponent somehow becomes just as divisive as their last one.

If We Must Have Debates, Let's at Least Make Them Smarter

The closest that this blog comes to a pose of assertive contrarianism is its consistently dismissive attitude toward the staging of televised debates in presidential campaigns. Debates are a well-established quadrennial tradition that are often treated as sacred rites of civic virtue; self-righteous outrage predictably ensues upon any suggestion that a candidate might or should refuse to participate. The political world is filled with people who are invested in puffing up debates, many of whom were no doubt captains of their high school debate teams. But there's a pretty strong case that their actual value to the democratic process is often zero and sometimes negative. 

There are two main problems with debates. First, they are framed in advance as valuable exercises in political deliberation and public edification even though they are actually treated as a form of entertainment and as one more arena of partisan competition. Second, the media commentators whose interpretations affect public perceptions of the outcome often decide who "won" and who "lost" on fairly silly grounds. Cracking a pre-written joke, sighing into a microphone, having too much on-camera energy or not enough—are these really the moments upon which the leadership of the nation should properly turn?

If debates are here to stay, which they are at least until a future candidate is bold enough to boycott them, they could at least be smartened up a bit. Here are three specific areas that could badly use improvement:

1. Before the debates: ignore campaign spin. 

When it comes to debates, media commentators not only admit to being influenced by campaign spin, but even judge the performance of the candidates against the prior claims of their opponents. For this reason, the Trump campaign's repeated attacks on Biden as mentally enfeebled—often accompanied by suggestions that the debates will dramatically expose his incompetence—strike some analysts as a serious strategic error that will make it easy for the media to declare Biden the winner. Since Trump has suggested that Biden can't make it through a 90-minute live event without embarrassing himself, or at least without the use of surreptitious pharmacological assistance, he has presumably set a very low bar for his opponent to clear.

Maybe Trump didn't play the spin game well. So what? There's no good reason why independent observers' judgments about debate performance should be shaped by whatever the nominees or their flacks say beforehand. (And note the recent Washington Post story quoting anonymous Democratic sources trying to lower expectations in their own way by claiming to worry about Biden losing his temper in response to Trump's provocations.) The excessive importance of prior "expectations" means that debate participants are often not compared with each other, but are judged instead against the caricatures of themselves that already exist in the minds of media analysts. Indeed, if Trump were simply to behave 30 percent less combatively than normal tomorrow night, he would earn some of the best press coverage of his entire presidency even if his performance were otherwise unmemorable.

2. During the debates: ask questions designed to illuminate important subjects for voters, not just play gotcha with candidates.

Debate moderators sometimes fall into the practice of choosing what they think of as "tough" questions: questions that try to catch a candidate in some kind of exaggeration or hypocrisy, or that effectively restate whatever attacks the opposition is making at the time. There is a place for such questions. But they seldom produce interesting responses, in part because candidates anticipate them and rehearse a deflection, and the debate can easily become stuck on a topic that doesn't ultimately have much to do with the job the participants are seeking.

Intended "gotcha" questions should be better balanced with more open-ended, less overtly antagonistic questions that invite candidates to envision the future as well as defend their past, and that focus as much as possible on the presidency's actual powers—which are more expansive in the realms of foreign policy and public administration than in the well-trod ground of legislator-in-chief—as well as its limitations. If debates are to be a kind of public job interview in which the audience actually learns something about the applicants that is relevant to their potential future responsibilities, the questions need to reflect what the job actually is. And any "fun" or "unconventional" question—"what do you do to relax?" or "can you say something nice about your opponent?"—is always an insulting waste of time, a smarmy condescension to Middle America in the guise of artificial folksiness. (Whenever regular citizens have the opportunity to address presidential candidates, they nearly always ask questions that are serious and policy-focused.)

3. After the debates: coverage should focus on what was said, not how it was said.

The history of debates is strewn with supposed candidate gaffes, but very few of those identified by media critics involve truly troubling mistakes—the misstatement of an important fact, the outright smear of an opponent, an insensitive remark directed towards a social group. From Richard Nixon's physical appearance to Mitt Romney's inelegantly-phrased description of his governorship's female staff recruitment efforts, nearly all of the best-remembered debate "blunders" over the years remain firmly at the who-really-cares level of substantive importance. Even the ability of a candidate to recover from a "bad" performance in one debate with a "good" showing a week or two later, as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all did in their re-election campaigns, merely proves how unreliable it can be to judge potential presidents based on their personal demeanor in any particular circumstance. Besides, we already know plenty about what kinds of people these candidates are. Let's focus on what they say they will do.

2020 Has Quietly Become Another "Year of the Woman"

The entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for election every two years. But congressional elections tend to lead the news only every other cycle, when there isn't a concurrent presidential contest. James Madison may have believed that the "legislative authority necessarily predominates" over the executive, but most Americans don't seem to behave accordingly; a development or trend in congressional politics that would be treated like a big deal in a midterm year will always receive much less attention if it happens to coincide with the selection of the president.

In 2018, the leading story of the congressional midterms was the anti-Trump backlash that handed control of the House of Representatives to the opposition Democrats. The "resistance movement" widely credited with fueling the Democratic victory was distinctively female in its complexion—not only among voters and activists but also at the level of the candidates themselves. A record number of women sought public office in 2018, and a record number were elected to Congress.

Though it hasn't received the same degree of notice this time around, the records broken in 2018 will be broken again this year. With yesterday's Delaware primary election marking the end of the congressional nomination season, the numbers are now available to make full historical comparisons. Among Democrats, 48 percent of all House nominees in 2020 are women, exceeding the all-time high of 42 percent set in 2018. And for the first time in history, a majority (58 percent) of non-incumbent Democratic nominees are women.

An even bigger change has happened on the Republican side this year. The mobilization of women was a single-party phenomenon last election, but now it's become bipartisan. The share of female Republican House nominees grew from 13 percent to 23 percent between 2018 and 2020, and the share of women among non-incumbent nominees surged from 18 percent to 33 percent—not only easily outpacing any previous election for Republicans, but even exceeding the Democratic rate in every year before 2018.

The picture in Senate and governors' races is less dramatic, but still shows an upward trend over time in both parties. The total number of female Democratic nominees declined a bit between 2018 and 2020, but that reflected a more heavily male class of sitting senators seeking re-election this year; the share of women continued to rise slightly among non-incumbent Democrats. In the Republican Party, 2020 did not produce the same abrupt spike in Senate and governors' contests that it did in House elections, but the party still narrowly set an all-time record with women constituting 19 percent of all nominees (up from 17 percent in 2018).

Most female congressional candidates won't win in November, since most non-incumbent nominees suffer defeat regardless of gender. Even so, it's likely that there will be a modestly higher number of women in the 2021–2022 Congress than there are today, especially since Republican women are sure to increase their representation in the House from the mere 13 now serving. With the possibility of a first-ever female vice president winning office as well, 2020 could quietly turn out to be the biggest electoral "year of the woman" yet.

If Trump Has Money Problems, They Won't Matter Much

Several prominent media reports emerged over the past week or so telling a similar story: the Trump re-election campaign is in financial trouble. On September 7, the New York Times warned of a "cash crunch" due to "squandered costs" that was forcing the Trump campaign to "slash" its advertising budget. Three days later, a Washington Post story used similar language, describing a campaign "facing tough budgetary decisions down the stretch" that has Republican strategists "alarmed" as "Democrats take over the airwaves." Politico suggested that Trump was compounding this apparent disadvantage by misdirecting his funds to target the already supportive national audience of Fox News Channel, allowing a Biden advertising barrage to court swing voters in swing states without sufficient contestation.

These articles all adopt a "WARNING: Crisis in Progress" tone that runs a bit ahead of the specific facts provided. A careful reading of the evidence reveals that the Trump campaign is far from broke (in fact, Trump raised $200 million in August, a historically staggering sum). What's really happened is that Trump's anticipated financial advantage has disappeared because Trump spent a chunk of money early in the race that is naturally unavailable to him now, and because his opponent has found even greater recent fundraising success (Biden raised over $350 million in August, a historically staggering-until-you-fall-over sum).

It's true enough that Biden is currently outspending Trump on swing-state television. But these reports also suggest that Trump's newly-installed campaign manager Bill Stepien has made the strategic decision to save money for a final barrage later in the race. Perhaps this choice is somewhat born of necessity; if the Trump campaign had no realistic limits on its financial resources, it would presumably be matching Biden right now. However, that doesn't mean the strategy will fail. Trump had an overall financial disadvantage in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, but his campaign actually outspent hers on television ads from mid-October onward and received considerable last-minute help as well from Republican-aligned super PACs.

The articles are also peppered with examples of supposedly wasteful expenditures by the Trump campaign. But $150,000 for airplane-towed aerial banners or $100,000 for cell phone security containers, whatever their usefulness or lack thereof, are petty cash-level sums in an operation on track to raise and spend well over a billion dollars in total. These factoids must be viewed within a particular context: there has been a change in leadership within the campaign, and the current Stepien-led regime has every reason to plant unflattering tidbits in the press about the decisions made during the tenure of predecessor Brad Parscale. If Trump makes a comeback in the final weeks, Stepien and company will gladly take credit for turning around the ship; if Trump loses, they will be happy enough to suggest that Parscale left them an unsalvageable wreck.

Even if Trump does face a financial disadvantage from now until November, this is very unlikely to be an election decided by money—especially his money. Most Americans' opinions about the incumbent, whether pro or con, are so strongly held that they will be very resistant to being swayed by advertising, and ad messages must compete with news media coverage to serve as information sources for the remaining bloc of undecided voters. Though he is being outgunned on the airwaves at the moment, Trump has already spent a lot this year on ads in both the television and digital realms, and these efforts didn't seem to exert a measurable effect on the horse race. The main Republican lines of attack since Biden became the apparent Democratic nominee in March haven't significantly damaged Biden's vote share or personal favorability rating, so it's not clear that putting more ad dollars behind the same message would make much of a difference.

Campaigns running consistently behind in the polls are always subjected to press coverage portraying them as organizationally incompetent, just as the strategists behind victorious candidates are always celebrated as political geniuses. Four years ago, media story after media story chronicled the chaotic, amateur-hour nature of the sure-loser Trump campaign (in contrast to the confident, professional Clinton operation) up until late in the evening on the night of the election, when commentators suddenly discovered that the Trump crew had been smarter and savvier than the Clinton team all along. It's obvious enough that Trump's second presidential campaign, like his first, has squandered advantages and misallocated resources. But elections are rarely decided by these factors, and it's hard to make the case that any significant share of voters won't have become very familiar with Donald Trump's campaign message by the time they cast their ballots.

2020 Republican National Convention Recap

This week's Republican convention did an especially efficient job of encapsulating the current state of the party after four years of Donald Trump's leadership. In terms of the roster of speakers and the venues at which they spoke, the convention reflected how much the party has become a personal extension of Trump. Among the usual appearances by up-and-coming politicians and regular-citizen testimonials, a long succession of members of the reigning court—including a deputy chief of staff, press secretary, assistant to the president, counselor to the president, personal attorney of the president, and seven Trump family members—dominated the schedule, while the White House itself served as the backdrop to the addresses of both of its current adult occupants.

But the words of these speeches showed how much Trump's consolidation of power within the party has been accompanied by his adoption of its existing ideological commitments. Speaker after speaker at this week's convention reinforced standard Republican themes: small government, social traditionalism, veneration of the military and law enforcement, and attacks on "socialism," the "radical left," and the news media. Even the president's children, who might have been expected to spend their stage time sharing family anecdotes intended to create favorable personal impressions of their father, concentrated instead on delivering familiar conservative rhetoric. The occasional heterodoxies of the 2016 Trump campaign, which convinced many pundits and voters at the time that he was pulling the Republican Party to the left on economic policy, are no longer evident.

If there was something a bit redundant about the Republican convention, beyond the repetitive format forced in part by COVID-related restrictions, it stems from this presidency's unprecedented day-to-day domination of the political world over the past four years and the volume of coverage it already receives in both the mainstream and conservative media. Even enthusiastic supporters already have many other avenues of constant exposure to communication from Trump and his staff, and the campaign chose not to use their candidates' acceptance addresses, or the convention in general, to make much news.

It's hard to remember another presidential campaign in which concrete proposals and potential legislative initiatives have played such a minor role. Democrats have plenty of ideas for policy reform, as usual, but they did not make them the centerpiece of their public message in last week's convention; Biden's acceptance address mostly omitted the traditional "laundry list" of issue-specific domestic appeals in favor of a narrower focus on denouncing Trump as a threat to American values and mismanager of the COVID response. But the Republican convention was even more devoid of a vision for the next four years that centered on the actual powers and responsibilities of the president, as opposed to its frequent expression of emotionally charged but mostly symbolic opposition to the media, national anthem protests, destruction of local statuary, and "cancel culture." In the midst of an ongoing national economic and public health crisis that requires active, competent management to address effectively, it's remarkable that our national debate at this moment isn't more concerned with each candidate's specific plans and capacities to solve the immediate, life-threatening problem that the nation continues to face.

"Many People Are Saying" Trump's Republican Party Doesn't Stand For Anything...But They're Wrong

Did you hear that the Republicans aren't writing a traditional platform this year? Did you read that the party has only approved a resolution pledging to "enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda"? Did you happen to catch the quote in today's Politico story from veteran GOP congressional hand Brendan Buck, who quipped that his party has come to stand solely for "owning the libs and pissing off the media"?

Whether you're a never-Trump conservative shaking your head in mourning or a never-Trump non-conservative chortling with schadenfreude, the idea that the GOP has been reduced to a content-free cult of an ideology-free personality has an irresistably appealing emotional truth. The problem is that it doesn't have much factual truth.

Is there any confusion, or serious disagreement, over the Republican Party's current position on abortion? Or gun control? Corporate tax rates? Universal health care? Military spending? Environmental regulation?

Maybe the lack of a new platform in 2020 doesn't mean that the Republican Party is out of ideas. Maybe it shows that there is so much consensus within the party around the ideas it already has that few activists see the benefit in pressing for more internal debate.

The popular story that the Republican Party now revolves around Trump is true enough. But it often leaves out the point that Trump has won this power in part by adopting the party's existing substantive commitments. In terms of both policy and personnel, the Trump presidency is the most consistently conservative administration since Calvin Coolidge. Aside from the area of international trade (which has never been a defining issue for either major party in modern times), Trump governs in an ideologically orthodox fashion. And on some important subjects, such as immigration and international relations, he has helped to pull his party even farther to the right than it was before his arrival.

So where does the myth come from that Republicans don't stand for anything any more?

One clue comes from the types of people who seem the most invested in this argument. Today's Politico piece, which quoted Buck approvingly amidst a larger thesis that the Republican Party has abandoned any coherent animating philosophy, was written by Tim Alberta, an alumnus of the leading conservative journal National Review. Alberta's perspective is common among elite conservatives who dislike Trump: conservatism is good and Trump is not, so a Trump-led GOP is by definition a party that has forsaken its ideals.

It's true enough that Trump does not speak, or carry himself, like a National Review conservative. But that's because Trump is a Fox News conservative, not because he isn't a conservative at all. He has little interest in conservatism either as an intellectual movement built on abstract principles or as a set of moral and personal virtues, so conservative thinkers who do view their cause in such a manner naturally find it difficult to admit him to their ranks. However, the last four years have shown that most Republican voters trying to figure out what, or who, is and is not conservative pay a lot more attention to Sean Hannity's or Rush Limbaugh's thoughts on the subject than they do to Ramesh Ponnuru's or George F. Will's.

In the end, there's nothing new about the argument that the Republican Party has wandered away from true conservatism. This refrain was sounded in the later years of George W. Bush, in the final days of the Gingrich speakership, during the administration of the senior George Bush—even, at times, in the era of the otherwise sainted Reagan presidency. The conservative project of shrinking the size and role of government while simultaneously reversing leftward cultural trends is simply very difficult to achieve in practice, even when Republican politicians are in power and rhetorically committed to the cause. Donald Trump has pushed federal policy in a conservative direction across a broad spectrum of specific issues to the approval of nearly all of his fellow Republicans. That's what the Republican Party stands for, and if it wins another term, that's what it will do for another four years.

2020 Democratic National Convention Recap

Political scientists tend to like conventions more than media figures do. One reason is that journalists, whose souls are stirred most of all by the dramatic and the unexpected, are easily bored and annoyed by the packaged, stage-managed production of modern conventions, where the nomination outcome is pre-ordained and party leaders labor to hide any internal divisions or other juicy stories from public view. (Clint Eastwood's famously bizarro empty-chair routine got so much media attention at the 2012 Republican convention largely because it was a rare moment of true spontaneity.)

But another reason is that political scientists tend to like parties more than media figures do, and national conventions are above all party affairs. The nature of this year's conventions means that they can't serve as physical gatherings of the parties' human infrastructure—a real loss, even if the virtual version is a slicker and snappier experience for viewers on television. But they are still important as a unique window into how each party defines itself, and how that definition changes from one election to the next.

In most respects, the Democratic Party we saw on display this week was a familiar animal—above all, a varied coalition of social groups. Unsurprisingly, given the current climate, the topics of racial and gender equality were not only implicitly primed by the presentation of a demographically diverse succession of participants, but were also frequently invoked in speeches and voiceovers. Democrats also handed over key speaking slots to the first families of the party—the Obamas and Clintons, with a briefer but equally inevitable Kennedy appearance as well—and exploited their permanent representational advantage within the community of popular entertainment-industry professionals.

But there were also unmistakable signs of change. If the typical persuadable voter in the minds of party strategists 20 or 30 years ago was a small-town, church-going wage earner who goes hunting on the weekends, today it's more like a suburban small-business owner with Lean In on the coffee table and Beyoncé on Spotify. Democrats' former defensiveness about associations with cultural liberalism is no longer a visible element of the party's national message, and subjects that party leaders were once somewhat reluctant to discuss—gun control, feminism, LGBT rights, illegal immigration—are now central elements of its public appeal. So while Joe Biden might have been seen in the primaries by supporters and detractors alike as a kind of throwback figure representing bygone days, the campaign he's wound up running is very much a reflection of the Democratic Party's present course.