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Hate Is on the Ballot
https://newrepublic.com/article/156402/hate-ballot. . .
My forecasting model for the 2018 midterms predicted an enormous Democratic wave in the House, mostly by focusing on a dynamic known in political-science circles as negative partisanship. The idea behind negative partisanship is simple, harking back to Henry Adams’s definition of politics as the “organization of hatreds.” The determination to vote out the opposition—and the broader trend of acute polarization within the American political system—has altered virtually every facet of our political life. Negative partisanship is affecting the behavior of voters and reshaping the voting coalitions aligned behind each major party.
. . .
To hear many Democratic leaders tell it, ignoring Trump was the secret to their success in 2018, but the voter file data suggests otherwise. Democratic gains, strong though they were, may actually have been handicapped by a strategy that failed to exploit the party’s best asset: the electorate’s angst about Trump. What’s more, the turnout of the Republican base was just as strong in these districts as in districts where candidates were more liberal and did talk about Trump. So the strategy of not rousing any partisan blowback in the general election doesn’t appear to have yielded the advantage of a suppressed opposition vote.
. . .
What do all these negative partisan trends portend for 2020? Even though most analysts continue to look at 2016 as a frame for 2020, that reflex bespeaks another failure to size up a dramatically shifting electorate. The complacent voting ranks of 2016 who believed (at the energetic prompting of polls and pundit forecasts) that Donald Trump could never be president have been replaced by the terrified electorate of 2020. These voters know all too well the hazards of granting great power to a figure like Trump and view the president as a Terminator-like political figure who simply can’t be stopped. After threading the 2016 Electoral College needle, Trump has acquired an almost mythic aura of invincibility for most people, election analysts included. And in some key ways, the unsettled character of this political moment—together with the structural inequities of the Electoral College and a battery of GOP-orchestrated voter suppression drives—has inoculated President Trump from political gravity. But as Andrew Yang would tell you, math matters, and Trump has a basic math problem. As the electorate is currently constituted, there are more potential Democratic voters out there than there are Republican, and not just in California. There are more in the Midwest and in the Sun Belt. There are so many more in Virginia and Colorado that both states have moved off the swing state map.
The 2020 election will be a battle of the bases, with nothing less than the country’s survival as a functional democracy on the ballot. Partisanship is a hell of a drug—especially when it’s cut with a heavy dose of existential fear.
My forecasting model for the 2018 midterms predicted an enormous Democratic wave in the House, mostly by focusing on a dynamic known in political-science circles as negative partisanship. The idea behind negative partisanship is simple, harking back to Henry Adams’s definition of politics as the “organization of hatreds.” The determination to vote out the opposition—and the broader trend of acute polarization within the American political system—has altered virtually every facet of our political life. Negative partisanship is affecting the behavior of voters and reshaping the voting coalitions aligned behind each major party.
. . .
To hear many Democratic leaders tell it, ignoring Trump was the secret to their success in 2018, but the voter file data suggests otherwise. Democratic gains, strong though they were, may actually have been handicapped by a strategy that failed to exploit the party’s best asset: the electorate’s angst about Trump. What’s more, the turnout of the Republican base was just as strong in these districts as in districts where candidates were more liberal and did talk about Trump. So the strategy of not rousing any partisan blowback in the general election doesn’t appear to have yielded the advantage of a suppressed opposition vote.
. . .
What do all these negative partisan trends portend for 2020? Even though most analysts continue to look at 2016 as a frame for 2020, that reflex bespeaks another failure to size up a dramatically shifting electorate. The complacent voting ranks of 2016 who believed (at the energetic prompting of polls and pundit forecasts) that Donald Trump could never be president have been replaced by the terrified electorate of 2020. These voters know all too well the hazards of granting great power to a figure like Trump and view the president as a Terminator-like political figure who simply can’t be stopped. After threading the 2016 Electoral College needle, Trump has acquired an almost mythic aura of invincibility for most people, election analysts included. And in some key ways, the unsettled character of this political moment—together with the structural inequities of the Electoral College and a battery of GOP-orchestrated voter suppression drives—has inoculated President Trump from political gravity. But as Andrew Yang would tell you, math matters, and Trump has a basic math problem. As the electorate is currently constituted, there are more potential Democratic voters out there than there are Republican, and not just in California. There are more in the Midwest and in the Sun Belt. There are so many more in Virginia and Colorado that both states have moved off the swing state map.
The 2020 election will be a battle of the bases, with nothing less than the country’s survival as a functional democracy on the ballot. Partisanship is a hell of a drug—especially when it’s cut with a heavy dose of existential fear.
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