Both of my two post-election posts so far have focused on the role of chance and political agency, as opposed to just grinding demographic forces, in shaping our politics, and now I’m going to go three for three by saying something about the idea that we’re stuck in what Vox’s Matt Yglesias (or at least his headline) rather vividly describes as a “meaningless, demographically driven seesaw,” pitting one coalition optimized for midterms against another optimized for presidential elections, with no end in sight.
Up to a point, this description clearly fits the facts, but as written it also makes it sound like this pattern is much more inevitable than it actually is:
More people vote in presidential elections than in midterms … the non-participation is not evenly distributed. Younger people and non-whites are especially unlikely to vote in non-presidential years, … younger people and non-whites tend to vote for Democrats … closely divided states such as Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and New Hampshire have an electorate that leans Republican in midterms and Democratic in presidential years.
Demographics aren’t strictly destiny. Democrats won big in 2006 despite the midterm electorate and a not-so-friendly map. Events matter …
[But] the “endless seesaw” model of American politics makes perfect sense. The presidential and non-presidential electorates look too different for either political party to optimize for both of them. Democrats have built a coalition that’s optimized for presidential years, while the GOP has one that’s optimized for off-years. And so we’re set for a lot of big swings back and forth every two years.
The point I would just stress here is that all of this is, in part, a political choice on the part of the people responsible for shepherding our two political coalitions. Yes, it’s hard to optimize perfectly for a larger, younger, more diverse electorate and a smaller, older, whiter one. But a political party could, entirely reasonably, react to that reality by just not trying to optimize perfectly for one or the other, and instead by spreading its appeals a little differently in an effort to build majorities that might be sustained across four or six or eight-year increments instead.
Our parties have, in the not-so-distant past, done roughly that. Clintonism and Bushism were both attempts, even if not always successful, to build or maintain coalitions that weren’t locked into boom-bust cycles, and that included a kind of internal diversity that could be sustained across presidential and non-presidential elections. (As, on a more limited scale, was Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy in the non-seesaw year of 2006.) There are solid-enough structural reasons why that internal diversity has faded since — the aging-out of New Deal seniors has made older voters more reliably conservative, their Iraq-related disillusionment with Bush and their changing patterns of social life have made younger voters more reliably liberal, the growth of the Hispanic vote has changed incentives for both parties, the presidency of Barack Obama has furthered racial polarization in unfortunately-predictable ways.
But it’s also faded because elites in both parties have been happy to see it fade — because a lot of liberal elites don’t want to make the kind of compromises that would keep their party a little more viable in midterms with, say, some of the white Southerners or Midwesterners who voted for Bill Clinton, and because a lot of conservative elites would rather lose presidential elections while talking about the 47 percent and upper-bracket tax cuts than win them while making the kind of shifts on economic issues that might win more presidential-cycle votes from the downscale or disaffected. (And of course there are still other organizing options, libertarian and socialist and so on, that are even further afield from what party elites prefer.) And those choices, while understandable and in some sense structurally-driven themselves, are still choices, which other choices could alter or undo.
I’ve made a version of this argument before, in the context of Obama-era racial polarization — which I argued isn’t something that “just happened” or that flowed from white ressentiment alone, but rather a trend that followed naturally from very specific policy moves and strategic gambits that people leading the Democratic coalition decided were smart or right or necessary. But it’s unfair to single out the Democratic Party’s leaders when their Republican counterparts have made the same kind of choices: Both parties are led by people who find it convenient to sort our political landscape by which kind of individualism, economic or social/sexual, you most favor or most fear. And it’s that sorting has given us the seesaw, in a way that a different sorting might well not.
Last week my colleague David Brooks wrote a column on the decline of political imagination, and the way that data-driven campaigning, in particular, has made our politics more rigid and our would-be leaders less creative. I saw some criticisms of the column on Twitter, most of them suggesting that Brooks was radically underestimating the power of polarization, and the way it keeps our politicians in pre-constructed boxes from which even a genius would struggle to escape. To which I would only point out that as true as that may be, those boxes are still themselves the product of human imagination, of a particular way or ways of imposing a partisan order and a binary division on a society of 300 million souls. The imagination at work is collective, not individual — the collective imagination of partisan elites. But its rule over our politics is still not in any way inevitable, and the fact that it’s given us what seems like an increasingly meaningless see-saw is all the more reason to look for very different imaginings instead.