The Government We Deserve?
Laura Blessing | November 7, 2024
Election Day 2024 is behind us. The country is taking stock of who we are and where we might be going. The final calls on some congressional races are still forthcoming, as predicted. There are many ways of viewing the political moment we’re in, but any reading of political history shows precursors to phenomena of interest. Even seemingly abrupt changes have been built in the days and years before they appear. If we have gotten the government we deserve, as the Tocqueville adage suggests, what exactly have we done? There are big trends for parties, economic accountability, and what policy is possible going forward.
Trump’s Control of the GOP
A core factor of our politics is Trump’s enduring and unusual control of the Republican Party, above and beyond the influence any past and future president might have as the titular head of the party. To understand this better, political scientist V.O. Key had a classic tripartite conception of political parties: parties in the electorate, parties in government, and parties as organizations. This is a useful typology for how we might consider the ways in which Trump now controls the Republican Party.
For his strength with the Republican electorate, we can consider his dominance of his rivals in the primary elections. Only Chris Christie ran in opposition to Trump’s record or identified that he lost the 2020 election, but remained mired in single digits. Polling strongly indicated that Nikki Haley would have been more competitive in a general election than Trump, but Trump’s overwhelming popularity with Republican voters made such a match an impossibility. (Haley has since endorsed Trump.) Whether it be principled objectors like Christie or imitators like Governor DeSantis or Vice Presidential nominee Vance, there are no clear heirs apparent with any current resonance with GOP voters.
Perhaps the stronger data here is to ask Republican voters for a referendum, not an alternative. A Brookings analysis done this cycle shows that about 20% of GOP voters don’t like Trump, but that higher percentages unaffiliated with MAGA may be running for Congress. (I insert the “may” because their analysis is based on campaign materials: testing those self-identifying inclinations in Congress will be a different matter.) Blum and Parker, from four years ago, studying MAGA beliefs and support suggest that half of Republican primary voters were MAGA. (Bartels and AEI separately ran surveys on attitudes in the Republican electorate.) Trump’s control over the party has increased.
As for the GOP in government, after yesterday’s election, only three Senators (Collins, Murkowski, and Cassidy) and at most two House members will remain in Congress who voted to impeach or remove Trump after January 6. After the insurrection attempt, a full two-thirds of the House Republican Conference voted to not certify electoral results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Crucially, Trump has more support with his voters than congressional leaders, who have lower and volatile support, with voters punishing them for opposing Trump. The fortunes of different GOP members of Congress who opposed Trump, from Senator Flake to Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger, only further illuminate these trends. Losing rising talent such as Rep. Gallagher or effective dealmakers like Rep. Graves, should also be of broader concern.
Finally, we can consider Trump’s control of the Republican party as an organization. His historic ouster of previous RNC chair Ronna McDaniel in favor of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump for the position of co-chair (along with chair Michael Whatley) has continued to remake the organization in his image.
Who Will Gatekeep the Gatekeepers?
Factional and network analyses of parties often identify prominent party or coalitional endorsements of a candidate. The endorsement patterns this cycle are unique: members of Trump’s administration, including both his Vice President Mike Pence and in memorable terms his Chief of Staff John Kelly, did not endorse him or endorsed his rival. Alumna of both Bush administrations, as well as McCain and Romney staffers, endorsed Harris’s candidacy. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, hardly a darling of the left, backed Harris alongside his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, who actively campaigned for her.
The traditional endorsers in the Republican party clearly are not playing the gatekeeping function of steering the party. So—who is? In a rejoinder to their book The Party Decides, whose more traditional conception of a party’s coalition and their endorsers did not predict a 2016 Trump nomination, those authors considered that media actors should be considered as a more powerful part of a party’s coalition. Other accounts look at the way the Tea Party has remade the GOP as an insurgent faction, aimed at taking down the party establishment. Still others look at how American political parties have been hollowed out, or how American national politics is marked by strong partisanship but weak parties. The vast literature on polarization agrees that the parties are asymmetrically polarized: that is, that the Republicans are more polarized than the Democrats. All of these accounts combine to create a more comprehensive picture: weakened parties have allowed nontraditional actors to have an outsized influence in shaping the party, and the Republican Party in particular.
Economic and Democratic Accountability
Another point of systemic weakness is the growing disconnect between policy performance and electoral rewards. In theory, a functioning democracy should be one in which voters can observe the effects of policy, know which party or policymakers are responsible, and then reward or punish policymakers accordingly. In practice, this is often too high of a bar, but a variety of studies look at how voters can overcome informational hurdles (either by using heuristics: mental shortcuts to function as better informed, or when voters’ actions are seen in the aggregate: seeing public opinion as thermostatic or views of social programs as ones similarly reactive on the macro level, to what has previously been passed). There is a wider literature on this, of course.
We’re seeing important trends here, above and beyond the general observations that the American welfare state is more opaque, its political institutions more fragmented and anti-majoritarian, in ways that make voters understanding and then rewarding policy hard.
The disconnect for rewarding or punishing politicians in office for the economy has been growing for years, after being a mainstay of how political scientists understood American politics and in particular, rewarding presidents and the president’s party. That connection, long eroded, seems to be broken. Further, the past few years have seen an American economy roaring back from the pandemic to be the envy of our OECD peers. Yet Americans don’t feel that the economy has improved. This disconnect has launched its own cottage industry of explanations. Of course, there doesn’t have to be just one explanation; growing partisanship clouding evaluations, partisan media sources, the lingering negative response to inflation (last month saw 2.4%, down from the 9.1% high in June 2022: highest in forty years). Some have suggested a pandemic malaise has affected evaluations, and its connection to an anti-incumbent wave felt by countries around the world. Annie Lowrey’s focus on a backlash to prices is compelling, and one that points to possible policy solutions.
My concern is that generally, this disconnect doesn’t point policymakers in this direction, seeking a rational discourse to discover the roots of policy problems and find possible solutions. This disconnect is yet another important factor that makes governance more volatile. American voters have yet again identified the economy as their top issue, but that has not resulted in them voting for Harris, for the economic record of the Biden-Harris Administration, or for Harris because economic Nobel laureates have endorsed her while warning explicitly against Trump’s tariff plans.
Strengthening institutions—including parties and increasing congressional capacity, strengthens democracy. We should consider public knowledge such an institution as well.
Where We Go from Here:
I outlined and wrote the above Tuesday, before any electoral returns. I considered that the Presidential race was going to be down to the wire by all available evidence, and that anyone who had a strong feeling one way or another was almost certainly basing that judgement on vibes. I considered that divided government was likely, and that discussing Trump’s influence on the GOP even in the circumstance of a potential loss was something important to understand about the GOP, as was the state of political party strength. I thought it would be worth identifying how difficult lawmaking has become on big issues in Congress, and which issues were promising for movement. Namely: tax policy given the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Those impulses aren’t wrong, and my analysis hasn’t changed. But the world has changed around it. What a second Trump presidency means for the United States and the world will be far from politics as usual. The changing nature of the GOP and the gatekeepers within it, as well as our inability as a nation to link economic performance to political rewards or to understand economic policy performance, are underlying conditions to a long list of other political risks and shifts.
If we want our politics to be different, we need to consider how we got here.
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