We’re Probably Stuck With These Two Parties. But Here’s How They Could Improve.

The Republicans 

In Kentucky’s gubernatorial election in 2019, nearly all of the votes were counted by Election Night, Tuesday, Nov 5. (There wasn’t that much absentee/mail-in voting.) Democratic candidate Andy Beshear was ahead of Republican Matt Bevin by around 4,000 votes, 0.4 percent. Bevin did not concede, with his allies citing various voting irregularities that they both failed to specify and were very unlikely to close a 4,000 vote margin. The following Monday, even as Bevin had not conceded, Mitch McConnell told reporters, “I’m sorry Matt came up short, but he had a good four years and all indications are, barring some dramatic reversal on the recanvass, we’ll have a different governor in three weeks.”  

A year later, on the Monday after Election Day, McConnell gave a fiery speech with the tone of, “how dare anyone suggest that Donald Trump concede or that I acknowledge Joe Biden won.” The circumstances are different, but not in McConnell’s favor. Most national news organizations weren’t covering the Kentucky race closely, so it wasn’t as if CNN, ABC, CBS, etc. had all determined that Beshear won, as they had for Biden by Monday. Biden leads by more than 11,000 votes (0.4 percent) in Arizona, more than 14,000 in Georgia (0.3 percent), more than 53,000 in Pennsylvania (0.8 percent) and more than 20,000 in Wisconsin (0.6 percent) and in other states with bigger margins.  Some of those margins are larger than they were on Monday when the Kentucky senator spoke, but a sharp political figure like McConnell surely knew that by Monday Biden had won fairly clearly. This is not a particularly close election---Biden is likely to win the Electoral College by a 306-230 margin. 

With Trump and his allies filing a lot of lawsuits without much merit and refusing to participate in the transition to a Biden administration, it is important for America’s other top Republican official to acknowledge Biden’s victory and make clear that a country dealing with a huge surge of cases of a deadly virus also doesn’t have to worry about its defeated incumbent president trying to stay in office despite his loss. But so far, McConnell hasn’t moved from his “I can’t tell who won” stance. 

But McConnell’s behavior isn’t surprising. We now have a Republican Party that is constantly flouting traditional norms like quickly acknowledging the election winner, but more importantly, more basic democratic values. The Trump legal strategy is basically to have the votes of some Americas tossed out so that he can come out ahead. Think about that for a second. The American president filing lawsuits to make sure everyone who tried to vote gets their vote counted would be one thing. Making it easier to vote and having your vote counted should be the goal in a democracy, not the opposite, as Trump is trying to do. The president and his allies are actively suggesting that Detroit and Philadelphia were hotbeds of voter fraud--an accusation that shouldn’t be called a dog whistle because everyone is perfectly aware that the Republicans are talking about black people. Anti-racism should be another core value in a multiracial democracy. The incumbent president and his party refusing to acknowledge the victory of the opposition party is the kind of thing that happens in countries becoming less democratic.

Today’s Republican Party is on an anti-democratic course. It is obsessed with aggressive gerrymandering to make sure Democrats are disproportionately underrepresented in state legislatures and the U.S. House. It is often hostile to efforts to make it easier to vote, fearing greater participation in the democratic process makes it harder for the GOP to win. It is constantly attacking fact-based institutions (the media, universities) and individuals (Anthony Fauci), because those institutions and people weaken a party which wants to both pursue whatever goals it wants but also not face a backlash from the public. 

Here’s the thing: the Republicans could just get off this course. A Republican Party that won, say 25 percent of black voters, 40 percent of Latinos and 45 percent of college-educated white women, would be a majority party, one that could win the national popular vote, comfortably win the Electoral College and control a lot of states without resorting to gerrymandering. Survey after survey suggests that black and Latino people aren’t uniformly liberal. The governors of Massachusetts and Maryland are Republicans! The ideas that the Republican Party says it embodies, like personal responsibility, promotion of small businesses, religious freedom, school choice, small government, are popular with a broad swath of Americans. 

The problem is that the Republican Party doesn’t actually really pursue that agenda. Remember in 2017-2018, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate and the presidency. They could have passed basically whatever they wanted, without any Democratic votes. They largely spent those two years on 1. A tax cut bill whose chief beneficiary was corporations 2. A health care bill that would roll back tax increases on wealthy individuals and dramatically cut health care spending for low-income people 3. Eliminating regulations on businesses 4. Appointing federal judges who would strike down regulations on businesses. 

Black and Latino voters tend not to be libertarians. They like government spending that helps them. So to win the votes of more people of color, it is likely not enough for the Republicans to promote a few people of color like Marco Rubio and Tim Scott and to embrace limited criminal justice reform. The party probably needs to move left on some pocketbook issues. 

But this is not an outlandish notion. The tax bill and Obamacare repeal were not that popular with voters overall, even Republicans. Things like raising the minimum wage are fairly popular with Republicans.

The problem is the current GOP is captured in many ways by an-anti-government, anti-tax elite (think the Koch Brothers) that finances much of the party’s operations and promotes candidates who favor this anti-government, anti-tax posture. That means that Republicans are constantly pushing unpopular policies that tend to look more like the agenda of large corporations than blacks and Latino small business owners. So keeping power with that agenda means attacking the media and other fact-based institutions (so voters don’t clearly understand you have an agenda they don’t like), not openly discussing that agenda (not updating your formal party platform),  rigging electoral rules (to make sure you can win power with as few votes as possible) and aligning with organizations like Fox News and the NRA (who focus on cultural issues and demonize the Democrats, so that politics is more a cultural war than a debate over whose policies benefit the most people.) This is basically the thesis of work by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, so I should acknowledge I am borrowing from their ideas. 

What would be really healthy for American democracy is if Republicans like Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker or South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott become viable national presidential candidates. Those two in particular are among the Republicans who are interested in building a coalition distinct from the current GOP one, which is more than 80 percent white. A Republican Party trying to win a majority of voters overall and large blocs of blacks and Latinos will probably seem more Democratic (meaning liberal), but it will also likely be more democratic (supportive of maintaining a multiracial democracy.) The second goal is much more important in my view. 

The Democrats 

Some of the problems of the Democrats are implied in the GOP section. They are more willing to defend democratic norms and values even if it means they are effectively bringing a knife to a gunfight. So Democrats in California, who in theory could gerrymander districts and weaken Republicans, rely on an independent commission to draw district lines. The party is to some extent running against ideals like school choice and personal responsibility that seem inherently good, since the Democrats broadly favor imposing the government’s will and therefore limiting some individual choice to try ensure better outcomes for more people. 

Democrats have two other real constraints. The Republicans are in effect running as the party to maintain the status quo, to conserve it. Lots of people either like the status quo in America or prefer the status quo to changing to an unknown new reality. Clearly understanding this dynamic is really important. The Democrats are in a constant debate about whether the party would win if it was more left on Issue X (leftists say Dems need to tout Medicare-for-all to appeal to a nation of people either worried about losing their jobs that provide their health insurance or who don’t have jobs that offer insurance) or more conservative on Issue Y (more moderate Dems say that slogans of activists like “defund the police” really hurt the party.) In interviews, conservative voters often say that they simply can’t back Democrats because of one issue: abortion. 

In reality, “I generally like the status quo and/or don’t want to change it too much” is likely driving a lot of Republican voting. It is course easier for a Republican voter to tell her liberal cousin/nephew/daughter, “I just can’t vote for a pro-abortion rights candidate,” instead of “uh, things are fine for me, and the Democrats want to change a lot.” (Dems often run anti-abortion candidates in those areas and those candidates lose.) Some Republican voters probably have a status quo bias and aren’t even aware of it. (Many Dems do too--more on that in a bit.) 

A second, related constraint for the Democrats is that they are the party of the traditionally-marginalized and/or facing discrimination: people of color, immigrants, refugees, women, LGBT Americans, Muslims and Jewish Americans in particular. That’s an admirable thing. Truly. But of course that dynamic reinforces that the Democrats are challenging America’s status quo, in which white people, men, people who are heterosexual and Christians have generally been considered the norm and those in power. Lots of Democratic rhetoric implies that lots of Republicans are racist against black people in particular. I don’t think that’s quite right--I think I could move next door to most Trump voters and they would be fine with me. But many white people, particularly white Republicans, are often opposed to policies that attempt to disrupt America’s status quo to address disparities between white and black Americans, policies like busing, school integration, affirmative action and reparations. So I do think many Trump voters (and perhaps some Biden ones too) would be uncomfortable with me if I moved next door to them, had a weekly Black Lives Matter chapter meeting at my home and a “Reparations Now” lawn sign. Being personally racist and opposing changes to address systemic racism are related but not quite the same. 

Democrat candidates aren’t generally campaigning on more radical ideas like reparations. But Democrats, even fairly moderate ones like Biden, are pushing more changes to the status quo and the racial status quo than Republicans. That creates an electoral problem in a majority-white country. And because so many of the marginalized groups are tied to the Democratic Party, their ideas can be easily linked to the party, even if the party doesn’t formally support them. Defunding the police is an idea from some activists, many of whom are black. There is virtually no Democrat running for any office across the country who is running on that idea. But while most Democrats aren’t for defunding the police, it’s likely that most people who favor defunding the police are Democrats and many of them are black, an overwhelmingly-Democratic part of American society. So Fox News can highlight some black activists and hint that the Democratic Party would defund the police if it were in charge, even if that’s not true. 

“Either you abandon racial justice as a part of your platform or you stop whining and learn how to not let the GOP define you. It's ultimately that simple,’ political writer Paul Blest said this week. 

But these constraints aren’t too big of an electoral problem for Democrats, because of what I laid out above: the Republicans keep pushing unpopular policies! The Democrats get to be the party of expanding health insurance to more people, opposing the separation of children from their parents at the border, raising the minimum wage, creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, banning police from chokeholds and other policies that are pretty popular even with Republicans. The Democrats are actively trying to win a majority of the vote (not just the Electoral College) so they generally campaign on ideas that are popular. So the Democrats have built a multiracial coalition that has been larger than the GOP one in every presidential election since 1988 except for one (2004.) 

That said, I do think that the Democratic Party is captured in a certain way that limits it too. It’s hard to describe this group precisely, but it’s best described as a multi-racial elite obsessed with credentials, particularly law and Ivy League degrees. It is focused on a kind of superficial equality of people of all identities but also fairly resistant to big changes to America’s status quo, so its preferred change tends to be having a person of color, a gay person or a woman with the exact views of this elite replace a straight white man in a key job. Michael Bloomberg is a fairly powerful figure in the Democratic Party and I think best exemplifies what I am describing, but Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom and many others probably do as well. 

There is some evidence that the bloc of voters ignored in both parties is moderate, but in a specific way: socially-conservative but economically more liberal. So build the border wall and defend it with a very aggressive policy force, but a $20 minimum wage, Medicare and legal marijuana for everyone inside the wall who speaks English, all funded by a huge tax on billionaires. I am not advocating that Democrats take this approach. But a Bloomberg-style Democrat is likely to be most opposed to the wall, arguing it hurts America’s image abroad and makes the nation seem racist, but would prefer some kind of complicated tax credit over just trying to offer higher wages and free health care to people. Bloomberg’s politics are those of many elite Democrats but not that many voters: somewhat economically-conservative but more culturally-liberal. 

This dynamic plays out in real life when a presidential candidate becomes a darling of the Democratic Party elite because he speaks eight languages (Buttigieg) but his campaign can’t take off because of the language he failed to learn but really should have: whatever words would make the black people of South Bend feel connected to their mayor and therefore want to see the hometown kid become president. The Democrats came up with an ultra-wonky health care plan (Obamacare) and have now spent 10 years promoting and defending it. The part of the law that is really working is the Medicaid expansion (basically Medicare for everyone who is fairly low-income.) The law hasn’t really helped the party politically at all, because it is sufficiently complicated that not many Americans are easily able to say, “My brother is on Obamacare, and he loves it.” Biden easily won in California, but ballot measures to hike commercial property taxes to fund more education spending, make it easier for black and Latino students to be admitted to California’s colleges and provide more benefits to people who drive for Uber and Lyft all failed. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who made his name as one of the first elected officials to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, didn’t work too hard to pass any of those initiatives, all of which likely would have benefited a lot of non-elite people. 

I can’t prove this approach is hurting the Democrats as easily as I can prove that pushing unpopular ideas hurts Republicans. But do you think that Nancy Pelosi has been so successful that she should have been the House Democrats’ leader for most of three presidencies (Bush, Obama, Trump) and will likely be so for a fourth (Biden?) Imagine if the congressional Democrats created a four-part scale for their members: 1. The highest income their parents ever earned 2. The income at whatever job the member of Congress held before taking her seat 3. The ranking by U.S. News and World Report of whatever college the member attended 4. How many years the member has served in Congress. Then imagine, the Democrats choose their leadership on Capitol Hill from among the people with the lowest scores on this scale (meaning fewer years on the Hill, lower income, less prestigious schooling.) You could imagine a Democratic leadership team that was more diverse in a whole lot of ways, but also one more connected to everyday Americans. 

That scale would make someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez more likely to be speaker than Pelosi. It’s worth thinking about how that might change Washington. Let’s imagine AOC gets briefed by the same consultants and pollsters who brief Pelosi. I would assume that these consultants would make it clear to AOC that as speaker she should never, ever, ever, ever utter or express support for the phrase defund the police. She might or might not follow that advice (I would bet on the former, as AOC’s role would then be party leader, not party activist.) But if the pollsters told AOC that Democrats should keep running campaigns talking about “protections for people with pre-existing conditions” and other poll-tested Pelosi-style phrases, I suspect she might push back there. The Democrats have been running safe, poll-tested campaigns for at least a decade and it’s not clear it’s working that well for them. An approach where Democrats try to speak to broader values and connect with voters in a more natural language that doesn’t sound so politician-y (like Trump) might not work. But it doesn’t seem like Pelosi-ism does either.