Why Trump, Why Biden, Why Are U.S. Politics So Screwed Up?
A Foreigner's Guide to American Electoral Surreality
Having re-entered the world of serious political stuff last time with “Putin’s Trap,” The Raspberry Patch will now show you, as promised, the answers given to an earlier set of three questions from a Singaporean journalist about U.S. electoral politics. I described last time how these questions came to me and the peculiar nature of the Singapore-based Chinese language venue from which they came. I have only now to describe the reason for the delay in setting this material before you.
On February 25 the Australian-based magazine Quillette ran my answer to only the first of the three questions, in mildly edited and slightly updated form. That was appropriate since the answers were designed mainly for non-U.S. nationals wondering what the hell is going on here—as well they might. I needed to wait for Quillette to publish before I posted, since most magazines prefer to go first and then be acknowledged as having done so in a Substack post. That took a while because I got bumped in their queue because of the Alexei Navalny murder, and because the editors wanted to set the timing of publication to dovetail with the results of the South Carolina primary.
All fine with me, and that reasoning should be fine with you, too. It also happens to be why, by the way, I took down the February 16 post so quickly; there, too, as it happily turned out, I learned just after I posted it that a brief excerpt will appear in another magazine—but not until autumn. After that blessed event occurs I will repost the essay with improvements, since the experience of cavorting with a clutch of English lit professors has led me to wondrous new discoveries.
So with no further throat-clearing to sound out, here we go, the questions being verbatim from the Red Dot and my answers being only mildly altered since, mainly for updating purposes. The text below remains in my original British-English spelling and punctuation conventions, a courtesy to my Singaporean colleagues.
The Questions
1. Why is Donald Trump continuing to lead the Republican primary race, despite his legal cases, age, and other problems? Why have the other Republican candidates struggled to gain ground?
2. Joe Biden's approval rating has hit a new low, and there are concerns about his age too. Why is there a lack of challengers for the Democratic presidential nomination?
3. Do you think that the 2024 election will end up being Trump vs. Biden again?
Prolegomenon to an Answer
Before I answer these three questions one by one, let me note that while the questions seem obvious, simple, and straightforward, they are actually not simple at all when applied to a reality that is neither simple nor straightforward. Questions about moving-target politics are necessarily fluid; like water, however clear and chemically uncomplicated, they take the shape of the vessel into which they are being poured.
Thus, properly comprehensive answers to these three questions, especially the first one, would far exhaust the capability of any newspaper to process and present them. So whatever else you do with my answers and those of others you gather, I urge you to caution your readers that a full explanation of what is going on in American politics right now is difficult to get and even harder to present in a short space.
I will provide incomplete but still much longer answers than you can use. But if I do less I worry you may not really understand what’s going on, since what is going on is rather strange even to most of us. It’ll be up to you to figure out how to translate the answers not just into Chinese, no simple matter at that given the vast inner differences between the two languages, but into something right-sized for a newspaper. Alas, you’re the journalist, so that heavy burden is yours to bear.
The First Answer
1. Why is Donald Trump continuing to lead the Republican primary race, despite his legal cases, age, and other problems? Why have the other Republican candidates struggled to gain ground?
Eight interwoven factors of different kinds explain why Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican primary contest. No one factor is adequate, and only when the eight are seen together does something like an answer emerge. But even before listing and briefly describing these eight factors, the overarching reality into which the GOP primary theatre fits needs to be stated clearly.
For many months now it has been clear to most politically attentive Americans that former-President Donald Trump will again be the Republican presidential nominee for the coming November 5 election. Despite his 91 felony indictments, a rape conviction, and skeins of increasingly bizarre behaviour, the Republican primaries of the past several weeks have been even more vacuous forms of political theatre than they otherwise would have been. They have amounted to presidential campaign season performances with a condom.
Now, true, some here have not seen things this way. The true-believer World Wrestling Federation crowd that tilts heavily toward the MAGA persuasion has mostly bought the Trump primaries act as though the contest were real. They who relish their WWF close encounters of the political bloodsport kind enjoy this sort of thing because it resembles so well their gamer/conspiracy theory/counter-humiliation fantasies. Fine; far be it from me to spoil anyone’s fun.
Some others who really should have long since known better have also been a bit slow to locate the key to the puzzle lock. Senator Mitt Romney managed to catch the tailwind of the Zeitgeist in January when he said after the Iowa caucuses:
I think a lot of people in this country are out of touch with reality and will accept anything Donald Trump tells them. . . . You had a jury that said Donald Trump raped a woman, and that doesn't seem to be moving the needle. . . . There’re a lot of things about today’s electorate that I have a hard time understanding.[1]
Do tell, Mitt.
If a Republican Senator is still struggling to wrap his mind around reality in what used to be the party he himself once led, how much harder must it be for many folks six, twelve, and even sixteen times zones away from American shores? This, in a nutshell, is why this brief primer is mainly for you distant gazers on the U.S. political scene. If some Americans want to read on I can’t stop you.
The first factor of the eight is that Trump is an ex-President. He got elected fair and square in November 2016, and that conveys a very high status in American politics. Only two members of the Federal government are elected on a nationwide basis: the President and the Vice-President, and the Vice-President doesn’t much count as long as the President is healthy. Having been President, Trump was able to use his office to confer status and benefits on others, those who worked for him and various and sundry supporters outside government. They all owe Trump for his status largesse, and he collects the debts in the form of activated political loyalty. That has enabled him to control nearly all fifty state GOP organizations. That matters. (Update alert: Just recently he dumped the very accommodating GOP National Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel anyway, but that’s just Trump being gratuitously Trump, again.)
The fact that Trump is an ex-President also makes the coming election unusual: Only twice before has an ex-President challenged an incumbent President running for re-election, once in 1892 and once in 1912—a long time ago, in other words. In 1892 the challenger won and returned to the White House; in 1912 the challenger lost but so did the incumbent. No one really knows how this factor will affect the outcome this third time around, assuming Trump wins the GOP nomination and stands for election. The main reason, which we will revisit below, is that the advantages of incumbency are not what they once were. Indeed, the cost of ruling in times when electorates are generically critical of the status quo can be high, and that is true outside as well as inside the United States. There is a lot of anti-establishment perfumery in the air these days, a lot of ambient discontent and disdain for authority of all sorts. Why that is begs other questions, but this isn’t the place to delve into them.
The second factor is that Trump has lots more money than the other candidates. Legal fees have lately bit deeply into his coffers, true, to the tune of about $50 million. Since he is not yet the official GOP presidential nominee he cannot use the Republican National Committee Nominee Fund to help pay these costs, and efforts are underway to prevent him from doing so even when he becomes the nominee. [Update alert] That’s a likely reason for Trump’s wrath against Ronna McDaniel….she refused to break the RNC’s rules. Also, since I drafted this sentence in January the financial judgements against Trump have seriously mounted on account of the guilty verdict in the New York State business fraud judgement, now summing to about $540 million. Almost certainly he lacks enough cash on hand to pay these judgements, appeals for delay probably won’t wash, and so he will need to sell assets or borrow money if he can. That takes time, which is why he is now running into court-established deadlines to pay up, the most immediate one being March 25.
I cannot, and we should not, resist comment on the shameful understory, so to speak, of the New York fraud trial. The frauds--there were more than one--for which Trump and the Trump Organization were convicted on February 19 had been going on for at least a decade and likely far longer. The fact that New York State officials, in the treasury and judicial offices responsible for monitoring and putting a stop to crooked business practises, let Trump’s hide-the-numbers farce go on for so long is the real story here. Had they done their jobs properly, Trump would never have become President. But most of the time in the United States we do not have uniform rule of law for everyone: We have one standard for very wealthy and hence influential individuals and businesses, and another standard for everyone else. That is the seamier side of Robert Michels’ famous “iron law of oligarchy” as it plays out in real time, in real life, here in the United States.
All that said—and now back to the matter at hand—Trump’s lawyers are not particularly well paid given their lowly professional status, and Trump has often used his legal problems successfully as a fund-raising tack. He is now doing so again with alacrity, apparently with some success. The key here is that his status as an ex-President makes him a national figure unlike any of his competitors, and the big money (the little money, too) tends to gravitate to candidates with the highest status and greatest likelihood of winning the nomination. It works like a corporate insurance policy in what has regrettably become a plutocratised pay-to-play political system.
In Trump’s case, too, given his legendary capacity to hold and if necessary invent a grudge, any former donors who abandon him for a competitor will invite his ire and, if he wins, will surely suffer disadvantage if Trump can inflict it. Few big-money corporate donors seek that risk, and few can locate any patriotic scruples that might incline them to. There have been exceptions, one big one in particular I’ll mention in a moment. But not many.
The third factor concerns the nature of the primary system itself. In U.S. politics, since the late 1960s/early 1970s, the primary process has become both more open and more ideological. Gone are the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” but also gone is the shrewd pragmatism that kept clowns with flamethrowers far away from public office.
The activists who dominate primary elections tend to be better educated and more affluent, and far more abstract in the way they think, than typical voters. That is true for Democrats as well as Republicans. So the trick for candidates is to go extreme to win the nomination and then, usually, tack back to the centre to win the election. And here Trump is a master’s master of the incendiary, sloganesque, shock-bar elevating statement. He is an extremist’s extremist when he speaks to the party faithful.
Grasping how important this skill is, Vivek Ramaswamy imitated and tried to outdo Trump in precisely this way. It worked to a point: By so doing he put his name on the Republican political map despite having zero political experience, no local supportive constituency, and pretty much no brains for public policy as far as anyone could tell.
That doesn’t mean that Trump won in 2016 without positions on issues. He did have positions, most of them given to him by party policy types that the candidate never studied or understood. But that doesn’t matter because now, when primary challengers have tried to gain ground on him they find themselves doing it locked into what appear to be his policy positions. So they all ended up looking like imitators, and primary voters tend to reason, “Why switch to an imitator when the original thing is there in the ring?”
Also important here as general background, losing political parties in mass-democratic Western polities tend to double down and become more extreme for the next time around. The Democrats lost in 1968, became more extreme, nominated George McGovern in 1972 and lost even worse before figuring out that they needed to head toward the centre to win. So in 1976 they nominated a Southern moderate--Jimmy Carter--and won.
Same with the British Labour Party. Ed Miliband led Labour to some losing elections, after which, in 2015, Labour made Jeremy Corbyn party leader. Shortly after a better but still unavailing showing that same year, Corbyn moved Labour sharply to the Left, and the next election result, in December 2019, was a Tory landslide victory.
Same with the Republicans: They lost in 2020—not just the White House but lost ground in both the Senate and House, as well—but the leadership’s reaction was to double-down, become more extreme, and buy into Trump’s “Big Lie/Stolen Election” narrative in the process. Trump is thus the pre-eminent symbol of the GOP’s post-2020 lurch toward the fantasist, surrealist Right. That is partly why he maintains his status as party leader: He justifies in the minds of MAGA ideologues that becoming more extreme was the right thing to do.
Was it? It’s ambiguous. The GOP lost more ground in the Senate in the 2022 midterms, but it did achieve a slight majority in the House. It actually won the popular vote for House seats 51% to 48%. Thereafter a lot of “normie” Republican politicians—“never-Trumpers” like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney—either leaped or were tossed from the party. After both 2020 and 2022 many GOP incumbents decided not to run for re-election, figuring they would lose state and local primaries to Trump-supported challengers. So Trump made the party more Trump-like, though not necessarily more electable, by moving it further toward extreme positions. By jettisoning a lot of frictional opposition, he now enjoys…..less frictional opposition. That’s one reason he’s been ahead from the get-go in all the primary races.
The fourth factor is that the party faithful, even those sceptical of MAGA orthodoxies, sense that Trump’s pet issues are becoming more salient, so many conclude that if nominated he’d win—and winning is above all what they crave in a polarized, existentially whipped up, political environment. Those issues are primarily border security and immigration issues, anti-woke/anti-DEI issues, crime, and the sense that lower socio-economic echelon voters have of economic duress and insecurity. This latter matter is despite the fact that macroeconomic data on employment, growth, and new job creation are very good under the Biden Administration, but those data do not align with the lived experience of less well-off people who are still dealing with the aftershocks of high inflation and on-going cost disease in critical service sectors (health care and insurance costs, higher education, housing, transportation, and digital services) when their incomes have not kept pace. These may be called white bread-and-butter issues, and they are key right now in MAGAworld. Trump’s ceaseless anti-elitist, anti-free trade, anti-globalist rhetoric works on those ensconced within it, and that translates into primary support.
Another, lesser issue factor playing in Trump’s favour is the Ukraine-Russia war. The Biden Administration has been careful but forthright in supporting Ukraine, but most Americans think that spending money and taking risks in Eastern Europe is not in American interests. The MAGA constituency is isolationist on balance as well as xenophobic in “spirit”, if one may call it that. Trump’s boast that Russia would not have dared invade Ukraine had he been (rightfully in his mendacious view) President plays well to the core, and his claim that if re-elected the war would soon be over and so cost American taxpayers no more money is also very popular even to non-MAGA Republicans and some independent voters. That’s why the Republican House has deemed it politically advantageous to obstruct military aid for Ukraine.
How would Trump end the war? By following the House lead and cutting off Ukraine, thus forcing it under duress to negotiate a surrender lest it be swallowed whole. That would bless the Russian annexation of seized Ukrainian territory and set the stage for the next war, a next war that would put NATO to its ultimate test and that, without U.S. buy-in, would effectively destroy it. Trump doesn’t care; indeed, he has relished the idea of withdrawing from all U.S alliances—and from less-than-alliance military “arrangements” (hear that, Singapore?)—for many years.
Meanwhile, finally on this factor, Trump has insulated himself on issues that bend toward the Democrats, especially the key culture war issue of abortion. Trump could care less about this issue and has never been blood-on-the-saddle in opposing abortion. The galactic-scale lie that many Evangelicals tell themselves that Trump is a deeply devout Christian is at least one that Trump himself didn’t have to invent—though he does encourage the Jesus-addled by taking pains at rallies to bubblewrap himself in sanctimonious fakery by having fawning clerics up on the stage with him. He didn’t need to be anti-abortion, since the Democrats were so volubly pro-choice that they chased all the so-called pro-life types into Trump’s corner by default. Of all the Republican primary contestants, Trump has the best chance of finessing the abortion issue in the general election. [Update alert: Hence his recent broaching of a 16-week Federal abortion ban, designed to make him look reasonable on the issue. No other GOP seeker of the nomination would have dared do that.]
The fifth factor, leading from the fourth, is that Trump speaks in populist tones much more convincingly and consistently than any of his primary opponents. Trump voters come in basically four flavours—cultists who think he is the saviour of all they hold dear; people who fear the (exaggerated) political clout of the illiberal woke Left (its real power is cultural, not yet political); people who vote the Republican brand by rote; and single-issue voters, as with on the abortion issue. Of these four flavours the first is most critical to Trump, and the currency here is Trump’s ability to play the counter-humiliation card.
Many less well-educated Americans, Americans who (like Trump himself) do not read anything more challenging than grocery lists, street signs, and the occasional cereal box back panel, feel status-humiliated at a time when decent blue-collar jobs are scarcer than ever and higher education is the key to social mobility. They swallow “deep state” and “QAnon” conspiracy theories more readily and tend to have low social-capital in their personal lives: fewer friends, broken families, for males self-eviction from the job market, higher rates of substance-abuse issues. They particularly crave community, even if it is only online virtual community. Trump is always tearing down the elites—political, economic, and cultural—so he appeals to those who think they have been humiliated by “the man”, whomever or whatever that means to them. This is why Trump’s massive legal problems, his paying hush money to a porn actress, his acting out in court bringing gag orders down upon him, actually help him with this constituency. They conclude that he, like them, is a victim unfairly held down. Their sympathy and support thus overfloweth.
The Trump cult now consists of somewhere between 28% and 35% of Republican voters, sometimes defined in polls as people who would vote for Trump even if he runs at the head of a third-party ticket, and defined more recently as even if he is a convicted felon doing jail time. If out of a total of 161.42 million registered voters about 27% are Republican (43.58 million), then that’s 12.20 to 15.25 million voters—not a trivial number especially in a close election. Not all of them are conspiracy-addled, adolescent-brained naïfs, but many do fit the description.
So now to the sixth factor: Trump’s anti-Federal government disposition. Aside from Ramaswamy and one or two other non-entities, all of the other contenders for the Republican nomination have had real government experience and educations more or less suitable for the job of legislating and governing. They are or were mostly governors of states (Haley, Christie, DeSantis, Hutchinson, Burgum, Pence) or Senators or Congressmen. Trump never did understand--and despite four years on the job still doesn’t understand--how the Office of the President or the Federal government actually works. All the competitors—Nikki Haley is the only one still standing for now—more or less do understand it.
Trump never cared to know, in part because he never really expected to be elected in 2016. His 2016 campaign was conceived as one massive infomercial for the Trump brand, mostly paid for by the craven broadcast media out to maximize market share. Thanks to the Reagan rhetoric of the 1980s, the activist ideologues in the Republican Party despise the Federal government and think, as Reagan said, that “government is not the solution, it’s the problem”. They would burn the hated “administrative state” down to the ground if they could, but for most “starving the beast”—in Grover Norquist’s immortal phase—of budget balm is the best they can manage.
The gist here is that anyone with genuine experience at governing is at a disadvantage relative to Trump as far as GOP party activists are concerned. This self-negating conception of government seems irrational for people seeking to hold high office. It is irrational. But it also is what it is: irrational and popular. It is, live and in living colour, Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason” redux.
The seventh factor is related to the fifth: Trump enjoys a cult of personality formed around him. His core displays all the characteristics of a cult, religious as well as political. None of the other contenders for the Republican nomination have acquired his mystical, larger-than-life aura.
Trump resembles the classic “magnifico”, the ostentatious, irreverent, free-spending, larger-than-life type that first emerged in the Italian Renaissance and that has numerous times been on display elsewhere. For those in Europe, Silvio Berlusconi is perhaps the most recent more or less pure example of the type. In American politics and culture the outsized presence of historical figures like Huey “Kingfish” Long, William Randolph Hearst, J.P. Morgan, and of course P.T. Barnum himself are prime examples. The only other U.S. President who was cultic in a populist mode was Andrew Jackson but, unlike Trump, Jackson had real military and political experience and could at least read and write standard (American) English. Obviously, too, Jackson operated in a media/communications world that dramatically differed from that of the 21st century.
And so now to the last of the eight factors which, just by the way, foreshadows the Age of Spectacle fare making its way toward you in this substack space.
American culture is increasingly in the grip of an entertainment template made possible by unprecedented affluence and technological novelty. It is characterized by an “attention economy”, in the words of 1978 Nobel economics laureate Herbert A. Simon, that works mostly through images that trigger the brain’s novelty bias. Combined with a sharp and relatively sudden decline in deep literacy, large number of Americans—easily 40% of American adults, maybe more—are addicted to screens of one sort or another. This is a neurocognitive statement, not a metaphor. The process of discounting actual three-dimensional reality into a torrent of mediated two-dimensional images, most of them fictive and many of them fantastical in nature, has had a dramatic but underappreciated shadow effect on the basic mentality of the nation.
Alas, huge numbers of American voters are addicted to distraction and have the attention spans of goldfish, so they cannot focus quality attention on anything longer or more complex than a video advertisement. If they don’t deep read anything, which is typical of the lot, they lack the wherewithal to think about public policy issues or political ideas at all. The absence of any serious teaching of civics at the high-school level for the past roughly fifty years hasn’t helped. Into the vacuum of their own understanding they throw, when feeling a need to say something about all this, a clipped dollop of adolescent-level ideology picked up from a slanted broadcast media rant. Many Americans now dropped into the maw of digital entertainment culture have actually understood, at least at some level, that Trump does not respect the Constitution (he is surely the only President ever to swear an oath to defend a document he has never read) and treats the rule-of-law as an exclusively instrumental/transactional issue, but extensive polling shows that they do not care.
How can that be? Most Americans today want more than anything else to be entertained, not educated or refined or saved or anything else, and they insist as well on being part of the entertainment. Many quietly live their inner lives as if they are the stars of their own shows in what amounts to a kind of private virtualized narcissism. They see the entire real world as if it were a reality-television show that never ends, as if they were on the old Jerry Springer Show now and always. Real-world problems more complicated than a typical adventure movie plot or made-for-TV drama storyline simply cannot penetrate their attenuated cognitive apparatus. They comprise, as former Republican Senator Benjamin Sasse put it, the “vanishing American adult”, intellectually trapped in a para-Hollywood adolescence all the way to the grave.
Donald Trump entered the consciousness of the American public first as a World Wrestling Federation shill, and then as a reality-TV star. He has name recognition out the wazoo compared to all his challengers, even apart from the fact that he actually got elected President. He knows that in a surrealist entertainment-mentality world facts don’t matter and “shiny object” slogans mean everything. He knows how to keep himself atop the news cycle; every outrageous thing he says or does sends the American clickbait broadcast media into paroxysms of greed trying to bottle and market the entertainment he provides. He knows that bad-guy publicity is better than no publicity, an insight that his WWF experience seared into his brain. He has cultivated his public persona as a faux-mafiosa don type, very New Yorkesque, and huge numbers of people find this wildly entertaining as they experience politics as mere bloodsport, like they’re watching a sporting event and only personalities, not issues or rules, matter. That’s enough nowadays to get elected President.
Or is it? Trump has always led the GOP pack in the primaries but for a brief moment things looked to be changing. Nikki Haley closed the gap in New Hampshire to just a few points. The key donor defector, the Koch Brothers, threw money at Haley and it has been working. It’s partly why after New Hampshire she was the only opposition to Trump left standing, and it why she did so well in South Carolina on February 25—but then again that’s her home state, so she obviously has more name recognition there than anywhere else. As already suggested, that matters.
More important, remembering key factor number eight, it is in the nature of an entertainment-addled mind to be fickle and impatient—just like the typical adolescent mind is fickle and impatient. Trump could well be wearing out his welcome. He’s old news. He must strain harder every day to dominate the news cycle despite the feckless, endlessly irresponsible help the broadcast media still give him. Here’s a quote Singaporeans (and others) can appreciate that speaks directly to this general point: About a hundred years ago, H.L. Mencken wrote, “When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.”
Indeed, Mencken may once again prove to be prophetic as well as witty. After all, although he thought he was writing about Warren Gamaliel Harding, he actually foresaw Trump’s White House portal waltz when he wrote in the July 25, 1920 Baltimore Evening Star:
As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.
We’ve still got about nine months to go [update alert, now it’s closer to eight months….tempus fugit] to November 5, 2024. We’ll see how long Trump can keep up his political grifting act before enough people tire of it to doom his prospects. It remains a very open question which way this will tilt, and of course how it tilts will not be Trump’s doing alone. Joe Biden will have something to say about it, too.
Why Biden?
2. Joe Biden's approval rating has hit a new low, and there are concerns about his age too. Why is there a lack of challengers for the Democratic presidential nomination?
This is an easier question to answer, but not very easy. First of all, the approval rating polls, and several other types as well, are not scientific polls. Most are conducted by for-profit businesses for sale to the mega-media, so they should not be taken too seriously.
Still, it’s true: Despite the good economic indicators many people are fretful of the economy as they experience it—of which more below. Biden is old, episodically forgetful, sometimes doddering, and prone to anecdotage (read: engaging his elderly mouth before putting his brain into gear).
But as with Trump, Biden has the status of seniority as a long-time Senator and a loyal Vice-President in a popular two-term Obama presidency. He is also a centrist and a moderate, however much MAGA propagandists try to paint him as a “woke” radical Marxist socialist madman. Nonsense: He’s a Catholic from a working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania family, went to a Jesuit college, and opposed busing as a means of public school desegregation. He is situated politically where all serious analysts say he should be to win re-election. That has helped deter challenges.
Then there is name recognition and the fact that the party is divided. On the party centre no other Democrat has anything like Biden’s name recognition as a sitting President, and no one further to the Left could overtake him given the party elders’ sense of what it takes to get elected in a nation that as a whole tends to be centre-right on cultural issues and centre-left on economic ones. Senator Elizabeth Warren is probably the smartest Senate Democrat and she actually has a theory of the case as to what’s wrong with the nation, and what needs to be done about it. Her 2020 effort to win the Democratic nomination needed a better tag line, “the democratization of opportunity” would have worked quite well, for example….but she neglected to seek my advice. But even with it, the party pros would not have thought her capable of winning then, or now. That’s probably right.
In the centre-right of the Democratic Party no one with either much name recognition or a theory of the case around which to base a campaign comes readily to mind. Typical Democratic politicians do not have a clue as to what comes after the neoliberal era that the Rubin-Summers wing of their own party helped to usher into vogue. Neither do Republicans, true, but they have disguised their lack of practical ideas with multiple layers of Nancy Reagan “just say no” nihilism. The Democrats, however, need a clue because they claim to be a party of governance and progress for the average person; but they have failed to show the electorate what that progress looks like. As a former boss of mine used to say—only in private, of course—both major parties are brain-dead, idea-free zones. He was basically right.
Last on this point, the nature of political recruitment in American politics has put a premium on people who can raise money with pretty faces and performative antics of one kind or another. Personality and celebrity potential now far outweigh ideas and policy-relevant experience. That’s the entertainment mentality pouring into American political culture, as it has now increasingly poured for decades. That phenomenon deters many serious people who might have otherwise gone into politics. The Democratic bench, as a result, is pretty weak when it comes to trustworthy stewards of the public interest who can also appeal to the electorate.
One final note on the second question. The obvious heir apparent to a sitting President, should he be thought too old or to unwell to run, would be the Vice-President. But everyone knows that Kamala Harris would go down in a torrent of flames in a head-to-head contest against Trump. This means that a challenger would per force be a challenger not only to Biden but also to Harris. Now, who among the Democrats wants to be seen trying to take down a woman, and a woman of colour at that? You take the point, right?
Why a Serious Third-Party Bid Could Change Everything
3. Do you think that the 2024 election will end up being Trump vs. Biden again?
Yes I do, as things stand right now, and that would be odd. The Republicans appear to favour a proven loser--lost the popular vote for President twice, lost the Senate and the House in the 2018 midterms, lost more ground in the Senate in 2020…..—and many Democrats seemingly want to dump a proven winner. This is strange and suggests something dysfunctional, if not outright irrational, at play in American political culture.
But even eight months [updated number] is a long time in politics, and a lot could still happen to deflect the election’s trajectory in a different direction. Old guys can get sick or even die at exactly the wrong time. (Word to the would-be cautiously wise: One man who ran for President a long time ago did well enough to win some electoral votes, but died before those votes could be counted; that was Horace Greeley in 1872.) But the question is slightly flawed because it ignores the possibility of how third-party candidates might affect the outcome.
Let’s assume that the Republicans nominate Trump and the Democrats nominate Biden, but that the No Labels organization revives its recent slough and decides to run a big-name third-party campaign. Suppose it’s a Joe Manchin-Liz Cheney ticket, a kind of national unity ticket composed of a right-of-centre Democrat from a “red” state (West Virginia) and a well-known (thanks to the January 6 Committee hearings) and articulate “never Trump” Republican from the west (Wyoming). That campaign would be in addition to other small parties that could get on the ballot in most states, like the Green Party, but it would be the only one likely to actually win a state’s electoral votes.
Now, a muscular vote-drawing third party can affect the election in two ways. The first way, as noted, is to actually win a state’s electoral votes, making an otherwise close election go short of producing an Electoral College majority. In that case, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each of the 50 House delegations casts one vote. Since more House delegations are majority-Republican than majority-Democratic that means, very likely, that the Republican candidate would be elected.
The second way is that a major third-party candidacy could draw enough votes from one major party in favour of the other to change the outcome in particular states. How would that play out in practise? Would a major third-party candidacy be more likely on balance to help the Democrats or the Republicans? No one knows yet, nor does anyone know if or how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s bizarre candidacy might skew the results. But given the impact of third-party candidates on election outcomes in fairly recent times--Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, possibly even Jill Stein in one or maybe two closely-run swing states in 2016--this is not a matter that can be safely ignored.
The reason it’s hard to know how a third-party effort would play out is that the polls currently contradict each other. Some have had Trump beating Biden by 4 to 7 points were the election held today, but others have claimed that as much as 64% of the electorate now say they would “never” vote for Trump. Both of those things cannot be true. Until the contradiction sorts itself out, it’s impossible to game out a major third-party impact on the election. It’s just another factor in the mix of uncertainty we live with here as we hurtle toward November 5.
What We Know That Ain’t So
You didn’t ask, dear Red Dot journalist but, finally for now, there is reason to believe that several hoary assumptions about U.S. presidential elections are wrong, or at any rate have become wrong. We have mentioned them in passing, but they are sufficiently important to merit a brief concentrated review.
One assumption is that the economy matters a lot in moving voters to either support or oppose the incumbent believed to be responsible for it, even though of course he is never really responsible for it except at the margin. Another is that incumbency is generally an advantage for reasons going beyond the state of the economy. Very likely, both of these assumptions are exaggerated, passé, or subject to meaningful and thus misleading mismeasurement.
Artemus Ward (he being Charles Farrar Browne and not Mark Twain or Will Rogers) once said that “it isn’t what we know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” Browne (1834-1867), America’s pioneer stand-up comedian, wasn’t just trying to be funny, although he was also that. In this case, new data show that the state of the economy has rarely been as important to election outcomes as many have believed.[2]
That is in part because how the economy is doing—a subject for which we have had reliable data only since 1913 at the earliest, when the Labor Department and the Bureau of Labor Statistics were created—has often gotten conflated in historical memory with persistent if shifting political disagreements concerning what money is, who can create it, and who benefits and loses from whatever arrangements are in place to use it. This is a complex story that winds from the federalization of the War of Independence debt in the 1790s to the struggles over a national bank in the 1820s and 1830s to “Free Silver” populism near the end of the 19th century to the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve system to FDR’s calling in gold in 1933 to Nixon’s suspending the convertibility of the dollar into species in 1971. We don’t have time for this now—it’s a book-length lesson in and of itself—but these issues have shaped election outcomes in ways the mere “state of the economy” rarely if ever has.
Second, given the decidedly sour mood of most affluent-nation electorates these days, it turns out that rather than incumbency being an unalloyed advantage it may bear a generic political cost. Other new data show that the public mood concerning the motives and competence of the specifically American political elite skitters along like a sine wave that from time to time dips below the baseline into “a plague on all their houses” territory.[3] That would be, again, right now. The cost of being seen to be responsible for everything that’s wrong, and that government either can’t or won’t fix, is a liability rather than an advantage. It’s like losing a game of toss the burning bag of faeces.
As to mismeasurement, the macro-data on the U.S. economy is indeed buoyant if you don’t look too closely at it. Vibrant job creation, low unemployment, sharply reduced inflation, good GNP growth—oh, very nice. But what kind of jobs? How many able-bodied men have removed themselves from the work force to produce that low unemployment statistic? Growth in what sectors, benefitting what income and wealth quintiles, and based on capital investment from where exactly?
Even more important for electoral assessment purposes, happy macro-data doesn’t square with the perceptions of most less well-off Americans. Inflation lag is still traumatic for family budgets that have yet to catch up with the cumulatively high inflation of the past few years and the tightened credit used to treat it has added woeful knock-on effects, as well.
But not all forms of credit tightening are created equal. The cost of borrowing new money is generally lower than the cost of repaying old. Many families in the lower half of the income and wealth quintiles have struggled with both growing debt because of inflation—using new credit to make ends meet—and debt servicing costs, including particularly carried credit card debt from before the latest spurt of high inflation. Anyone with rolling credit card debt whose interest payments have not been fixed is now paying a lot more for old credit even if they have taken on no new debt, and whether they see that old credit as having been a necessity or a you-only-live-once luxury no longer matters when the monthly dunning arrives.
The cost of money in an economy like that of the United States is just as important as the cost of goods and services not just for less well off families and individuals, but to some extent for everyone because it ripples through the entire economy, affecting for example the ratio of wholesale to retail costs as value-added processes move along. (Note here, if you’ve a mind to study this issue, Marijn A. Bolhuis, Judd N.L. Cramer, Karl Oskar Schulz, and Lawrence H. Summers, “The Cost of Money is Part of the Cost of Living: New Evidence on the Consumer Sentiment Anomaly,” NBER Working Paper Series, Paper 32163, February 2024.)
That high inflation and associated higher cost of credit, by the way, were made considerably worse than they were going to be for pandemic-related reasons by the then-new Biden Administration’s handing out way more free money as so-called economic stimulus payments—it would have been wiser to have called them public health emergency supplements, or something that would not have normalized the expectation that the Treasury would hand out free money whenever the economy hits a bump—for obviously political and not just economic reasons, than was prudent. That was President Biden’s at-the-margin impact on the economy this time around, one undertaken with either the connivance or inexcusable somnambulance of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. (Tacit connivance seems the better bet.)
For example, the average American homeowner’s insurance bill for 2024 has risen 18%, with some major companies’ rate hikes hitting 42%. Why? The insurance companies contend that recent loss claims have far exceeded premium revenues because companies could not quickly enough revalue assets in line with inflated costs of replacement, that in addition to heightened costs caused by pandemic era supply-chain disruptions, and so on.
When whoever handles the family finances opens a bill for homeowners’ insurance and sees a whopping 18-40% hike in the new premium charge, he or she—momentarily at least….—doesn’t give a damn about macroeconomic data. And the same is true for every sector of the U.S. economy, listed in passing above, that suffers from “cost disease” (best defined, perhaps, as grey-suited corporate-bureaucratic oligopolistic behaviour that raises sectoral costs beyond inflation even when inflation is relatively low). Obviously, too, huge increases in property owners’ insurance bills trickle down to affect rental costs, which are presently skyrocketing in many places.
So double-whammy: Incumbency isn’t likely to help Joe Biden in November but may hurt him instead and, despite all the ballyhooed data, the economy is not doing well in the perception of the core Trump base and among a big chunk of the independent swing voters who are likely to decide the outcome.
Dear Singapore, aren’t you glad now that your elections are so much simpler than ours? As we enjoy whispering when downing beer and eating chicken rice at the hawker centres, our political systems are the same save for one minor difference: We Americans know when our elections will happen but we don’t know who’ll win; we don’t know when Singapore’s elections will happen but, at least so far in the country’s history, we do know who’ll win. Tee-hee. (Don’t print that smidgen of wit in S’pore, lah?)
[1] Romney quoted in Charlie Sykes’s “Morning Shots”, The Bulwark, January 18, 2024.
[2] See Lee Drutman, “What If It’s Not the Economy (Stupid)?” Undercurrent Events, February 1, 2024, and the research sources cited therein.
[3] See Alfred G. Cuzán, “The First Two Laws of Politics: Nannestad and Paldam’s ‘Cost of Ruling’ Revisited,” Acta Politica 57: 2 (April 2022), pp. 420–30.