Twenty-five years in 2,500 words

The Slow Boring political narrative of every election I've voted in

When I was a teen political junkie in the 1990s, both public opinion and public policy were, overall, way to the right compared to today.

But I think the state of conventional wisdom about politics was a lot sounder. If you watched “Inside Politics” on CNN and read The New York Times and The Economist, and occasionally dived into The New Republic, National Review, and The Nation, you would come away with a broadly correct view of what was going on.

Politics is too complex to be summed up by a one-axis chart showing how people position themselves and presidential candidates ideologically, but exercises like this can provide a useful snapshot of America.

Since that era, political junkie types have developed, I think, overly complicated and basically incorrect views of how politics works. I find myself frequently trying to re-describe the events of recent history in terms of this earlier, more simplistic worldview, but people always (understandably) have questions about it. So, I thought a useful New Year’s exercise would be to present a complete Slow Boring Narrative of the Past Quarter-Century of American politics.

Doing that in a couple of thousand words requires incredible levels of telescoping and glossing over. I’m making, I admit, a lot of assertions and presenting very little argument or evidence. But I’m doing it less to persuade the unpersuaded than simply to convince everyone that there is a coherent account that hangs together. It also, in the manner of a good Wikipedia article, includes a lot of links where you can learn more.

My primary claim is that basic spatial models like the one above are good. It’s true that they’re simplifications. And it’s true that if you ask knowledgeable journalists and academics to fill in more details, they can bring your attention to a lot of other factors. But it’s also true that journalists and (especially) academics are much more left-wing than the overall public, so the injections of nuance tend to be asymmetrical and, as a result, can sometimes leave you less informed than if you’d stuck with a simpler take.

I think the newer, more confused narrative usefully begins with the first election that I happen to have voted in, the 2000 race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, so that seems like a good place to start with our simpler version.

Things fall apart

Many things happened simultaneously in this race, and a lot of them got lost in the shuffle of the post-election wrangling. But these are, I think, the most salient facts about the 2000 presidential election:

• The Kyoto Protocols were signed in 1997, and this was the first election in which climate change was on the ballot.

• Bush portrayed himself as a “compassionate conservative” who didn’t want to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor” and was invested in improving education.

• This not only helped him win more votes than Bob Dole had in 1996, but it re-enforced Ralph Nader’s message that the two parties were “tweedledee and tweedledum” (moving to the center is good both at persuading swing voters and also at demobilizing your opponent’s base).

If you compare the 1996 map to the 2000 map, one of the most dramatic changes is the sudden shift in Appalachia. Gore did well in West Virginia compared to subsequent Democratic presidential nominees, but not only did Clinton win it in 1996, he ran stronger there than he did nationally. But 2000 was the very first election in which climate change was on the partisan political agenda. I find that progressives tend to systematically underrate the political significance of climate/energy issues because it’s dissonant to acknowledge that an agenda they believe in substantively has political costs. But “should fossil fuel extraction industries exist?” is a big deal for communities built around fossil fuel extraction industries, and the right-ward shift of coal country was a harbinger of things to come.

The Iraq and marriage elections

Bush’s presidency ended up featuring the wildest plot twist in American political history since the Kennedy assassination, with al-Qaeda hijackers flying airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and murdering thousands of Americans. Today, the overwhelming conventional wisdom is that Bush mishandled the aftermath, and the response is often cited as an example of America’s failing elites. At the time, though, not only was Bush’s handling of the attacks wildly popular, it also led to an unusual surge of trust in government.

Personal popularity plus surging trust set the stage for Bush to invade Iraq, which dealt John Kerry the worst hand of any major party nominee in my lifetime.

By the summer/fall of 2004, the war had become a classic wedge issue — it was much too unpopular for Kerry not to criticize but still very clearly supported by a majority of all Americans. He also faced a tricky situation on same sex marriage. It was deeply unpopular at the time, so Kerry said he was against it. But Bush upped the ante, pushing for a federal constitutional amendment to bar the Supreme Court from ever ruling that equal protection required marriage equality. This was clever of Republicans, because they (correctly, as it turns out) intuited that liberal jurists would rule that it did, if given a chance. And while Democrats in those more pragmatic times were willing to side with the public against gay rights activists on the marriage question, they committed to holding the line on the constitutional question.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Given the fundamentals of the situation, I’ve always thought Kerry’s campaign was underrated. He finished the race with a 57 percent favorable rating, despite being badly outspent in the era before class de-alignment. He also came a lot closer to winning the electoral college tipping point state than the popular vote.

But he lost.

And what happened next, I think, set the tone for everything that came after. Because after Bush’s re-election, there was a lot of discussion about the need for ideological adjustment among Democrats and also a lot of new investment in progressive infrastructure. In the end, the ideological adjustment didn’t really happen (except Democrats temporarily stopped talking about gun control). Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was strikingly conservative by contemporary standards (for “clean coal” and tough immigration enforcement, no talk of “criminal justice reform,” and, of course, against gay marriage) but so was Kerry’s. Obama brought more charisma and pizzazz than Kerry had, but also a persona that seemed edgier — Black college professor instead of white war hero.

Instead of Democrats moving toward the median voter, the median voter moved toward the Democrats as marriage equality became less-unpopular and the Iraq War flipped from popular to unpopular.

Republicans responded with a shrewd move of their own, nominating not an establishment loyalist but the popular moderate John McCain. He had a puncher’s chance against Obama, except by summer, the economy was clearly sliding into recession. By the fall, it was in total collapse. Democrats won while adopting a more ambitious policy agenda on health care and, if anything, doing less to cater to the cultural sensibilities of middle America. In all my whining, I never want to be heard as denying that this is possible — if Trump fucks up in some huge, obvious way that people hate, Democrats can definitely win in 2028 with Biden-Harris ideology.

But I think it’s important to be clear that even though Democrats didn’t dramatically “move to the center” after 2004, ideological positioning was still central to the outcome. It’s not that Obama discovered some organizing magic; it’s that a stance on Iraq that would have been seen as too liberal in 2004 seemed correct by 2008. Actually convincing people to change their mind is an extremely powerful force for political change. But it wasn’t really Democratic Party messaging innovations that changed it.

A normal election and a weird one

In 2012, the GOP nominated a very reputable, very establishment friendly guy in the form of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. In 2016, they nominated a lying asshole and scumbag in the form of Donald Trump. Romney lost and Trump won, which led a lot of Republicans to conclude that assholes and scumbags are good and a lot of Democrats to conclude that all the laws of politics had been repealed.

But I really think you need to read both elections in light of policy.

If you zoomed out from all the particulars of the campaigns, you would see that Romney ran on the most strikingly hard-right platform of any 21st century Republican. He disavowed Bush-style compassionate conservatism in favor of a pitch centered squarely on cutting spending, including privatizing Medicare. At a time when LGBT rights had become much more mainstream, he wanted to bring back Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And it was Romney, not Trump, who abandoned support for the Bush/McCain style of bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform. A lot of this hard-right positioning reflected themes that should be familiar to recent Democrats: Romney spent a lot of time worrying about consolidating his base, who didn’t really trust him since he’d governed Massachusetts as a moderate.

Obama exploited Romney’s policy extremism and won. Unfortunately, Democrats couldn’t carry the House in 2012 because of gerrymandering and had a bad midterm in 2014. This meant Obama’s second term disappointed progressives on substance, and progressive funders went about breaking down the veal pen and creating the groups.

Then came 2016. On the GOP side, this meant elevating a badly flawed candidate, but one who had the good sense to moderate from Romney’s toxic stance on Medicare.

Hillary Clinton started the cycle riding high, but she faced an unexpectedly tough challenge from the left in Bernie Sanders. In response, she panicked and started wielding identity politics to attack Sanders from the left. I think this backfired and caused Sanders to do better with conservative Democrats. I also think Democrats’ read of Sanders’s relative success underplayed the extent to which his best issues were mainstream Teens Democratic issues like Iraq and LGBT rights. Hillary was defeated not so much because of socialism versus establishment Dem views. She was defeated because by 2016, mainstream Democrats thought her 2003 vote for the Iraq War and her husband’s 1990s support for things like the Defense of Marriage Act were dumb.

I think it remains underrated the extent to which Iraq drove many political dynamics of the aughts and teens:

• Iraq made 2004 unwinnable for Democrats.

• Iraq is why Democrats could win in 2008 without moderating.

• Iraq is why Hillary felt unacceptably right-wing to young Democrats in 2016.

• Iraq is why the Bush dynasty was discredited in the eyes of GOP primary voters by 2016.

The whole “establishment” meltdown of 2016 is multifaceted, but a single facet — dynastic politics colliding with Iraq — is far more important than the others.

Things fall apart (again)

After 2016, I think Democrats could have rationally responded in one of two ways. They could’ve declared the establishment discredited and allowed the left to take its turn, in which case I think Trump would’ve just won in 2020. Or, they could’ve admitted that certain 2016 platform innovations — notably, shifting from comprehensive immigration reform to non-enforcement, abandoning tough on crime language and policies, and ditching their “all of the above” energy strategy — didn’t work, especially in the face of Trump moderating on Medicare.

In that world, it’s easy to imagine a young, reminiscent-of-Obama figure like Julian Castro or Cory Booker or a moderate woman like Amy Klobuchar running and winning on a Back To Obama platform.

What happened instead was a crazy cycle in which mainstream figures like Castro and Booker raced to the left, only to find that those voters still wanted Bernie Sanders or maybe Elizabeth Warren. The young, Obama-esque figure who captured imaginations was Pete Buttigieg, who seemed under-qualified, and while his platform was moderate compared to the primary field, it was actually quite left-wing compared to Democrats in the 2008 or 2016 cycles. This left the “Back To Obama” lane open for Joe Biden, who was not young and didn’t particularly capture anyone’s imagination. But he was seen as the electability choice.

And after Biden won the primary, something unexpected happened.

Instead of Democrats with more energy and charisma than Biden realizing they’d misread the primary electorate and needed to recalibrate their positions, Biden pivoted left. He fired his campaign manager right after winning (odd) and brought in the architect of the Beto O’Rourke campaign. He formed a unity task force and made policy concessions to the defeated Bernie wing of the party (notably, this was on top of the fact that Biden had already positioned himself to the left of Obama on things like trade and charter schools). And the leftward pivot continued throughout the campaign. Separate from the unity commission process, in September of 2020, Biden — who had spent the whole primary opposing a refundable Child Tax Credit — announced that he now supported one as an emergency pandemic measure. Of course once he took office, making permanent the CTC he opposed and then supported as temporary became a signature policy fight, with the White House directing all kinds of ire at Joe Manchin for holding Biden’s previous position. And after beating Trump, Biden was still telling people he wouldn’t use executive authority to cancel student loan debt, a position he again later reversed.

Primary Biden got raked by the left for promising his donors that though he would raise their taxes, he would never demonize rich people and “nothing would fundamentally change” about the market economy. Again, he won the primary with that moderate pro-business message that was explicitly designed to differentiate him from Bernie and Warren. But in office, he embraced the gospel of anti-neoliberalism and championed a network of Warren-linked staffers who totally disagreed with that message. Primary Biden was still clearly visible on foreign policy, especially Israel, but on domestic issue, he wasn’t just more left-wing than swing voters were expecting — he was more left-wing than primary voters had voted for. I still don’t think we really know why any of that happened. But we saw quite quickly that sticking the Biden face on Warrenism wasn’t popular. From 2022 forward, all of Democratic politics was centered on trying to ride backlash to Dobbs (which Trump eventually neutralized by disavowing an abortion ban) and on specifically knocking Trump over January 6 and the threat to democracy.

Anti-Trumpism came close to winning an election for Kamala Harris, but it was nowhere near scoring a Senate majority that would make progressive governance possible. The long, leftward post-2012 trajectory didn’t just fail narrowly (anything can fail narrowly), it completely failed to achieve its objective of pushing a more ambitious pace of policy change. Because to change policy, you need to be competitive in more states.