What happens next. By Matthew Yglesias

What happens next. By Matthew Yglesias

Hey folks, welcome to the first full day of Joe Biden’s America.

January 20, 2021. 

Slow boring.com

I think what everyone wants to know is what’s going to happen over the next four, eight, and twelve years of American politics. Fortunately, you’re a Slow Boring subscriber and I can tell you — we don’t really know.

The best way to think about the future is to think about the recent past of efforts to predict the future. Nobody is better plugged-in to DC gossip than Politico, so check out the lookback that Alex Thompson and Theodoric Meyer published Tuesday on their Biden Cabinet reporting:

Of the 18 Cabinet posts we included, we didn’t even mention the ultimate nominee for 15 of them. Our only consolation is that The New York Times didn’t fare any better, reporting just three of 17 senior administration roles correctly in their initial piece.

So how did I do? With the exception of Attorney General, I didn’t cheat by offering multiple suggestions for each job. I also only tried to report on the 15 jobs that start with “Secretary of X.” So out of my 16 names, two (Deb Haaland, Alejandro Mayorkas) ended up being correct and two more (Pete Buttigieg and Xavier Becerra) were ultimately selected as secretaries, but not for the job I listed them as the top contender for.

In other words: Relative to the competition, the Slow Boring team of reporters (i.e., just me) is pretty well-informed.

But in absolute terms, the reporting industry did a very bad collective job of this. Probably the best thing I can say about my own cabinet reporting is that compared to other people who wrote these pieces, I tried to be appropriately under-confident, writing:

Nothing is decided until Joe Biden actually decides, in consultation with Chuck Schumer (and/or Mitch McConnell pending the outcomes in Georgia). The transition teams and the vetters all have big impact here, but they can’t actually make a pick without the president-elect’s agreement. 

And that turns out to be the rub. Relative to what the transition team had been talking about pre-election, Biden turned out to place a higher priority on tapping very experienced people and people he’d worked with previously for certain key roles. That had some knock-on effects for other positions and everyone’s forecasts turned to garbage. The point is, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen in the future.

The baseline scenario

What we can know is what’s happened in the past.

One extremely strong pattern is that while pundits often perceive the winning team to have momentum, public opinion swings thermostatically in the other direction. A new president takes office, there’s a lot of public focus on his party’s most controversial ideas, and opinion swings the other way. Public sentiment became much more pro-immigration while Trump was in office, for example.

Related to this, the president’s party usually loses ground in the midterms. Because Congress is so closely divided right now, historical expectation would be that Democrats will lose the House and the Senate in 2022.

Presidents are normally re-elected, so we’d expect Biden to be re-elected in 2024. Re-elections are often a good year for the president’s party in the Senate because presidential and Senate vote are strongly correlated in on-years. But Democrats’ 2024 map is bad, so you’d expect even a successful Biden re-election to feature the loss of Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio.

The opposition party normally wins that “third” election so you’d expect the GOP to win in 2028.

Thanks to the Senate dynamics, that new GOP president should have much more ability to legislate in 2029 than Trump did in 2017 so I’d expect big right-wing bills to pass in a way that wasn’t the case in Trump’s term. Then since the GOP economic policy agenda is — unlike their broad cultural messaging — incredibly unpopular, I think we’ll see a big backlash. And that 2030 backlash will likely jolt us out of the cultural cleavages that are currently dominating politics. In both the 2006 and 2018 midterms we saw efforts to implement welfare state rollback meet huge electoral backlash in a way that scandals, racism, and authoritarianism don’t. What happens after that? Well, who knows. We don’t even know this much.

Baseline deviations

To be clear, those are not predictions! That’s just the pattern. So how could it go wrong?

Midterm losses are a strong historical pattern, but not a law of nature. Republicans gained seats in 2002, and it’s possible Democrats can defy history in 2022.

Indeed, the narrowness of their Congressional majorities may help them here since it will be objectively difficult to engage in the kind of overreach that would tempt a backlash.

Presidents are usually re-elected, but it’s not that unusual for an incumbent to lose (indeed it just happened), so just on the broad history I wouldn’t place a huge bet on this.

I’m assuming Biden will be in good health and run for re-election, since that’s what normally happens, but he’s unusually old and there’s a higher-than-normal chance that won’t happen.

What’s more, while presidents are usually re-elected, they also usually don’t face a four percentage point Electoral College disadvantage. Unlike Senate bias, the skew of the Electoral College is kind of flukey and weird and it might get smaller in 2024, but a really basic trend projection doesn’t show that happening until 2028 (when Texas’ steady leftward drift starts to matter), so you never know.

One plausible scenario is that Biden is in good health, runs for re-election, wins the popular vote 51-49, and because of the nature of the maps, this leads to a Republican trifecta with healthy-sized majorities.

On the other hand, the other big known-unknown out there is Donald J. Trump, who has been kind of silenced since the January 6 insurrection but presumably won’t just vanish from the scene. Could he launch a third party? Could he insist on running again and prompt Mitt Romney or whomever to launch a third party? Maybe? I’ve been reading inaccurate predictions of a looming conservative crackup my whole life so have a gut-level tendency to discount these ideas. Conservatives are very fractious in their way, but the movement is more organized around blocking progressives (as William F. Buckley said, “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”) than around an affirmative agenda, so they tend to pull together at key moments.

That said, if you look at the major third party election years of the 20th century (1912, 1948, 1968, and 1992), they’re sort of all beautiful unique snowflakes, so I’m not sure the “history of third-party presidential bids” actually conveys a lot of information about the future.

Demographics and destiny

We all know that the thesis of The Emerging Democratic Majority didn’t pan out and that demographic determinism about partisan politics is wrong.

To an extent, though, I now think that people may have over-learned that lesson. One big reason Democrats haven’t dominated 21st century electoral politics is that the issue landscape has shifted way to the left. This ad from Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996 is way closer to Donald Trump’s re-election themes than it is to anything a contemporary Democrat would say.

To a degree, I think the extent of this change has been obscured by happenstance.

Bill Clinton’s wife got elected to the Senate in 2000, mounted a major presidential campaign in 2008, and became the Democratic Party nominee in 2016.

Joe Biden, who was already a very senior Senate Democrat in the 1990s, became Vice President in 2009 and the Democratic Party nominee in 2020.

Bernie Sanders, who was also in Congress in the 1990s, ran major presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

So on the level of personalities, “The Clintons fight with Bernie Sanders about NAFTA and such” has just been going on for a really long time, and the left keeps losing. And personally I think it’s pretty unhealthy to have had all these oldsters dominating things.

But the basic shape of it is that the underlying structure of American politics has moved left. Sanders himself has moved left on key issues (guns, immigrants); the party establishment has moved left; and the Republicans have mostly moved left, too. If Trump ran on privatizing Social Security, on Paul Ryan’s ideas about Medicare, and on kicking gay soldiers out of the military, he’d have gotten creamed.

The demographics give us two different double-movements:

The college grad share of the population keeps rising, and college grads keep shifting left. This helps Democrats on one level, but also tends to leave them ever-more-captured by the BA bubble, with few figures remaining other than Biden himself who remember basic ideas about how to communicate with the non-college majority.

The non-white share of the population keeps rising, which lifts Democrats, but non-white voters themselves are trending in the GOP direction. I think it remains a little controversial at this point which side of that dominated more in 2016-2020 shifts, and it’ll continue to be a race in the future.

But all these trends and contradictions point toward a continued evolution of the electorate in a more progressive direction.

What’s noteworthy about America, though, is that our electoral system is full of tipping points. A 51-50 Senate is very different from a 49-51 Senate even though the underlying distribution of public opinion that generates those outcomes is very similar. So a leftward drift of public opinion is very ambiguous in its outlook for actual policy, given that the maps currently favor the right. The baseline scenario basically involves Democrats overreaching a tiny amount, which leads to a huge rightward swing of policy that in turn produces a huge backlash. That might not be what happens, but just contemplating it is a reminder that the system has destabilizing properties along with gridlock-inducing ones.

The abortion time bomb

Now at long last, in keeping with my commitments in “How To Be Less Full of Shit,” I am going to commit myself to a specific prediction.

I think the savvy take among progressives that the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court will “chip away at” or “gut” Roe v. Wade while leaving it formally in place is wrong. Rank-and-file conservatives believe that abortion is morally scandalous, and conservative legal scholars believe that Roe is both poorly reasoned and (perhaps more importantly) emblematic of why progressive jurists are bad and should be kept out of office. John Roberts and Co. are going to want to say in a loud and proud way that they are rectifying a historical injustice. He and Brett Kavanaugh will probably insist on an official majority ruling that is less of a table-pounding rant than the inevitable Thomas/Alito concurrence, but it’s not going to be a cutesy thing.

I’m putting 80 percent on overt “this precedent was wrong, and we’re overruling it.”

And that’s going to be a big deal for politics. Abortion has not been an electorally salient issue in recent campaigns, even though in retrospect, the 2014 Senate races and 2016 presidential campaign will have proven decisive to its fate. Recall that Mark Udall was very widely mocked for attempting to emphasize reproductive freedom issues in his re-election campaign and “war on women” messaging in other states likewise fell flat. The voters could not have known that Antonin Scalia would die or that Mitch McConnell would hold the Supreme Court seat vacant. But the broader point is that voters tend not to think prospectively.

By the same token, we know that the non-college white voters who backed Obama in 2012 but flipped to Trump in 2016 are a pretty secular and choice-friendly group. Anti-immigrant sentiment obviously played a big role in that, but another issue is that Trump — in a good way — seemed like such a phony. Here’s a bit from a focus group on Planned Parenthood conducted after the 2016 campaign:

This leads to an obvious question: If these women think defunding Planned Parenthood is a deal-breaker, why did they vote for a candidate who promised to do exactly that? After all, in a September letter addressed to “Pro-Life Leaders,” Trump pledged to strip Planned Parenthood’s federal funding unless it stops performing abortions. But many of the people in the focus groups didn’t know he’d made this assurance, and those who did didn’t take it seriously. It seemed as if Trump’s lasciviousness, which Clinton hoped would disqualify Trump with women, actually worked in his favor. The focus group participants couldn’t imagine that Trump would enact a religious right agenda. “He’s probably paid for a few abortions himself,” said the 58-year-old in Phoenix, eliciting a roomful of laughs.

In several focus groups, the moderator asked if people expected Trump to veto a defunding bill, and most hands went up. The new mother in Harrisburg pointed out that Trump avoided social issues in the campaign: “That was never Donald Trump’s platform.” Said a Phoenix man in his 30s: “I think this is coming from the bible-thumper mentality. I don’t see Trump having that mentality, but [Mike] Pence, Paul Ryan, those guys, it’s like they call up God from their cellphone. They’re so out of touch with reality.”

Trump threaded this needle very effectively. He credibly committed to Evangelical leaders and judicial conservatives to deliver on policy. Those leaders in turn very effectively delivered pro-Trump messages to people who care about those topics. But to cross-pressured and less attentive voters, he came across as what he is: a secular Northerner who has no actual interest in traditional values.

Post-Roe this is going to change, since anti-abortion activists aren’t just trying to win a debating point about a constitutional right to privacy and its implications. They want people to stop getting abortions. And while to some extent it will be “left up to the states,” if there’s anything we know about modern-day politics, it’s that everyone’s engagement with the issue is highly nationalized. I’m not sure exactly what the consequences of abortion becoming a high-salience national political issue are going to be, but it will shake up the current alignments in ways that I don’t think generalized political commentary yet fully appreciates.