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Sorry for me just like dumping all of this on you. No, no, please. It's good. How do you... Let it go. Let it out. How do you navigate... Thank you. Thank you. Do I have to pay you for this? Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk.
We're at an awkward moment in electoral politics. When it comes to the Republican primary, while there are plenty of alternatives to Trump, none of them so far have gained serious traction. When it comes to Democrats, despite consternation about Biden's age and electability, he has no serious primary challengers.
And all the while, Americans are pretty down on the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch. So here we are, more than a year out from the presidential election. It seems like the writing is on the wall, that electoral politics is frozen in place, and that few people are happy about it.
Today, I'm coming to you from the northern suburbs of Los Angeles, where I've been for the past couple days doing reporting ahead of the second Republican primary debate, which is at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. And in coming out here, I knew that there was one person in particular in L.A. that I wanted to talk to to help make sense of this moment. And that person is Lynn Vavrick.
She's the co-author of comprehensive data-driven accounts of the past three presidential elections. The gamble about the 2012 election, identity crisis about 2016, and the bitter end, which is about 2020. She's an American politics professor at UCLA and also helped develop Nationscape, a survey of half a million Americans, one of the largest public opinion surveys ever done.
Lynn, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. That's quite an introduction. What fun. I've set the bar pretty high. You know, I want to talk to you about current events and apply your lessons from the past three elections to where we are right now. But I think first, it'll be helpful if we kind of lay out the frameworks that you've used. So after 2020, you're
Your main takeaway was that the electorate was calcified and also at a point of parity. Can you just lay out for me a little bit what that means? After 2020, I wrote a book with Chris Tisanovich, my colleague at UCLA, and John Sides, who is a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, called The Bitter End. And in that book, we describe the state of American politics after the 2020 election as being calcified.
that is meant to convey a sense of rigidity or stickiness. And that calcification is really a function of four things. One of them is the parody that you just mentioned. So we just happen to be at a moment in time where
when the number of people who call themselves Republicans in the electorate and the number who call themselves Democrats, that that balance is roughly equal. And that's going to produce all sorts of perverse consequences. It's going to make elections feel very high stakes.
It's going to make them very close and turning on a knife, sort of we're right on the knife's edge. But the reason that everything feels so high stakes are the other drivers of calcification. So homogeneity within each of the parties, which means more than any time since, let's say, the New Deal.
The people who call themselves Democrats, they have more similar positions on things on average than they used to. And the same for Republicans. So a sameness across people within the parties is
And then heterogeneity between the parties. So a greater distance between what Democrats want on average and what Republicans want on average. And then the third driver of this calcification is the rise in importance in our politics of identity-inflected issues, sort of things turning on race and gender and ethnicity and religion.
And you sort of mash all that up, sameness within, difference between, identity issues coming to the fore, instead of New Deal issues like the role and size of government. We used to fight about those all the time. We don't really anymore. And then the partisan parity. And we've got this moment in time where things feel stiff and rigid and stuck, and every election is a high-stakes event.
Yeah, I mean, there's a data point that you point to that is something along the lines of decades ago, people had difficulty, a lot more difficulty telling the two parties apart. And now it's something like 90% of respondents say that there's a big difference between the two parties. It's an amazing time trend. And it's a figure in the bitter end. It's one of my favorite figures in the whole book because it's
just a simple plot of public opinion over time starting decades ago. And the question simply asked, this is from the American National Election Study, simply asks Americans, do you see a great deal of difference between the two parties? And in the 1950s, for reasons everybody can understand,
Only half the population said, yeah, I see a big difference between these two parties. And you go over time and that difference grows and grows. But you hit 2008, 2012, 16. And then by the time you get to 2020, nine out of 10 people, that is virtually everybody in the population, 16.
saying they see a great deal of difference between the two parties. So that distance between them, it not only shows up in the data people, voters,
sense it, they perceive it, and they know the other side, they want to build a world that I don't want to live in. And that's what's making our politics stuck. You can't say, oh, I don't agree with my party's candidate on issue X, so I'm going to try out the other side. The other side is too far away. You can't try them out. Very true.
That's the calcification and parody aspect of all this. You already mentioned the identity aspect that you bring up in Identity Crisis after 2016, which is this pivot from arguing about New Deal issues like the role and size of government, all of the debates that we had about health care, welfare in the 90s, things like this.
versus sort of immigration coming to the fore and maybe gender issues coming to the fore, Black Lives Matter coming to the fore around 2016. I think people probably listen to that and say, "Well, I thought politics was always about identity." So what exactly did change in 2016? When we want to say there's been a pivot from these New Deal-type issues to identity-inflected issues,
And what we mean by that is that the things that are salient to people at a moment in time have changed. What we don't have is I can't get in a time machine and use my exact same method that I used in 2020. I can't get in a time machine and go back to 1980.
to run that same method in a survey of a half a million people and show you that people were really, you know, their priorities were coming out of the oil crisis and coming out of stagflation and role and size of government and economic issues. When I tell you that that was what was important in 1980, I'm relying on data from 1980 that's using different kinds of methods than we're using in 2016 and 2020.
But I have a lot of confidence in those data and methods from the 1980s and 90s. And I think if everyone sort of jogs their memory, when they think about those elections, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, even you can think back to 2008 and the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain, when they spent...
I don't know, the better part of 10 days or so talking about Joe the plumber and whether Joe the plumber, who sadly is no longer with us, has just passed, but whether he was rich and should have his taxes increased or lowered. We're not fighting about that anymore. And a large part of how that shift happened is
is Donald Trump and 2016. Some of it is the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the reelection in 2012. But a bigger catalyst for this change in focus is
Is the Trump campaign in 2016? He comes down that escalator, announces his candidacy and starts talking about identity inflected issues. So we're not saying identity. This isn't like I'm a woman, you're a man, and we see politics differently. That's not what we're saying.
We're talking about policies that government is going to enact, legislation that our governments are going, whether city, state, county, national, are going to put into place that are going to affect our lives that turn in some way on identity characteristics, like a religious test to enter the country, like building a wall,
Those, you know, abortion. So those are the kinds of issues that we're talking about, not people's characteristics. It seems like we have two things going on. One, there's a significant change and we see a realignment in the electorate, which suggests maybe things are malleable, you know, like all of these Obama Trump voters and all of these sort of Romney Johnson Biden voters or Romney leave the top of the ticket blank and then Biden voters, right?
It seems like, oh, maybe we're not so rigid. Like, you can only have a realignment if people are changing their minds. So is it just that we're now calcified in the 2016 election? Like, you know, the meme that, like, we'll truly be living in the 2016 election until the end of days or something like that? Yes. Or that this calcification is a long-term trend? Or maybe it's both. Oh, yeah.
Yes, to your first question. When we say politics is calcified, a large part of the evidence for that is
comes from the fact that the 2020 election was almost an exact replay of the 2016 election. State by state, county by county, the average absolute shift in county vote across the whole country from 16 to 20 is like a point and a third or something. It's almost an exact replay. And 2016 relative to 2012
Very big shifts. That's where you see what you're calling the realignment, the shifting, the sorting, the changing of voters.
Okay. But then once they get to where they want to be in 2016, they're staying there in 2020. So yes to your first question, are we stuck in 2016? Uh-huh. But then your second question was, or is this a long-term thing? Well, 2016 didn't happen, you know, instantly. So yes, it took a very long time, decades.
for those issues to start changing, for the parties to start becoming farther. That process is a long time in the making. You know, one way to think about this is what if there had been 16 candidates for the Republican nomination in 2016 instead of 17? What if Trump had not run? Would that 2016 campaign have been fought about a Muslim ban, the border wall? I don't think so.
So this is where Trump is culpable in this story. It doesn't mean that we were never going to get there. He certainly didn't create these attitudes. He woke them up. He sort of threw gasoline on the embers that were already there. Those other candidates likely were not going to do that. Doesn't mean someone wouldn't have come along in 2020 and done it or 2024.
So it is a long time in the making, but the fact that it did happen in 2016 means that this is where we are. We're stuck. For me, the logical next question is, well, if someone could come along in 2016 and iterate in a way and find new angles to fight over politics on and create a significant realignment as a result—
How calcified are we? Like, could someone just come along now? I mean, as I've laid out in the intro, it doesn't seem like somebody is coming along to change the dynamic. But could somebody come along and switch it back to New Deal issues or come along and change it to, I don't know, national security issues because through China hawkishness or something –
in Ukraine goes even worse than it's currently going. And we end up in some kind of, you know, like, are we calcified as long as Trump is on the scene or are we really sort of enduringly calcified? So I don't think that Trump leaving politics is necessarily going to end the focus on identity politics. So you've seen other people emerge from
to echo his style of campaigning and his positions and his sort of prioritizing identity-inflected issues. But there are a couple of pieces of evidence that I think are interesting to think about. So the first is we saw in 2020 some extraordinary moments in global politics.
a global pandemic that did not dislodge this new dimension of conflict in American politics. We saw the largest social justice movement since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act
in America in the 1960s. That did not dislodge this new dimension of conflict. Those are— Well, that's in many ways a doubling down, right, of this dimension of conflict in a way, right? Like it's the sort of maybe more Democrats' approach to identity-inflected issues. Well, you did see after the murder of George Floyd, everyone's ratings of police went down.
Everyone's ratings of the Black Lives Matter movement, I mean, on average went up. So there was a moment where entrepreneurial or strategic politicians might have capitalized on that. It doesn't happen. Same thing with COVID. In the beginning of COVID, everybody was staying home, washing their hands, canceling visits with family. Then Trump politicizes it. He says,
March on your state capital and tell your governors that you're taking back Michigan, et cetera, et cetera. He reintroduces this identity inflected dimension. This is a blue state problem is how he framed it. So if there were a big global political moment or a national political moment, it doesn't even have to be as big as those.
where one of the two candidates did not try to make it about this existing dimension of conflict, then maybe the fight wouldn't be over that dimension. But here's the problem. Having demonstrated that there is political payoff by making politics about this dimension,
It will be very difficult for a candidate who wants to win elections to come along and say, oh, here's this dimension on which the previous two presidential elections, you know, we won one and we've come within tens of thousands of votes of winning the other. Boy, I'm going to forego that and I'm going to start talking about something else. That's tough.
And about foreign policy, I'll just say historically, it's been very difficult for candidates to make that the central feature of a national election fight. So I don't see that happening either. Yeah, I'll say, you know, listening to stump speeches and...
on the primary so far, it seems like Nikki Haley is trying quite hard. Like she's really pitching sort of focusing a lot on China in her speeches in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And voters like it, but I don't know that it really changes the dimension very much. - You know, that's very smart on her part because that's where her credential, her national stage credential,
That's where it is. You know, she is the candidate with a lot of foreign policy experience who has communicated with other world leaders.
So she does want to talk about that. That's what sets her apart from the other people running. But as you just said, it doesn't mean she's going to be able to refocus the whole election onto that. Yeah. I mean, the way that you tell the story is a very Trump centric story. And I understand in 2016, we all lived through that. I'll spare our audience, you know, like too much rehashing of it. But to what extent is that?
identity-inflected politics, a Republican-driven realignment or pivot versus a Democratic one, because I just said I wasn't going to rehash 2016. But we all listened to Hillary Clinton's stump speech in 2016. It was very much like going through every piece of the perceived Democratic coalition to say, I am here representing LGBTQ Americans, Native Americans, Black Americans, and
et cetera. And so there's a lot of focus and, you know, the deal me in on the woman card and I'm with her. And there's a lot of identity inflected politics in the way that Hillary Clinton campaigns in a way that Barack Obama never would have done and probably couldn't have done given that he was the first black American president. So I'm curious for your take on how Democrats play a role in this or if you think that the way that Clinton campaigned was just a reaction to Trump.
Yeah. So I think I'll say three things. The first is that Barack Obama doesn't have to say it out loud. He just has to show up on the scene. And he's already priming race in people's minds. So he doesn't have to talk about it. Second, the 2008 and 2016 presidential elections are happening in incredibly different contexts for the Democratic candidate.
Barack Obama can say, we are in the middle of a global financial crisis. That party got you into it. Give my party a chance to get you out of it. In 2016,
Hillary Clinton's context is very different. She's coming off of those Obama years, getting us out of the crisis. And so in many ways, her story has to be, don't change horses midstream. You've had a good run with our party. Why would you want to experiment with something else?
But as you say, then this this unexpected wrinkle enters the contest, i.e. Trump gets the Republican nomination. And he he, for reasons you can imagine, does not want to talk about the success of the Obama years and getting us out of the global financial crisis. And so he introduces this other dimension of conflict. Now, at that moment, Clinton does have a choice to make. Stick with my point.
If you remember when she launched her campaign, I'm going around talking to Americans about the economy and about jobs, and people are buying new homes and getting new jobs. And guess what? I want to get a new job and move into a new home too. That's how she announced her candidacy. Yeah, I remember that. She can stick with that or she can counter what Trump is saying. And as you mentioned, the Democratic coalition...
does have strong preferences on these identity-inflected issues. So even if she wanted to stick with her economic message, it's very difficult in that moment because the activists in the coalition are saying, you have to respond, you have to respond. And she does. But then we're fighting about the thing Trump wants to be fighting about.
Okay, so the third thing that I just wanted to say in response to that is your original question was, you know, how much are Democrats culpable for this rise in identity-inflected issues? Is that post-2016, we get into 2020 and 2022 and now 2024.
And we've introduced even more identity-inflected issues that we're fighting over. How do we want to think about men's and women's sports teams? How do we want to think about gender and gender identity and school locker rooms and bathrooms? And states are going to make policy, school districts are going to make policy about these kinds of things.
And this is another set of identity inflected issues and policies that have come into this conversation. And we're a long way toward getting resolution on all of these things, but particularly these new issues. And so, yes, like the this is a good place to see how far apart on average the parties are.
and how people within the parties are similar to one another. This is exactly sort of the drivers of calcification that we're talking about. And I mean, you need both sides to have distance and to have that stickiness. All right. I want to dive into some of the current events that are swirling around in the ecosystem now that we've established some of this framework.
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For months, polling has suggested that Democrats are wary of Biden running for re-election based on his age. And general election polling, while very early, suggests a close race with Trump. I will just say, for the record, as we're recording this, there's a lot of chatter on the internet about a recent ABC News Washington Post poll, of course, conducted by my colleagues, showing that
Trump leading Biden by nine points in a potential matchup. That is an outlier, folks. But of course, it all sort of culminates in a lot of anxiety amongst Democratic voters that is maybe best encapsulated by this David Ignatius op-ed in the Washington Post titled, President Biden Should Not Run Again in 2024.
You stick to the data. So I'm curious for your thoughts on this. Are Democrats' concerns about Biden's electability in 2024 evidence-based or vibes-based? I think that they are rooted in the high-stakes feel, so if you want to call that a vibe, of the outcomes of these elections. The other side wants to build a world
Very different than the one that, you know, you want to live in, let's say. And these last two presidential elections have turned on so few votes. When you think about the rules of the game or that the electoral college is how we do it. And when you think about the number of votes needed to flip the electoral outcome, electoral college outcome, it's tens of thousands, very few.
So the vibe among people, I believe, is that if the other side wins, the whole world that I'm living in is going to change. And it's going to be something very different than I want. And that means the outcome of this next election is very important. And that means that there are voters who are marginal voters.
who are maybe I'm going to go this way or that way. There are fewer of them than there have been in the past, but there aren't none. And so when people say things like, we need a better candidate, we need whatever, better this or that, they're talking about shoring up those marginal voters. And yes, anything you can do to get them, you absolutely have to be focused on because the
10,000 votes in one state could swing this thing. So I think it's evidence-based and based on this feeling of the high-stakes nature of these outcomes. But I guess evidence-based in the sense of
And I've looked for it. We don't have a lot of polling showing Biden versus Trump, Kamala Harris versus Trump, Pete Buttigieg versus Trump, Raphael Warnock versus Trump, Gretchen Whitmer versus Trump, in the same way we have a whole bunch of different candidates against Biden. And so I guess it's hard to know how evidence-based this is. And even if we had that data, people know a lot less about those other people than they do about Biden.
And in some of your writing, you talk quite a bit about how sometimes candidates don't really matter. And especially in a calcified world, given everything that goes into an election, how much does the candidate themselves actually matter? I think the candidates are important. Okay, so I don't want to go so far as to say they're irrelevant. The candidates are important. All candidates come with constraints.
And the contest is about your constraints relative to your opponent's constraints. That's important. And what am I really talking about? People have been talking a lot about the age of both candidates. If Donald Trump were running against Pete Buttigieg, let's say, age for sure would be a dimension that would get mentioned a lot in that contest.
He's not running against Pete Buttigieg. He's running against another man who is about his age. That means that those two candidates are probably not going to talk about age very much in their contest against each other. Neither one of them is advantaged on that. Here's another one. Well, in the polling—
Trump is advantaged on that because people I mean, people say age, but I think what they mean is capability, performance, whatever. And I think that people have the sense that Biden has slowed down more than Trump or something like that, because you see you see in the polling, you know, what concerns you about these candidates? If you disapprove of them, you see a lot more people concerned about Biden's age than Trump's age.
Fair enough. People are concerned about Trump's age, but... But it is not the case that being four years, or however many years apart they are in age, that Trump is going to go out there and say, that guy, he's old. Right, right. It's not going to be something... Voters may be appreciating it, but the candidates are not going to talk about that. They're not going to ask voters to raise that to a level. Right.
OK, so the other thing is experience is the same. This is likely to be an unusual contest. Biden, Trump, two people who have been president of the United States running against each other. That's unusual. Hasn't happened in a very, very, very long time. So one of them cannot play the experience card.
because they're equally experienced. They both have one term in the White House. So again, that will be neutralized. So the candidates do matter because the constraints tell them what they can talk about to gain advantage over their opponent, to get those marginal voters that we talked about a moment ago, the small set of them that are still out there. But where you're right is that for the large set of people
who are going to be loyal to their party and always vote their party, who the party nominates is largely irrelevant. Now, we've almost always seen parties nominate highly experienced, very serious, very competent candidates. And so in some sense, we've been saying, oh, people vote for their candidate's nominee, but it's really more than that. They're voting for high quality nominees.
In 2016, people thought that was going to change. Here's someone who's not a politician, who hasn't demonstrated any of these kinds of things that people would think of as being a high-quality political candidate.
Republicans did stick with their nominee, even if they weren't necessarily fans of his demeanor or his style of politics. A lot of that is that they did match up with him on policy positions, and that matters to people. Yeah, in the world that you describe, this calcified world in which there are still marginal voters, people will often say, oh, you know, elections are more and more about turnout and less and less about persuasion.
One, we can have an argument about whether those are different things. Like really, the things that might get persuade people to vote for you are also maybe the things that would get them to turn out. So perhaps not as different. But on top of that, the marginal voters that do exist just become more and more important to winning elections. So in a way, it's not that those as we become more calcified, the marginal voter becomes more.
less important. It's just that the fewer people become more important, right? It's something along those lines. And also, like, don't forget, you need your base to turn out, too. So I would never say ignore your loyal voters and only focus on the marginal voters. So you need to do both. And I think that's where these are huge operations. All those people who always turn out and always vote for you, you certainly don't want to take them for granted.
And so you have to engage in both turnout and persuasion. And as you say, sometimes you can accomplish both with the same mission, but sometimes they need to be separate exercises. Who are marginal voters? Good question. You know, if you just think about it, what kind of a voter is likely to
not be sure which party better represents the kind of world they want to live in, decide late which party they're going to vote for. They tend to be voters for whom politics is not the most important thing in their lives, who maybe know a little bit less about the two political parties and about the two candidates. Maybe they're conflicted in terms of what they think are the most important issues in
To them and one party represents them on one set and the other party on the other set, you know, and politics is not the most important thing to them. So they have a hard time sort of sorting through what should be the most important thing to me.
So they tend to be a little less engaged. So speaking of this cross pressure on issues, Trump has done something pretty interesting recently. He's moderated on abortion in a pretty high profile way. So he called Florida's six week abortion ban terrible. He blamed the party's position on abortion for its middling performance in the midterms. He declined to support national restrictions on abortion. And he said he'd compromise with Democrats.
Do you think that this is something, given all the calcification we've talked about, do you think this is something that really changes support for Trump, either in the primary or a potential general election? It could, especially with marginal voters. Again, we talked a moment ago, the base is probably not thrilled with that, but they're going to be loyal. You do want to, again, this is where you want to make sure that they're going to turn out.
But with marginal voters, you know, my sense of Trump has always been very much coming out of the business world. He has this sort of sense of what is popular with people. Whereas, you know, many candidates would be looking at polling and digesting the crosstabs and the banner books of poll results. I don't think that Trump is inclined to do that. But I think he has a gut sense. And my guess is that
Nikki Haley had that moment in the first Republican debate a couple of weeks ago where she looked straight down the barrel of the camera and she said, you know, these questions about abortion, these are human questions. We need to humanize this, not criminalize it. And she talked to women and that got her a lot of attention and she was able to raise money coming out of that. And my sense is that Trump noticed that and
And thought people liked that. And so I'm going to pick up a little bit of that. I'm going to do a little bit of that.
That's my guess. I obviously don't have any, you know, you're the reporter. I don't have any inside info on that. But yeah, I mean, you don't have to look at the crosstab to know that Republicans are having some issues with voters on the issue of abortion. And so I don't know. You know, I don't know. Like Trump has obviously gone against his party before in relatively high profile ways. And that's one of the ways that he shifted the conversation from New Deal era issues to identity inflected issues was by neutralizing the
fights over Social Security or Medicare, frankly, even the deficit, free trade. We've talked about all of this before. But my question here is, it seems like you suggested that abortion was an identity-inflected issue.
Now, in some ways, Trump could only get away with neutralizing Democrats' position on the New Deal questions because it turned out those issues weren't so, so, so important to Republican voters. There were a good deal of Republican voters who were okay with bigger government and more spending, and things like immigration were much more important.
Where does abortion rank today in terms of salience for Republicans and voters in general? Yeah.
When we wrote the book on 2020, we used sort of an interesting technique that we borrowed from marketing called a conjoint experiment. So marketers use this to figure out attributes of the things they're trying to sell us. If I put my cereal in a red box compared to a blue box, will people buy more of it? And they change characteristics of the packaged goods and then they see which one we buy more of.
So we basically borrowed this technique and said to our survey respondents, here's two worlds, A and B, and they have certain characteristics. And we gave them three or four policy outcomes.
There is a wall on the border. Abortion is legal. So they didn't have to, these outcomes didn't have to fit together in any kind of partisan or ideologically consistent manner. And then we just simply ask people, which world would you rather live in, A or B? And people played this little game 10 times. We had 500,000 people. So we have a lot of iterations of people choosing which world.
And to simplify how we look at this, if, for example, people are always choosing the world that matches their policy outcome preference on abortion or on building a wall, and they trade away all their other outcomes, all the other policy outcomes, we know that that policy is important to them. If they're always trading away tax rates, we know that's not important to them. And what we learned in 2020 is
was that identity-inflected things like immigration, the Muslim ban, those are very high on the list. Abortion is high. It's a high-priority item for both Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. Now, I have not repeated that today. So what I can tell you is in 2020, it was—
pretty important to people in both parties on average. Is it less important today? Probably not. So it's always been high salience and it likely still is. I guess some of the polling that I've seen suggests now maybe a gap in that Democrats see abortion as even more important, but Republicans see it as perhaps a little less important. So
This innovation, you could say, for Donald Trump of moderating on abortion is, I don't know if it's a primary play or a general election play, but you suggest it could play a role with marginal voters.
I'm curious if there are things that Biden could do the same on where they, and you talk about in your book, you know, the best way to make an issue, a non-issue in an election is for both candidates to have the same position on it. You know, one of the things we notice is that when you look at all the issues Biden does, I think worst of pretty much everything on immigration. You know, in recent polling, we saw from ABC News, we saw it's something like he's,
30, 40 points underwater on the issue of immigration. We also see that it's very, very salient to Republicans, much more salient to Republicans than it is to Democrats. Is that the kind of thing where he could just steal Republicans' position on a border wall or on border security? Maybe not immigration in totality, but say border security, say, okay, we're going to build a wall. We're going to expand the wall. We're going to boost surveillance, all of this stuff.
I mean, what would that do to this election, given that the calcified place that we're in has a lot to do with the way that the candidates talked about immigration in 2016? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that theoretically, your intuition is exactly right. A plus for sort of getting the big picture on all of that. But I think what's tricky about immigration for Biden is
He cannot do the thing you just suggested where he comes out and says, we're going to... He can't come out and say, I'm building a wall? Yes, for obvious reasons, right? But here's this public dilemma, and it is a human crisis. It's a border crisis. It's got all these dimensions. And if he wanted to do what you suggested, sort of come in and...
move a little closer to the Republican Party preference on these things to try to steal some of those marginal voters away. Because remember, he's not going to steal partisans. Okay, let's just like, nobody's stealing partisans. So we're talking about those marginal voters. So if he wants to try to do that, he's got to come up with a new way of introducing the problem and the solution. So it would have to be something like,
Going back to the 1980s, we've been struggling with how to bring people into the country, a country that is built on bringing people in. This is as embedded in our culture as Americans as almost anything.
And we've not been doing a great job of that. And, you know, we've talked about this and that and walls and cages and, you know, we've separated. And we have to do better. And so I'm announcing today, whatever it is. And if whatever it is, if that were easy, I promise you.
People would have already done this. But it's not easy. The problem is not easy to solve objectively. And so, and to do it in this way that's going to pivot off of the solutions that are already out there and we've already fought over is even harder. So I think that that's not... Well, isn't that exactly what abortion is? You know, like, it feels like Trump, Trump's sort of ability to act in an almost, and act in a pretty irreverent fashion towards abortion
most things that Republicans have cared about for a long time is remarkable. And also, like you said, seems to get at maybe deeper truths about what is popular in America. It's so complicated on this though for him. Are Democrats just different? Well, Trump is different. First of all, being irreverent is...
That's core to his identity, to bring the word identity in. Maybe we use different... To his personality. That's baked in now when people think of him. They think of like, oh, he's going to say something that I don't expect. Like...
OK, so he he gets to do that and people expect it. That is not who Joe Biden is. And if he came out and did some people be like, whoa, wow, we really got to pay attention to this because this is so counter to type. But it's not counter to type for Trump to to take a position that is opposite the party to say something provocative. OK, but the second thing is that he's also the guy that delivered Trump.
to his partisans, the Supreme Court outcome that got us to this place. So he delivered for them on this exact policy. So
You know, he can he can say, no, hey, I don't like the way this state is enacting legislation on this. You know, I wouldn't go down and he can say all these things. But at the end of the day, he can always say, I gave you the outcome you wanted.
And that is huge. You know, on the topic of Trump, we have all of this material to talk about because he's been basically the number one story in American politics for eight years. So as we enter this period where it seems like he, you know, is likely to win the primary, who knows, crazy things happen. And Biden has also been in American politics for decades and decades. Is this a unique election in that context?
The candidates are so well known. Like, how do you campaign in that environment? Because usually the reason you spend, in part, a billion dollars on a presidential campaign is, well, mutually assured destruction. Everyone spends a billion dollars, so no one gets outspent. But also to, like, tell people who you are.
What does America have to learn about either of these candidates between now and November 2024? This is exactly right, is they both are well-known. As I mentioned, they've both been president. Super unusual. And I think this is just another thing that is going to drive calcification, right? If you thought that, you know, 2020 was a replay of 2016, like 2024 is going to be a, you know,
It couldn't be less of a replay. Buckle in first. Yeah. So I think that that fact is just going to make it harder for both of the candidates to persuade anybody to change off of where they were before. Now, you know, you did point out a moment ago that the context here is really different. Dobbs,
post COVID, knock on wood, you know, we are, we're in a different context, but not different enough, I think, to make the 2024 contest between the same two people, you know, who ran in 2020 that different.
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One of the things that I think you've talked about in your analysis of 2016 and this new identity-inflected era of politics is that candidates are less effective at motivating people based on gender than they are on other things because the relationship between men and women is one of intimacy, you know.
father, mother, brother, sister, you know, daughter, son, et cetera. Like we're enmeshed in ways that other segments of society that you can divide up by identity are not. But-
There's this new poll that came out from Change Research that I'm curious to get your take on. And it got a lot of attention because of just this huge gap between young men and young women when it comes to political identification. So young women, and this is 18 to 34, were more on the political left than right by a 34-point gap. And young men were more on the political right than political left by a five-point gap. So some clear asymmetry there.
What is motivating that gap? Understanding that it's been harder to sort of motivate people politically based on gender in the research that you've done. Well, you know, my sense of this particular moment in time is that if there were young women involved,
in particular, who may not have been paying a lot of attention to politics. It's not something they think a lot about. In the post-Dobbs period, it becomes very difficult to not think about it a little bit, particularly for young women. And so I suspect that that has something to do with this increased gap.
It will be, I think, really interesting to see whether that gap persists over the next several years. You know, this is not I am not an expert in political sociology, but one of the things that researchers have shown is that the period of time that really imprints on young people politically is limited.
their adolescent pre-adult years. So 12 to 14, that sort of period. And so, you know, if you
If the party in power in the White House is, you know, the Democratic Party when you're 12 to 14, then as you become an adult, you identify more with that party. Same thing for Republicans. So this is a little older, 18, 20s into your 30s. And it's, you know, it certainly makes sense to me that a big moment like this,
the overturning of Roe versus Wade could be a moment that makes young people reassess, oh, is the party that I'm associating with delivering the world I want to live in now on this new dimension that previously I understood the status quo, but now the status quo has changed. And so do I need to think about how I'm going to vote? I think that that makes a lot of sense to me, but we'll see how long it lasts.
We've been going for a long time here, and I really appreciate your knowledge on all of these things. I have a few sort of current events things that I want to ask about before I let you go. Okay, so one, Senator Bob Menendez indicted on federal corruption charges over the weekend.
as part of this new era of calcification, I think there's this attitude of like, LOL, nothing matters. Scandals don't matter as much anymore. Is that true? Is that backed up by evidence? Does it only apply to Trump? Does it apply to everyone? How should we think about that? Yeah, I think one of the ways in which this really matters, you know, when you say things like this doesn't matter, that doesn't matter, you have to define what you mean by mattering. And so one of the ways that
scandal is going to make a difference in 2024 is you've got Trump likely to be the Republican nominee coming in with facing a set of indictments and criminal charges and trials. And if you had an opponent who wasn't touched by anything like that, that could be a leverage point, right? People think politicians are corrupt. Well, that guy is proven to be, but not me.
And that and that. But that's where the Hunter Biden situation for for Joe Biden neutralizes this issue. Right. All of a sudden it went from being an advantage to now it's neutralized. And Menendez is just a part of that, too. It allows Trump and Republican candidates and voters to say to the other side, no, it's not just our guy. There's problems everywhere. Issue neutralized. Let's move on.
So it matters very much in that way. All right, next topic. We're barreling towards a government shutdown. I think Sunday is the day that we will shut down, October 1st, if there isn't some sort of agreement in Congress, which it seems unlikely there will be. I think there's been a lot of reporting in the media that's sort of
Like, wow, what do Matt Gaetz and the folks who seem to be insisting on a government shutdown really want? They don't seem to be motivated by anything except burning the whole place down. How do you explain that from an academic perspective? I think the way that a productive way to think about this, we spend a lot of time talking about the homogeneity within the parties, these two parties that are opposite each other.
But we can't forget that internal to each of the parties are sets of people who want different things. These party coalitions are very odd entities. They don't, you know, they don't totally always make sense ideologically. These are groups of people who want things who have come together for mutual advantage. And so there are going to be fights within the parties.
sort of activist groups of each of the parties for what this party should be doing, what it stands for, who's got the most power, what group has the most power within the party.
You can think of the ways that that plays out in the Democratic Party, and you're seeing right now a little bit of the way it's playing out in the Republican Party. So I think of this more as internal party struggles and competitions, and not so much the kind of calcification that we've talked about already and that we talk about in The Bitter End. And one thing that you do describe in The Bitter End that maybe not for this exact instance, but...
I think is helpful to understand the way that Congress behaves is that in a world where there's parity, there's not that much of an incentive to work with the other side to reach some sort of agreement that you're both a little upset about, both a little happy about. Because if you just sort of stonewall and message and fight it out, you could probably win the next election without conceding too much
policy ground. Because like you said, these things hinge on 10,000 votes or so. And that I think people will often think like, well, but hasn't it always just been Democrats and Republicans? But in fact, there has been stretches of American history where there isn't parity. That, you know, Democrats are cleaning up in the House, Republicans are winning the presidency more often. And so there's this incentive for the sides to work together because you're not just going to flip it in the next election.
You've got to sort of make peace with your position in the minority one way or another. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the way you described that, that, you know, we run a contest. My side almost wins. In 2012, for example, the Republican Party lost.
And they took a step back and they said, okay, we need to assess why we're not winning. And they wrote a hundred plus page report, the growth and opportunity project report saying how they were going to move forward. Now, nothing about 2016 was drawing on that report. They win narrowly in 2016. But if you are losing by the narrowest of margins, there's very little incentive to take a step back and say, wow,
we need to evaluate why we're not winning and perhaps moderate a little bit, become closer to our opponents on issue X, Y, and Z so we can steal some of those voters. Or we need to stop prioritizing issue A because that's where we're losing a lot of voters. You do sort of this post-mortem. Instead, if you lose by only a few votes, the incentive for you is to say, you know,
Well, there's just some chance we win the next time if we just do it again. But also, if we could just change the rules of the game a little bit so that instead of losing by a little, we win by a little next time. Boy, that would be an easy way to win. So instead of wholesale rewriting our platform or moderating on things, let's change the rules.
Um, you know, a first, instead of first downs being 10 yards, let's make first downs for our side, eight yards, we'll win the game. And so that's where you see a lot of worrying changes to how votes are going to be counted, what it means to register, who has the power to certify elect, you know, all those kinds of changes in the rules. Um,
And that's what we think in the bitter end is the ultimate challenge to democracy is keeping those kinds of reactions from happening. I can't leave California without asking you about California politics in a state that is sort of dominated by one party. What are the fault lines here?
Because there seems to be a lot of disagreement and a lot of discord in California politics these days over housing, homelessness, crime, you know, and a lot of which, almost all of which is being fought on the Democratic side because it feels like the Republican side is sort of irrelevant in state politics. So how does that play out? What are the dividing lines if it's not partisan? Sort of what I want to say and answer that is like, well, wait a minute. Like when we say partisan,
You know, we're often talking of it's not just an identity like my party identity. I'm a Democrat because like I'm also a Cleveland Browns fan in the same way. Right. Your partisanship is driven by your policy preferences, you know, at least a good deal. So.
When you take away the party label and you have people within that same party fighting, you know, the answer, I just want to say it's they're fighting over policy outcomes and they may be fighting over what the priorities are. But, you know, pretty much we're going to agree on what outcome we want. And so what we're fighting over is the pathway to get to that outcome.
The mayor's race in Los Angeles, the last mayor's race was a great example of this. The unhoused population in Los Angeles has grown. It was something both candidates talked about. They had very different solutions. Everybody agrees on the outcome. And this is politics. You know, a lot of politics is fighting over the path to the outcome. And so I think if you just think about it in that very simple way, we're within party fighting over two things.
We agree on the outcome, but we have different ideas about how to get there, or we're fighting over what the thing is we should be fighting about. So I want to talk about the unhoused population. You want to talk about climate.
And so which one of those things are we going to try to get voters to prioritize? And, you know, you want to talk about climate because you think maybe you're a climate scientist and you have some advantage there. I want to talk about housing, you know. So it's no different than if we were in different parties.
So that's I guess that's the that's what I want to say is like just because we call ourselves, you know, party A or party B, we can still have the same kinds of fights within that under that label as we would if we were, you know, what maybe you were suggesting is without that queue for people, for voters. Does it you know, how how does it play out for voters? And I think that, you know, yes, it's if you don't have the party queue.
Maybe it's harder for people, but going back to the two parties being very far apart in the worlds they want to build and people knowing what kind of world they want to live in and knowing which party wants to build which world, they just have to do a little bit more work when that party label goes away. Candidate A, candidate B.
you know, is going to build lots of quick interim housing that might not meet code, is maybe not going to last 100 years. Candidate B wants to invest in housing that's going to last the long term. They both think more housing is needed or you have to do a little bit more work. And that's hard in a state like California because we don't have—California's big.
And statewide media, there really isn't, you know, California ABC News, right? There's
the Bay Area market, there's the Los Angeles market, there's San Diego. It's very broken up. And so it is hard for candidates to campaign across the whole state and to get one message out easily across the whole state. So it's harder for them. It's a little harder for voters. But the process is really no different. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. I mean, oftentimes it feels like the intra-party debates are...
more interesting because there's a lot more work done around policy to motivate people, to get people on your side or to turn out or whatever, because it's harder than saying, that guy's the opposite party from me. Don't vote for him. They're bad people or whatever. Okay. Last question here.
Going all the way back to 2012, you wrote a book about the money bolification of electoral politics, which very much jibes with how we view things at FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Nate wrote the blurb for your book that was like, this is the comprehensive, you know, take on the 2012 election. We all felt like in 2012, like we have got this figured out. We know how to cover elections. Like it's going to be data focused from now on. And like 2016 just,
with us like really bad and so did 2020. And there is plenty of consternation in the political press about how to cover these things and how much to rely on data and whether some of the metrics are broken. Like, okay, well, oftentimes we can use consumer sentiment or the direction of the economy, but those things don't seem to really be indicative now because
sentiment is so low and, but Democrats keep overperforming in special elections. Like, it feels like the things that we thought we knew, we don't anymore. Sorry for me just like dumping all of this on you. No, no. Please. It's good. How do you, how do you navigate? Let it go. Let it out. Thank you. Thank you. Do I have to pay you for this? No.
How do we navigate both for a political scientist who's dedicated to understanding elections in a rigorous way and for the political press that wants to do evidence-based reporting? Mm-hmm.
what numbers to pay attention to, what historical data to pay attention to, and what we just have to say, okay, maybe it is the vibes. Maybe numbers can't give us the answer here. You're never going to do better relying on vibes. I mean, let's just start with that. So I'll go on the record as saying data over vibes. But you're right. You have to know where to look and what to make of what you're seeing.
And I think if we go back to 2012 and this idea that there are some fundamental characteristics of a moment in time that set the context for a presidential contest, that is still true. In 2012, we identified those fundamentals as the state of the nation's economy, the balance of party identification in the electorate, incumbency.
Okay, so let's hold off for a second on 16 and 20. Let's apply that to 2024 and just think for a minute. So state of the nation's economy, historically, a great predictor of which party is going to win the presidential election is the nation's GDP growth from January to June of the election year. And if that's robust, if it's over about a point and a half, that's good for the incumbent party.
So, you know, what's that going to be? We're still several months away from January to June, but I don't think that's going to be 5%. Right. So this is going to be in terms of the economic context of this election, a little murky.
Okay. Second thing we said was partisan balance. We've already talked about how, just what a huge player that is in our politics right now, that there's rough parity in the electorate between Dems and Reps. So that's still a very important consideration. And then incumbency. We talked at the very beginning about how, what a weird contest 2024 is likely to be if it's
the incumbent, current incumbent Joe Biden, and the last guy who was in the office, Donald Trump. So essentially two incumbents. That's just in the modern era, we've not seen that. So also going to be very important. But the thing is, is that those three things are not pointing in a very clear direction. Murky economic context, partisan parity, two incumbents running against each other.
Okay. So that's just like going to take us back to calcification, like a replay of the last time. So I think those fundamentals are still important. I would still look at them if I were an evidence-based, you know, a data journalist. The polling results, like we don't engage in that conversation in any of our books.
about the changes in polling technology, the changes in sampling and things like this. There's lots of work on that and lots of great people that you have talked to and you will talk to about this. But again, like more data is better. So as you mentioned, sometimes you get a poll result. It looks different than all the others. It's important to talk about that.
So, instead of seeing this poll result that's an outlier and relying on your gut and your vibes and saying, I don't think that's right, it's much better to go get all the other polls that have been done in a one-week or two-week or three-week period of this outlier poll and say, hey, all the other ones suggest something different. And that leads us to believe that
that maybe this was just a bad draw, bad sample. There are lots of probabilistic reasons that that could happen. So more data is always better. That's sort of, I guess I'm a card-carrying political scientist and I have to say that, but I do believe it. Yeah, it's like the data version of the answer to bad speech is more speech. Yeah.
or whatever. What is that like? It's like the free data argument. The answer to bad data is more data. More data. Yes. And I just want to, let me just say, I think that you guys, especially FiveThirtyEight, but everybody who engaged in data journalism in the wake of the success of FiveThirtyEight, you guys have done a tremendous job of increasing the data literacy of the set of people in the country who are interested in elections and
really want to understand politics. I just, you know, see it over the course of my career since 2000 and really 12, you know, starting in eight, but really 2012, the progress
The push, the amount of time and effort and energy that journalists and news outlets have put into bringing data to bear on political questions, it has really changed the way people in the population think about and orient themselves toward politics.
And, you know, maybe we reached the zenith of that and now we're on the other side. I don't know. Maybe we're still climbing. But the change is in large part due to the efforts of all of you. We couldn't do it academically. We'd been trying, you know, for decades. And, you know, nobody cared. Our students maybe care a little less.
But I can't give you enough credit for that. Well, thank you. That's beyond kind. And obviously those kind words apply to a lot of other people apart from me, especially Nate. But as far as the podcast is concerned, turns out all you have to do is play a couple games, swear a little bit, be a real human being, and people will enjoy the data on the road to the election as well. That must be what's wrong with college professors. We're not engaging our students on those dimensions. I mean, come on.
More swearing. I mean, honestly, you know, I am not a campaign advisor, but I would bet that if you started swearing 25% more in your classes, your enrollment would go up significantly. Although I'm sure you already have sky-high enrollment anyway, so you don't need my advice there. It's an experiment I probably won't conduct, but I do appreciate the tip. Yeah.
All right. Well, Lynn, thank you so much for joining me today. I've really appreciated this and I think you've helped us all. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. It was great. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.
