RadixJournal - The Blue Period

00:00:00.000 The Blue Period, by Richard Spencer, read by the author.

00:00:09.740 The Democrats will soon achieve political hegemony in an age of radical polarization.

00:00:16.240 It probably won't end well.

00:00:19.520 Introduction.

00:00:20.920 On November 3rd, Joe Biden should comfortably win the presidency of the United States,

00:00:26.300 earning between 325 and 375 Electoral College votes, matching Barack Obama's results in 2008 and 2012.

00:00:36.900 In an age of polarization, and in light of Trump's tremendous popularity among Republicans,

00:00:43.440 Biden's victory will be viewed as a landslide, a national denunciation of Trumpism.

00:00:50.120 Demoralization and confusion among the Republican faithful will follow.

00:00:53.720 In addition, Democrats should take control of the Senate, with a tight majority of 51-49.

00:01:02.000 More than one long-time Republican stalwart and Trump ally will be sent packing.

00:01:07.720 In the House, Democrats will maintain dominance.

00:01:11.440 The wave election already occurred in 2018, and to a lesser extent in 2016.

00:01:18.380 This year will be marked by consolidation, not conquest.

00:01:22.060 Inertia is the most powerful force in politics.

00:01:27.040 Some 75% of all House races are uncompetitive slam dunks.

00:01:32.040 And we can expect incumbent congressmen, especially members of the House, to be re-elected at a rate around 90%.

00:01:37.940 But after multiple cycles of consistent gains, on January 20th, 2021,

00:01:44.740 the Democrats will stand in the same position the Republicans did four years earlier.

00:01:48.960 They'll have the presidency, they'll enjoy a House majority in the realm of 235 to 250 members,

00:01:56.420 and a narrow margin in the Senate.

00:01:59.120 A 25-year era of mostly Republican leadership in Congress will be supplanted by a new blue period.

00:02:06.460 This is the result of seismic, demographic, geographic, and attitudinal and psychological shifts.

00:02:14.100 But ultimately, the 2020 victory will paper over deep problems for the Democrats,

00:02:20.280 which will likely lead to an unhappy presidency for Mr. Biden.

00:02:23.640 This essay will explain my forecast.

00:02:27.860 But more important, it will assess the structural basis for the coming Democratic dominance

00:02:34.220 and expose the fault lines that make doing politics, even for a hegemonic party, exceedingly difficult.

00:02:41.860 In 2016, Trump was not just the candidate of right-wing populism, but chaos as well,

00:02:49.460 to borrow an insult from Jeb Bush.

00:02:51.440 Trump ran against his own party, its leadership, and quite a bit of what it held dear.

00:02:57.960 Biden, on the other hand, has run a bipartisan campaign on the promise of a return to normalcy.

00:03:05.600 Normalcy means ending the Trump experiment, the outrages, scandals, wild talk, and nationalism.

00:03:11.580 But it also means keeping at bay left-wing energies, wokeness, BLM, and democratic socialism,

00:03:19.300 that are now motivating a great deal of Biden's voters.

00:03:23.460 Biden's experience of the Democratic primaries is best described as survival, not triumph.

00:03:30.100 And it was only possible through the intervention of party luminaries at the 11th hour.

00:03:34.140 Biden has a long history of being extremely un-woke, and his Clintonian policy proposals are simply

00:03:41.900 out of step with the majority of Democratic activists and operatives, if not high-level

00:03:46.860 leadership and donors.

00:03:49.000 Thus, Biden is caught in a pincer, and there is a strong chance that he will be undermined

00:03:54.660 early on by forces within, perhaps even given a rude comeuppance.

00:03:59.620 Moreover, it is becoming questionable whether America is governable at all.

00:04:06.420 We will soon be in a remarkable situation in which the once-and-future party of political

00:04:11.660 hegemony, the Democrats, will be governing a population that has undergone radical polarization

00:04:17.320 and division.

00:04:19.280 In the new blue era, the Democrats will struggle for legitimacy, not power.

00:04:24.880 That can't end well.

00:04:26.120 Section 1.

00:04:30.560 We just hate each other.

00:04:33.620 Biden's coming victory must be put into perspective.

00:04:37.560 The era of monumental landslides, when one candidate captured a unified national mood, is passed.

00:04:44.580 The last time a candidate won more than 500 electoral votes was 1984, when Ronald Reagan came close

00:04:51.340 to matching Richard Nixon's 49-state domination in 1972.

00:04:56.340 Barack Obama's comfortable victories in 2008 and 2012, or George Bush's 2004 win as the stay-the-course

00:05:04.760 wartime president, never approached the lopsidedness seen in the 1930s, 50s, and 60s.

00:05:12.200 Our era is one of fragmentation.

00:05:14.900 This has, perhaps surprisingly, led to stasis and rigidity.

00:05:20.500 Voters are polarized in the sense of being frozen in place.

00:05:25.340 You simply are red or blue, and there ain't no doubt about it.

00:05:30.280 On some level, red-blue politics has eclipsed race, ethnicity, and religion as the source and

00:05:36.500 marker of identity.

00:05:37.580 When polled, Americans who strongly identify with conservative or liberal are skittish about

00:05:44.480 the prospect of family members marrying someone of another political affiliation.

00:05:49.580 A hardcore conservative worries more about his daughter marrying a Democrat than a man of

00:05:55.620 a different race.

00:05:57.380 Look who's coming to dinner, indeed.

00:05:59.940 There are, I should point out, some key issues of remarkable national consensus.

00:06:04.920 At least in 2018, a majority of Republicans supported a national health care system, or

00:06:11.420 Medicare for All, a program touted by Bernie Sanders.

00:06:16.020 That said, on a host of metapolitical topics, like inequality, racial discrimination, and the

00:06:22.620 environment, gaps between red and blue are only widening.

00:06:27.620 The parties themselves have become hostile nations with little overlap.

00:06:31.660 This is demonstrated in a longitudinal study by the Pew Research Center covering the past

00:06:36.960 25 years.

00:06:39.020 In 1994, 64% of Republican voters were to the right of the average Democrat on a host of

00:06:45.500 basic issues, with considerable overlap.

00:06:48.740 Put another way, the average Democrat was to the right of one-third of Republicans.

00:06:54.120 By 2017, the center had vanished.

00:06:58.760 Effectively, all, 95 to 97% Republicans, are to the right of Democrats, and Democrats to

00:07:05.500 the left of Republicans.

00:07:07.520 Some old-timers still wax nostalgic about a bipartisan era long ago when both parties would roll up

00:07:14.180 their sleeves and get things done for the American people.

00:07:16.780 The reality is, compromise and collaboration are simply impossible when there is literally

00:07:22.880 no common ground.

00:07:25.840 Polarization tracks with religious divides.

00:07:29.020 Mormons and evangelical Protestants are overwhelmingly Republican.

00:07:33.360 And to no one's surprise, self-described atheists are liberal to roughly the same degree as

00:07:38.360 fundamentalists are conservative.

00:07:40.740 Polarization is also strongly regional, a phenomenon known as the big sort.

00:07:47.060 Blue states are clustered on the eastern and western seaboard, and states containing large

00:07:51.940 metropolises tend to be Democratic.

00:07:54.680 Texas and Georgia are notable southern exceptions.

00:07:58.400 Polarization also marks the intersection of race and class, as Republicans have gradually

00:08:04.020 become the home of the white working class, those without college degrees. 0.99

00:08:08.660 I'll explore this in more detail in the next essay in this series.

00:08:12.140 In 2004, George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by a close score in the popular vote, 51-48.

00:08:20.940 But mapping the election county by county told a very different story.

00:08:24.860 The entire heartland and south was deep red, with some blue outliers in predominantly African-American

00:08:32.140 districts and urban centers.

00:08:34.340 Someone in, say, Casper, Wyoming might not know another soul who voted for John Kerry, to

00:08:40.300 paraphrase the infamous quip by Pauline Kael.

00:08:44.560 Polarization is even more radical than elections would lead you to believe.

00:08:48.700 Terms like secession and Civil War II are in the air.

00:08:52.820 A Reuters-Ipsos poll conducted from November 2016 through January 2017 found 22% of respondents

00:09:01.300 supporting the state they live in, quote, withdrawing from the USA and the federal government, end

00:09:06.780 quote.

00:09:07.600 Support among non-whites was even higher, at 29%, with less than an outright majority opposed

00:09:13.740 and the remaining quarter of the population, unsure.

00:09:17.480 Some 40% of both Democrats and Republicans openly tell pollsters that political violence

00:09:23.040 is justified, quote, a little, end quote, if the other guys win.

00:09:27.680 Both the QAnon conspiracy and Russian collusion narrative, which led to Trump's impeachment,

00:09:34.100 are factually dubious, but true to the prevailing zeitgeist.

00:09:38.740 For QAnon, the Democrats aren't just wrong or misguided. 1.00

00:09:42.340 They are literally satanic, blood-sucking pedophiles. 1.00

00:09:46.760 The mass media, or fake news, is only there to distract the public from Trump's noble crusade 1.00

00:09:52.780 against evil.

00:09:53.800 On the other side, resistance liberals say that Trump is in Vladimir Putin's pocket, effectively

00:10:00.400 reviving a Cold War-era ghost story about a Manchurian candidate, once the bugbear of right-wing

00:10:07.020 fanatics in the John Birch Society.

00:10:09.060 Trump doesn't just want better diplomatic relations with Russia.

00:10:13.640 He is, in fact, a tool of a Slavic autocrat bent on world domination. 1.00

00:10:20.240 Marianne Williamson captured the mood as only she can.

00:10:23.520 I told my daughter this morning that if he wins again, he'll probably start rounding people

00:10:29.320 up.

00:10:30.280 You might get a call at some point to come bail out mommy. 1.00

00:10:33.880 We both laughed nervously.

00:10:36.160 Don't tell a Jew they'll never have to worry about being rounded up. 1.00

00:10:39.880 And don't tell a woman she's never been underestimated because of her gender.

00:10:44.520 We know better.

00:10:45.760 Ancestors don't lie.

00:10:47.020 What is key here is that both Reds and Blues view the other, not as an adversary, but as

00:10:54.140 a demon or tyrant.

00:10:56.180 Why debate or find common ground with someone who wants to throw you in a dungeon? 0.99

00:11:00.720 After all, it's kill or be killed.

00:11:02.860 Section 2, Projecting the Presidency

00:11:07.760 Radical polarization is disturbing, and it might foretell an eventual breakdown of the

00:11:14.660 United States, as unthinkable as that might sound.

00:11:17.940 But for our limited purposes here, polarization means electoral stability, and that means that

00:11:24.340 four out of every five states in any presidential election can be forecast years in advance.

00:11:29.760 For yet another cycle, a dozen or so states will determine the outcome of the presidential

00:11:35.840 election.

00:11:37.060 Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio,

00:11:43.900 Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

00:11:46.580 The other 38 are not likely to produce surprises.

00:11:50.940 Texas and Georgia are two remarkable additions to this list, as both have been reliably Republican

00:11:56.420 since 1996, and are thought of as bastions of conservatism.

00:12:01.800 Among the 12 states in play, three, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, will prove most important,

00:12:08.800 since they are populous and polling has been both close and volatile.

00:12:13.480 Mainstream forecasters, the Cook Political Report, The Economist, FiveThirtyEight, and The New

00:12:18.120 York Times, are consistent on this assessment.

00:12:20.640 Joe Biden's advantage immediately jumps to the fore.

00:12:26.980 Taking the 38 non-swing states as givens, Biden will begin election night carrying some 215 to 225

00:12:35.860 electoral votes.

00:12:37.280 Trump, only around 125.

00:12:40.280 Of the dozen decisive states, half of them are leaning towards Biden.

00:12:45.140 Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Arizona.

00:12:48.880 Only Texas and Georgia are significantly leaning Republican.

00:12:54.380 This leaves Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa as the toss-ups among toss-ups.

00:13:01.040 The problem for Trump is that Biden does not need to win all of the Democratic-leaning toss-ups

00:13:07.160 to reach 270 electoral votes, and thus an electoral college majority.

00:13:11.620 In other words, for Trump to eke out a victory, he must hold Southern stalwarts like Georgia,

00:13:18.640 Florida, and Texas, and win at least a couple of Midwestern states, Iowa and Ohio, for example,

00:13:24.500 that formed his unlikely Rust Belt strategy of 2016.

00:13:29.200 This is simply too tall an order.

00:13:32.140 A victory for Trump, based on, say, winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida,

00:13:37.300 would already be reflected by polls suggesting a Republican wave.

00:13:41.720 We don't see this.

00:13:43.500 Biden has maintained a comfortable lead in national polling in the area of 7 to 10 points

00:13:48.680 for months.

00:13:49.900 This is significantly higher than Clinton's lead over Trump throughout the summer and fall

00:13:54.260 of 2016, which hovered between 1 and 6 points and was trending towards deadlock.

00:13:59.500 Numbers on early voting foresee a dramatic, multi-fold increase of turnout among young

00:14:05.420 people, 18 to 29, a group that skews heavily towards Biden.

00:14:10.340 As they say in the NFL, any team can win on any given Sunday, and that rule holds for Tuesdays,

00:14:16.900 too.

00:14:17.840 If, say, Trump secures Florida with its 29 electoral votes, then his chances of pulling off an upset

00:14:24.000 increase dramatically.

00:14:25.300 But we need to remember how astounding Trump's win in 2016 really was.

00:14:31.740 In the Electoral College, Trump beat Clinton handedly, 304 to 207.

00:14:37.380 On a state-by-state basis, however, his margins were razor thin.

00:14:42.400 Trump won Florida, a state of 22 million, by 100,000 votes.

00:14:47.700 He won Michigan by a mere 10,000.

00:14:49.720 Treading such a precarious, narrow path to victory one more time is too much to ask of

00:14:56.760 any candidate.

00:14:58.160 And demographics in those states are clearly moving in the wrong direction.

00:15:04.400 Part three, letting a good crisis go to waste.

00:15:08.260 America might never again see a truly national statesman, that is, a man who transcends party

00:15:16.680 and policy, and is widely viewed as the right guy to take charge in a crisis.

00:15:22.580 After 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemingly couldn't lose, consistently boosted by his resolve

00:15:29.220 in the Great Depression and Second World War.

00:15:31.220 Since then, wartime can make a president invincible before sinking him.

00:15:37.260 Lyndon Baines Johnson won a landslide at the height of the Vietnam War,

00:15:41.120 then bowed out of the 1968 election early, having lost control of his own party.

00:15:46.680 George H.W. Bush's approval ratings were just shy of 90% after launching the first Iraq war.

00:15:53.200 They then dipped as low as 29 in 1992 when the fight was over.

00:15:57.460 His son, George W., experienced a similar ordeal.

00:16:02.200 He broke 90% after the September 11th attacks, just before his approval cascaded downward and

00:16:08.860 he became a national punchline in his second term.

00:16:12.700 W. might be the last president to achieve unanimous adulation, however fleeting.

00:16:18.940 After years of relative peace for the American empire, Trump was challenged in the final year

00:16:24.120 of his term with a crisis of biblical proportions.

00:16:27.460 A plague from the Far East that brought the world to its knees. 1.00

00:16:31.880 Politically speaking, this was a gift.

00:16:34.400 If only he were willing to unwrap it.

00:16:37.120 Trump achieved his highest approval ratings in the first half of May 2020, 49%,

00:16:42.500 weeks after he had officially declared the coronavirus a national emergency.

00:16:47.740 Great stress brings out animal instincts.

00:16:50.580 People desperately want to follow the leader.

00:16:52.860 For all of the shrill talk about Trump being a fascist, the reality is that Benito Mussolini

00:17:06.460 would have relished the chance to mobilize the nation under pandemic socialism.

00:17:11.160 And if Trump governed more like a fascist, perhaps donning a nightly hazmat suit during press

00:17:17.520 briefings, he would have a much better chance of being reelected.

00:17:22.360 No leader on earth has paid a price for overreacting to coronavirus, even if some have indeed overreacted.

00:17:29.740 Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has consistently urged lockdowns, has had an approval rating in the

00:17:36.120 mid to upper 60s on his handling of the pandemic, double that of Trump.

00:17:40.800 The nation was clearly begging to be given marching orders by a strong man.

00:17:46.040 Trump, for his part, chose the power of positive thinking, a uniquely American form of Christianity

00:17:52.040 articulated by Norman Vincent Peale, a minister who presided over Trump's first wedding.

00:17:58.020 Trump's response to coronavirus will forever be remembered by his claims that it was a

00:18:02.700 Democrat hoax, that it will go away in the spring like a miracle, various goofy proposals

00:18:09.260 for instant cures, and his fretting over the health of the Dow Jones Industrial Index.

00:18:14.060 By October, Trump was losing seniors, the most vulnerable to COVID-19, by 10 points in the

00:18:21.080 all-important state of Pennsylvania.

00:18:23.380 Voters over the age of 65 would seem to be the natural constituency of any conservative.

00:18:28.640 65% of them voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

00:18:32.480 Yet in 2020, the olds have a voting profile much like their self-centered left-wing grandchildren.

00:18:38.480 Trump is one of the only presidents in recent memory to declare himself a nationalist, and

00:18:45.320 he has invoked the pre-war slogan of America first.

00:18:49.340 But in the end, his nationalism, whatever it might mean in practice, is a minority political

00:18:54.980 position.

00:18:55.540 It is undoubtedly popular with GOP diehards. 0.90

00:18:59.160 Trump's approval rating among Republicans is rising to 95%.

00:19:02.740 But it is simply not a governing ideology.

00:19:06.160 The country is headed in a very different direction.

00:19:11.640 Section 4.

00:19:13.320 Projecting the House

00:19:14.520 The 2018 midterms amounted to a wave election for the Democrats, the one obscured by the final

00:19:22.840 result.

00:19:23.940 A split government, with the Republicans increasing their lead in the Senate.

00:19:27.580 That year, the Democrats achieved a net gain of 41 seats in the House, which put the victory

00:19:33.780 on par with two iconic Republican waves of recent history.

00:19:38.620 The 1994 Revolution, net gain of 54 seats, and the 2010 Tea Party, net gain of 63.

00:19:47.000 Remarkably, the 2018 Blue Wave was greater than those two, at least as measured by the popular

00:19:53.680 vote margin.

00:19:54.320 Yes, all politics is local, especially in the House.

00:19:58.560 But if the 2018 midterms were treated like a national referendum, then the Democrats had

00:20:04.100 a nine-point advantage over the Republicans, matching Biden's 2020 advantage over Trump.

00:20:10.680 The 94 and 2010 midterms birthed new heroes in the persons of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan,

00:20:18.320 two pompous and nerdy libertarians.

00:20:20.300 The impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the consolidation of the religious right as

00:20:25.520 a reliable bloc, endless prattle about budgets and various government shutdowns marked the

00:20:31.040 terms of those speakers in this red era of Congress.

00:20:35.460 It's difficult to think of any legislative achievements.

00:20:38.460 No examples come to mind.

00:20:40.620 Recent Democratic gains in the House, on the other hand, brought us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

00:20:46.360 and the so-called squad, all of whom immediately became stars and generated friction with the

00:20:52.460 centrist leaders of the House and Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

00:20:56.600 Biden, too, is running as a centrist, the man who, as he brags, beat the socialist and

00:21:02.500 will revive a globally oriented foreign policy.

00:21:06.260 Whereas Republican presidents were generally aligned with popular energies in their parties,

00:21:11.720 Biden is already at odds with them.

00:21:13.920 He may be the last Democratic standard-bearer to promise nothing will fundamentally change.

00:21:20.260 Regardless of what Joe wants, creative and paradigm-shifting policy, the Green New Deal

00:21:25.980 being a perfect example, will begin flowing out of the Democratic House.

00:21:31.700 Section 5.

00:21:33.340 Projecting the Senate.

00:21:35.500 In 2018, Fortuna looked fondly upon Republicans.

00:21:39.620 That year, only eight of their 51 seats in the Senate were in play, whereas the Democrats had

00:21:46.060 23 of 49.

00:21:48.200 Republicans seized the opportunity, and the recent confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett would

00:21:53.260 not have been possible were it not for the lucky hand they were dealt.

00:21:57.920 In 2020, Republicans faced the inverse of the happy situation last cycle.

00:22:03.160 They have 23 seats up for election, while the Democrats have only 12.

00:22:07.480 And it gets worse.

00:22:08.340 Among the Democrats' 12 seats in jeopardy, only one is likely to be lost, Doug Jones' perch

00:22:14.880 in Alabama, which was acquired in a bizarre special election against Christian fundamentalist

00:22:20.220 Roy Moore.

00:22:21.320 In 2020, Alabama will likely send Republican Tommy Tuberville, the old Auburn football coach,

00:22:27.740 to the U.S. Senate.

00:22:28.480 Of the Republicans' 23 seats that are up for election, eight are considered toss-ups, and

00:22:35.040 in the case of Martha McSally in Arizona and Cory Gardner in Colorado, likely losses.

00:22:41.280 Seats that should be solid are now in play, such as Joni Ernst in Iowa and Lindsey Graham

00:22:45.840 in South Carolina, both of whom seem to be dragged down by their close association with

00:22:50.080 Trump.

00:22:50.320 Graham's unlikely challenger, Jamie Harrison, has raised more money than any other Senate

00:22:56.360 candidate in U.S. history, upwards of $85 million.

00:23:00.380 For Republicans, there are simply too many signs that too many things are going wrong.

00:23:05.200 A baseline expectation for the Democrats would be to lose Alabama and keep 46 of their current

00:23:12.540 47 seats.

00:23:14.200 This would roughly maintain the status quo.

00:23:17.260 The Republicans should reasonably hope to maintain their 15 safe seats.

00:23:21.780 However, they should expect to lose between four and five, that is, half of the toss-ups.

00:23:27.460 In that scenario, they would lose control.

00:23:29.980 Normally, the re-election of a party's incumbent president means a rising tide, but this is

00:23:36.000 not a normal year.

00:23:37.900 The Republicans should lose five seats, and on November 4th, 2020, the Democrats will gain

00:23:43.280 control of the Senate.

00:23:46.500 Section 6.

00:23:48.420 Ignore the polls, bro.

00:23:51.080 But wait, weren't all polls wrong in 2016?

00:23:55.160 It's a common refrain you hear from Trump fans.

00:23:58.100 It also harkens back to 2012, when Republicans were similarly confident that polls weren't

00:24:04.780 capturing Mitt Romney's support, a contrarianism that led Karl Rove to engage in embarrassing

00:24:10.580 displays of delusion and denial on national television when the results came in.

00:24:15.920 The short answer to the question, weren't the polls wrong, is no.

00:24:20.180 The full story is more complicated.

00:24:21.980 Trump's entrance onto the political scene in 2015 was a watershed in that traditional

00:24:28.660 metrics and punditry, which had worked so well in previous elections, failed spectacularly

00:24:34.160 to understand his popularity over the course of the next 18 months.

00:24:38.480 Much like Ron Paul in 2008, Trump was the candidate from the internet.

00:24:44.100 He activated a base that was increasingly getting its news from social media and not from network

00:24:49.580 cable television.

00:24:51.260 That included Fox News, which, we shouldn't forget, opposed Trump's ascendancy throughout

00:24:56.420 2015.

00:24:58.800 Trump simultaneously developed a cult following among younger and more activist men and women,

00:25:04.500 who liked him precisely for his combative personality and because he waged war against

00:25:09.300 the Republican establishment.

00:25:11.140 This was the alt-right in its broader and more nebulous form.

00:25:15.460 From the outset, it was demeaned by the mainstream media as a gaggle of internet trolls and even

00:25:21.780 bots.

00:25:23.200 But Trump's digital engagement was very real.

00:25:27.500 In late 2015, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight infamously wrote,

00:25:32.760 Dear Media, stop freaking out about Donald Trump's polls.

00:25:37.120 According to Silver,

00:25:38.220 For my money, that adds up to Trump's chances being higher than zero, but considerably less than

00:25:43.620 20%.

00:25:44.380 Your mileage may vary, but you probably shouldn't rely solely on the polls to make your case.

00:25:50.240 A strange statement coming from a man whose career is based on aggregating polls.

00:25:55.280 Over the course of the nominating process, Silver and other cephalogists assured the public

00:26:00.460 that Trump was a sideshow.

00:26:02.440 Plugging historical precinct figures, campaign finance data, and political endorsements into

00:26:08.140 their algorithms to weight the polls, they put Trump at the bottom of the pack.

00:26:12.780 Jeb Bush was to be the likely nominee, with Marco Rubio the possible upset candidate.

00:26:19.840 Absent from these prediction formulas were rally attendance numbers, social media engagement,

00:26:25.440 and organic, rather than media-manufactured, public interest.

00:26:29.700 Trump dominated internet search queries throughout the campaign cycle.

00:26:34.280 A Trump supporter might, on two days' notice, take off work to drive three hours for a chance

00:26:39.540 to get inside a sports stadium for a Trump rally, and face a very real chance of being kept outside

00:26:45.520 on account of the venue reaching maximum capacity.

00:26:49.040 Jeb Bush, on the other hand, had difficulty filling up an elementary school classroom,

00:26:54.460 not to mention getting people to clap.

00:26:57.480 Yet this patent disparity in intensity was thought by the experts to be electorally insignificant.

00:27:03.340 Usually, when a state politician endorsed a candidate ahead of a caucus or primary, tens of thousands

00:27:11.020 of people might hear about it, most often days afterwards through second-hand media reports.

00:27:17.060 But during Trump's rise, tens of millions of people would hear directly and instantaneously

00:27:22.520 from Trump via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

00:27:26.000 It was not uncommon for people to be made aware of the endorsements of Trump's opponents

00:27:31.180 from Trump himself.

00:27:33.180 The conventional blessing of a political establishment had become the curse of the swamp.

00:27:39.020 The big miss of the mainstream media came in 2015, when pundits dismissed Trump, despite

00:27:45.980 his strong polling and measurable online engagement.

00:27:50.040 2016 was a different story.

00:27:52.660 The polls weren't all that wrong.

00:27:54.580 Nate Silver, for one, gave Trump a much better chance of winning the 2016 election than his

00:28:00.340 contemporaries.

00:28:01.520 The national popular vote total was actually well within the range of major polling predictions.

00:28:07.040 The real clear politics average across 11 different polling companies showed Hillary Clinton winning 0.96

00:28:12.120 the popular vote by 3.3 points.

00:28:14.980 Her actual margin of victory was 2.1.

00:28:17.800 Most of the national polls were within the margin of error.

00:28:21.140 The breakdown in polling reliability, at least relative to the boring election night of 2012,

00:28:28.980 occurred at the state level.

00:28:31.040 Trump strongly outperformed his statewide polls in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania,

00:28:36.800 which were key.

00:28:38.100 But we should remember that Hillary outdid expectations in Nevada, despite most late-October 0.98

00:28:43.680 polls suggesting a Trump surge.

00:28:45.620 Red states went redder than the polls predicted, and to a lesser extent, blue states went bluer.

00:28:52.580 The correlation between Trump's margin of victory and his overperformance relative to RCP polling

00:28:58.400 at the state level was a staggering 0.63.

00:29:02.660 Pollsters have learned lessons from their shortcomings in 2016.

00:29:05.680 And more importantly, even if all the 2020 polls were as wrong as those in 2016, Biden would

00:29:13.140 still comfortably win the presidency.

00:29:15.780 Mainstream polling is simply not fraudulent, and the move towards Democratic hegemony is

00:29:20.740 seismic, not a result of the latest news cycle.

00:29:24.220 Trump pulled off an amazing upset in 2016, but demographics and attitudinal change forecast

00:29:30.300 a new blue period in American politics, a process that began well before the nomination of Joe Biden.

00:29:39.500 Section 7, New Blue

00:29:41.920 Trump's victory and inauguration was a winter of discontent for the American left.

00:29:48.800 Scenes of crying, shock, hysteria, wailing, and gnashing of teeth filled the news outlets

00:29:54.280 and social media feeds across the land.

00:29:56.640 But perhaps they shouldn't have been so bent out of shape.

00:30:01.880 In 2016, Hillary Clinton received almost 3 million more votes than Trump, roughly 65.8 million

00:30:08.220 to 63.

00:30:09.380 And many overlooked that Democrats actually gained seats in the House and Senate.

00:30:14.700 Since 1992, Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.

00:30:20.640 Both Trump and George W. Bush relied on the idiosyncrasies of the Electoral College

00:30:26.980 and with Bush, the Supreme Court, to secure their first terms.

00:30:32.160 On the whole, America is a left-wing country, by any reasonable measure.

00:30:38.720 In the 20th century, the Democrats were the party of hegemony.

00:30:42.720 For six decades after Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, Congress was effectively a

00:30:49.180 one-party body.

00:30:50.960 Between the 73rd Congress of 1933 and the Republican Revolution of 1995, Democrats controlled 28 of

00:30:58.900 the 31 Congresses, losing to the Republicans only briefly in 1947 to 49 and 1952 to 53, and

00:31:06.900 enduring a split in 1985 to 1986.

00:31:09.640 For better and for worse, the Democratic Party is responsible for every lasting policy paradigm,

00:31:17.500 from the New Deal to the Great Society to civil rights to immigration reform.

00:31:21.980 The last notable policy initiative of either party was the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare,

00:31:27.540 of 2009, which again was achieved when the Democrats had control of both houses.

00:31:33.460 The quarter century since Republicans took the House in 1994 can be thought of as the Red

00:31:39.000 era.

00:31:39.460 The Republicans' share of Congress has increased from some 25% in the early 1930s to over 55%

00:31:46.960 in the last few decades.

00:31:49.160 Republicans have held both chambers 7 out of 12 election cycles, and held on to one chamber

00:31:55.180 10 out of 12.

00:31:56.840 Democrats, as mentioned, were only in full command for two years during Barack Obama's

00:32:01.300 first term.

00:32:01.860 Since realignment in the 1960s, Republicans progressed, slowly but surely, from being an

00:32:08.860 also-ran and regional party to a majority one.

00:32:12.980 Yet it's questionable whether they were ever a governing party.

00:32:17.140 Outside of tax cuts, cantankerous complaining, and vague calls for limited government, Republicans

00:32:23.520 seem to have no clue what to do with power once they capture it, much like a dog chasing after

00:32:28.940 the mailman.

00:32:29.940 The GOP has certainly been popular, but it has clearly lacked the intellectual resources

00:32:35.380 to be a truly national party.

00:32:37.860 As the Red Era took shape, the margins of dominance in Congress by either party have progressively 0.93

00:32:43.600 shrunk, approaching an even split.

00:32:46.400 In other words, the Red Era is one of visionless deadlock, obstruction, and back and forth. 0.95

00:32:52.760 You could argue that as margins in Congress are tightening, and polarization becomes more

00:32:58.420 intense, we should prepare ourselves for exchanges of power between the two parties every cycle.

00:33:04.160 But I expect something quite different to emerge.

00:33:07.600 Long-term domination of Congress and the presidency by the left moving forward.

00:33:13.900 The Democrats might never achieve the supremacy of the FDR coalition, but they will set the 0.76

00:33:19.820 agenda for the next quarter century.

00:33:22.140 Medicare for all, universal basic income, and woke policies beyond our imagination will

00:33:27.880 become possible.

00:33:30.700 Section 8.

00:33:32.340 Is diversity destiny?

00:33:35.560 Pronouncements about America's changing demographics, or about how diversity is destiny, are now so

00:33:42.720 commonplace as to be cliches.

00:33:44.820 The built-in assumption is that demographic realities doom the GOP, the monoracial white 1.00

00:33:51.840 party within the American rainbow.

00:33:54.220 But it's important to remember a few things.

00:33:57.500 In Texas, whites reached minority status 20 years ago, and the state remained a keystone

00:34:03.020 of the Red Era throughout that time. 0.76

00:34:05.540 So, theoretically, Republicans could continue to win elections as the white party, the home 0.85

00:34:11.580 of legacy Americans and those who aspire to be like them.

00:34:15.620 What is decisive is that the Democrats, and not the Republicans, have constituted themselves

00:34:21.320 as a hegemonic entity for the 21st century.

00:34:24.680 The largest demographic group now entering the Democratic Party is not Hispanic immigrants,

00:34:30.660 but white suburban professionals.

00:34:32.860 The left is thus home not only to African Americans, but the new class of corporate and financial 0.87

00:34:38.760 managers.

00:34:39.380 While the conservatives are downright proud of the absence of cultured snobs and intellectuals

00:34:45.120 in their ranks, the Democrats have long been the party of thinkers, artists, and dreamers.

00:34:50.480 This new blue grouping that is emerging might seem contradictory, but you could say the same

00:34:55.780 thing about FDR's New Deal coalition, which brought together the urban poor, small farmers,

00:35:01.180 eggheads, and southern segregationists.

00:35:03.300 The Democrats are positioned to capture the forces of America's transformation and govern

00:35:09.160 the declining empire competently.

00:35:12.040 The Republicans are still talking about their half-remembered dream of American greatness,

00:35:17.180 and even that is fading into oblivion.

00:35:20.300 The major obstacle for Democrats is not demographics, surely, nor is it the lack of policy creativity,

00:35:27.060 which will explode in the coming years.

00:35:28.920 It is the fact that millions of white people who identify as conservatives and real Americans

00:35:34.840 will view their hegemony as entirely illegitimate and maybe evil.

00:35:40.040 That is a nut the left might not be able to crack.

00:35:45.360 Epilogue.

00:35:46.660 Could Trump actually win?

00:35:49.280 Then again, my assessment could be wrong, at least in the short term.

00:35:54.120 And regardless, it's worth discussing how Trump could actually pull this off.

00:35:58.180 We can start with Joe Biden's personal limitations.

00:36:02.840 The most common criticism of Biden, heard from Republicans, is encapsulated by Trump's nickname

00:36:08.140 for him, Sleepy Joe.

00:36:10.700 Biden is senile, they say, incoherent, stuck in his basement, afraid even to step outside.

00:36:17.560 Much of this is grounded in reality.

00:36:20.260 Biden's bumbling, absent-minded speech patterns and malapropisms are striking, though many of them

00:36:26.920 are more charming than politically damaging.

00:36:29.920 And American voters are likely to see Biden's personal quirks as a feature, not a bug.

00:36:35.620 As mentioned, Biden is quite popular among seniors, who can empathize with his moments,

00:36:40.840 since they have many of their own.

00:36:43.220 Hillary Clinton was widely reviled, precisely because she comes off as Machiavellian, calculated, 0.70

00:36:49.660 codified, and in a funny way, over-prepared to be president.

00:36:53.660 Uncle Joe, on the other hand, captures the sweet spot of benign goofiness.

00:36:59.620 He's simply too guileless and folksy to be evil, unlike Hillary.

00:37:05.040 The second level of the Sleepy Joe argument is that, they say, his running mate, Kamala Harris, 0.92

00:37:11.480 will be in charge, a suggestion she herself seemed to embrace.

00:37:15.300 Though Harris is clearly more of a woke feminist than Joe could ever be, she was selected precisely 1.00

00:37:22.680 because, on policy, she's in the same centrist ballpark as Biden.

00:37:27.260 In August, the Wall Street Journal reported,

00:37:29.840 as Kamala Harris joins the Biden ticket, Wall Street sighs in relief.

00:37:35.860 Harris opposes Medicare for All, after once supporting it, supports fracking, ditto,

00:37:41.540 and in a lecture to young people in Chicago, instructed them to give up on their dreams

00:37:46.520 and build more jails, not schools.

00:37:49.800 Harris's initial campaign for the Democratic nomination was derailed

00:37:53.100 when she was scolded by Tulsi Gabbard for being a draconian district attorney. 1.00

00:37:57.380 Harris hasn't helped the Biden ticket, but she has not seriously hurt it either.

00:38:03.680 And if she does emerge as the eminence grise of the administration, 0.68

00:38:07.680 it will be to pursue most of the same policies that Biden would.

00:38:12.560 The stronger argument in favor of Trump is that all of the same dynamics of 2015,

00:38:18.400 which we discussed above, are still in place.

00:38:21.760 Echoes of the Trump-Jeb rivalry have returned in 2020,

00:38:25.720 as Trump continues to generate large crowds and religious-like devotion,

00:38:31.240 while Biden holds rallies to audiences of a few dozen journalists.

00:38:36.000 This has a lot to do with COVID-19.

00:38:38.480 However, the enthusiasm gap is quite real.

00:38:41.840 And it's not wrong to sum up the dynamic of 2020 as such.

00:38:46.200 Trump supporters love Trump.

00:38:48.440 Biden supporters hate Trump.

00:38:50.360 Can Biden pull off a victory on exasperated negativity alone,

00:38:55.740 on his voters settling for him as a relief from the other guy?

00:38:59.820 We'll find out.

00:39:01.520 As mentioned, Trump is approaching an astounding 95% approval among Republicans.

00:39:08.200 And in a Pew Research poll in August,

00:39:11.260 66% of his supporters were strongly enthusiastic about voting for him.

00:39:15.700 These are the types that attend rallies, post on Facebook,

00:39:19.560 and talk about Trump tirelessly to their friends and co-workers.

00:39:23.800 At the time, Biden's strong support was only at 46%.

00:39:27.400 But over the past three months, enthusiasm for him has begun to rival conservatives' adoration

00:39:33.140 of the president, perhaps as the left's hatred of Trump reached levels previously thought impossible.

00:39:39.220 On social media, Trump remains miles ahead of Biden on active engagement, as we would expect.

00:39:47.220 According to the New York Times,

00:39:48.980 in the past 30 days, Mr. Trump's official Facebook page has gotten 130 million reactions, shares, and comments,

00:39:57.140 compared with 18 million from Mr. Biden's page.

00:40:00.360 That is significantly larger than the engagement gap for the preceding 30-day period,

00:40:05.200 when Mr. Trump got 86 million interactions to Mr. Biden's 10 million.

00:40:10.840 The same story goes for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube,

00:40:13.940 and especially the new alt-tech platforms like BitChute and Parler.

00:40:19.560 Moreover, while polls are one thing, actual voting is another,

00:40:24.540 and Trump has looked particularly stout on this front.

00:40:28.340 No major Republican dared challenge him in the GOP primaries.

00:40:32.360 And in New Hampshire, for example, he received 85% of the vote in the primary,

00:40:37.700 building on his total from four years ago by 30%, from 100,000 to 129,000,

00:40:43.940 despite the fact that these elections didn't seem to matter much.

00:40:47.820 In other words, MAGA enthusiasts, and not necessarily Trump haters,

00:40:52.580 are committed to trudging through a snowstorm to cast a ballot for their hero.

00:40:56.940 That shouldn't be discounted.

00:40:58.680 There is also the potential for the activation of anxious, though shy, Trump voters.

00:41:05.840 They aren't willing to announce themselves to pollsters,

00:41:08.600 and they might cast ballots on the basis of angst over the BLM riots,

00:41:12.820 which flared up over the summer and have resulted in looting,

00:41:15.700 violence, and demonization of the police.

00:41:19.020 Princeton academic Omar Wasau has studied the major protest movements of the 1960s

00:41:24.700 and their impact on presidential elections.

00:41:27.880 In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater promised law and order

00:41:32.840 against crime in the streets, but lost in a blowout to President Johnson,

00:41:37.560 a champion of civil rights.

00:41:39.300 By 1968, though, the tide had turned,

00:41:42.920 and Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon successfully marshaled a

00:41:47.040 tough-on-crime campaign to help win the White House.

00:41:49.840 What happened in those four years between Goldwater and Nixon?

00:41:54.620 For one thing, the protests became more violent,

00:41:57.460 particularly in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King.

00:42:01.440 Wasau marshals county-by-county data and concludes that in 1968,

00:42:06.320 localities that were proximate to nonviolent protests tended to vote more liberally,

00:42:11.700 that is, for Hubert Humphrey, than they might otherwise have.

00:42:14.760 When Wasau looked at counties that were exposed to violent protests,

00:42:19.680 Nixon tended to gain some two percentage points.

00:42:23.480 In various counterfactual scenarios,

00:42:25.980 Wasau suggests that Humphrey would have likely won the election of 1968

00:42:30.140 were it not for the reaction to the violence.

00:42:33.640 Such social science modeling reinforces gut instincts.

00:42:37.760 When people see crime, chaos, and racial hatred,

00:42:40.680 they turn to symbols of authority,

00:42:42.400 whether that be incumbents or the candidate viewed as the most right-wing.

00:42:47.980 In the summer of 2020,

00:42:50.060 violent protests occurred throughout the swing states of Georgia,

00:42:53.560 Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

00:42:56.020 And though these have cooled down of late,

00:42:58.760 Antifa, Defund the Police, and Black Lives Matter have become household terms.

00:43:03.820 And violent images of mayhem and destruction have been broadcast across the globe.

00:43:08.320 Might we see a similar Nixon effect in 2020?

00:43:12.840 One that is even more pronounced this time due to the virtual proximity created through social media?

00:43:19.420 This prospect, too, should not be discounted.

00:43:22.360 That said, Trump's path to victory remains the same.

00:43:26.360 An electoral college squeaker which would drive liberals into conniption fits. 0.98

00:43:30.720 And we shouldn't forget how close it was four years ago.

00:43:35.120 A Donald Trump victory in 2020 remains just as possible impossible as it was in 2016.

00:43:41.820 I would be remiss to count Trump out,

00:43:44.460 though I don't expect to be proven wrong.

00:43:46.500 Thank you.

00:44:00.080 Thank you.

00:44:30.080 Thank you.

00:45:00.080 Thank you.

00:45:30.080 Thank you.

00:46:00.080 Thank you.

00:46:30.080 Thank you.

00:47:00.080 Thank you.

00:47:30.080 Thank you.

00:48:00.080 Thank you.

00:48:30.060 Thank you.

00:49:00.060 Thank you.

00:49:30.060 Thank you.

00:50:00.060 Thank you.

00:50:30.060 Thank you.

RadixJournal - November 03, 2020

The Blue Period

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Summary

Transcript