Here’s why the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looks so impossibly close | Column
- by Tampa Bay Times
- Oct 23, 2024
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The parties increasingly donât mind offending or infuriating those they consider irrelevant âenemyâ voters, says columnist Jonah Goldberg.
[ SHARON DOMINICK | iStockphoto.com ] [ Provided ]
Franklin D. Rooseveltâs Democratic Party was the sun party for two generations, until the dawn of the Reagan majority. When Bill Clinton signed welfare reform and (falsely) declared, âThe era of big government is over,â he was reflecting the reality of that transformation.
In the early 2000s, the GOP receded back into moon status. âBut,â as David Brooks noted in 2011, âsomething strange happened. No party took the lead. ⦠Both parties have become minority parties simultaneously. We are living in the era of two moons and no sun.â
That dynamic only intensified as politicians and voters accepted the new abnormal as normal. If you look too closely at specific elections, it can be hard to see, but the trend becomes clear in retrospect.
George W. Bush ran in 2000 as a sun party candidate and eked out the slimmest of victories. As it happens, the use of âredâ and âblueâ to denote Republicans, Democrats and the statesâ political complexions also became a fixture of our politics that year. It may seem like a trivial thing, but I think red-vs.-blue rhetoric accelerated polarization by solidifying the idea that partisanship is a kind of identity.
Bush won reelection in 2004 by leaning into the two-moon system, boosting turnout among his political base by emphasizing culture war issues, chief among them gay marriage and the impulse to support a wartime president.
Barack Obamaâs election in 2008 obscured all of this because of the unique nature of his candidacy and Bushâs unpopularity amid a financial crisis and war-weariness. But itâs worth recalling that as a candidate, Obama never pivoted to the center. He won reelection in 2012 with a brilliant base-turnout strategy, motivating millions of low-propensity young and minority voters.
In 2016, the Donald Trump-led GOP adopted the same strategy in reverse, turning out millions of low-propensity white, non-college-educated voters.
One result of this dynamic is that the parties increasingly donât mind offending or infuriating those they consider irrelevant âenemyâ voters. Indeed, outraging the opposition becomes a strategic goal because in an era of polarization, the enemyâs outrage bolsters partisan commitment (and donations) on your own side. This requires ever more apocalyptic rhetoric about the consequences of defeat.
More important, what happens in campaigns doesnât stay there. Electoral strategies become governing philosophies. Parties that run on the theory that they only need more of the base to win become beholden to those core supporters in office.
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