Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why Is Every Recent Presidential Election So Close?

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

My favorite sort of social phenomenon is something that seems normal to modern eyes that is actually incredibly unusual. We take it for granted that every presidential election is a nail-biter these days. But this era of close elections is deeply strange. We used to have blowouts all the time. In 1964, 1972, and 1984, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, respectively, won by more than 15 points. This never happens anymore. Since the hanging-ballot mess of 2000, we’ve had historically close contests again and again: in 2004, 2012, 2016, and 2020. This year seems almost certain to continue the trend. National polls have almost never been this tight in the closing days of a presidential contest. In an era of shifting coalitions and weak parties, why is every modern presidential election so close? Today’s guest is Matt Yglesias, the author of the ‘Slow Boring’ newsletter, and a return guest on this show. We talk about how the era of close elections has, importantly, coincided with an era of racial realignment. We propose several theories for why every election is a nail-biter in the 21st century. And we explain why “it’s the internet, stupid” doesn’t work to explain this particular trend. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Matthew Yglesias Producer: Devon Baroldi LINKS: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-era-of-close-elections https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-electorate-is-becoming-less-racially Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that scientific studies have found most people lie once every 10 minutes? In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies, they tell, from faking illnesses in high-pressure moments to making up stories on national TV. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips. Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. How close is this presidential election? So close that just about every polling website has the national vote about as near to a statistical tie as possible.

So close that you could take a normal-sized polling error, the sort of thing that wouldn't make pollsters bat an eye in surprise. And if it airs in Kamala's favor, she could win every single swing state, the entire blue wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, plus Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. so close that the same normal polling error could also push all of those states toward Donald Trump. And because state polling errors tend to be correlated, the cone of probability here actually includes both what Democrats would call a beatdown and what Donald Trump would call a landslide.

The fact that the election is hanging on a razor's edge is obvious. The explanation for why this election is close is harder to pin down. You could frame the equipoise of the electorate by saying that the parties are balanced in their policy advantages. That would mean that Republican agitza around high inflation, chaotic immigration policy, and culture war stuff is proving exactly as motivating as democratic fears about abortion, health care, and Trump's character. A second explanation for this election's extraordinary closeness is that Trump and Harris each wield a powerful advantage that is perfectly cancelling out the others. Of all the things going for Trump,

perhaps nothing is as important as the sheer fact that incumbent parties like the Democratic White House have fared terribly around the world in elections this year. In the UK, the Conservative Party faced its worst-ever electoral defeat. In Germany, social Democrats suffered their own worst-ever electoral defeat. As Steve Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard, told PR, quote, by and large, people are much more unhappy with their governments than they were 10, 20, 40 years ago. Being an incumbent, which used to be an advantage, is increasingly a disadvantage.

Of all the things going for Kamala Harris, however, perhaps nothing is as important as the sheer fact that Donald Trump is an unpopular political figure who has managed to negatively polarize high propensity voters. At the Democratic election, in the age of Trump is full of people who just like to vote a lot, like college graduates and older women. The GOP electorate in the age of Trump has pulled in a lot of people who tend to vote less, like non-college graduates and young men. The Kamala coalition is a little bit like an army that you want to go to war with.

The Trump Coalition is like a battalion that needs a favorable terrain to win its battles. And that's exactly why I think this election is so close. the terrain benefits Trump, as clearly as the combat readiness of the Democratic coalition, benefits Harris. But I'd actually like to scope up a bit and explore a question that's bigger than why is this election so close. How about why is every election so close these days? In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson beat Goldwater 61% to 39%, total blowout. In 1972, Nixon won by an even wider margin. In 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Mondale, 59% to 41%.

Total beat down. Landslide elections used to be commonplace. So far this century, they're an endangered species. The 2020 election was a nail-biter. The 2016 election was a nail-biter. And it's not just like Trump is unusually good at dividing the electoral college into even slices. To keep going backward. In 2012, Obama won.

by just three points. In 2004, Bush won by just about two points. That's not typically remembered as a razor-sharp close election, but John Kerry lost Ohio by 110,000 votes. If he'd won Ohio by one vote, John Kerry would have been president. And then, of course, there's the 2000 election, which was decided by a handful of ballots in Florida, I mean, possibly a literal handful, as in the number of votes a small child could hold in their hands. This is a my favorite sort of phenomenon, something that seems normal to our modern eyes that is actually crying out for an explanation. Why is this an era of close elections? It might even be weirder than it seems. In a period of profound institutional distrust and weak parties and unpopular

politicians, wouldn't you expect elections to be more chaotic? It would make sense that the parties did a consistently terrible job trying to reach the average voter, that you'd see more chaos. It'd be Democrats winning a blowout and then Republicans winning a landslide and then back to Democrats winning a blowout. That we don't see that at all. That we see the opposite is very interesting. I think the most obvious answer to this question of why do we live in an era of close elections is that the electorate isn't changing, that most Americans, are like devout religious worshippers, and they have picked their congregation, or I guess to take the negative partisan gloss here,

like devout religious haters who know exactly which church they hate. But as the writer Matt Iglesias has pointed out, the electorate is in flux more than most people think. And that makes the era of close elections even more mysterious. There's one theory that Matt and I touch on only briefly that I think is worthy of further explanation and maybe further investigation on this show. What if it's the internet?

As close listeners know, I rarely shy away from an opportunity to blame the internet for things, but think about it, digital tools make it easier for companies to shape our opinion about all sorts of things. In an age of advanced data analytics and rapid-fire feedback loops for consumer opinion,

it sort of makes sense that political parties armed with hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, would be able to fine-tune their consumer appeal such that every election ends around 50-50. That's plausible, but at the same time, the Internet is global, and the world is strewn with blowouts and landslides. I just told you that the incumbent parties in the UK and Germany

just suffered their worst election losses ever. They've got the Internet in London, they've got the internet in Frankfurt. And so if the era of close elections is an internet phenomenon and the internet is global, why isn't this a global phenomenon? Today's guest is Matt Iglesias, the author of the slow-boring newsletter, and a return guest on this show. We talk about how the era of close elections has importantly coincided with an era of racial realignment, and we propose several theories for why every election in this century is such a nail-biter.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Madaglacius, welcome with the show. Hi, good to be here. So in the open, I just briefly traced why I think the age of close presidential elections is such an interesting mystery. It is really uncommon to have a 24-year period with so many elections hanging on a razor's edge like this. But the first thing that I want to do is to help listeners, feel the mystery as I feel it. So this would not be an interesting puzzle to solve if the

electorate was frozen in place 48-48. Like if everybody was locked into their partisan positions and voting for the same party over and over and over and over again, there'd be no mystery to solve. But that's not true. Like Barack Obama won Ohio by four points in 2008. And then eight years later, Donald Trump won Ohio by eight points. There are huge changes to the electorate happening during this period of close elections. And one of those things that's happening that I think is under-recognized is a very serious racial realignment, this old assumption that, you know, white people will vote for the same share, the same white people will vote for the Republican Party, and the same non-white people will always vote for the Democratic Party. That has become

complicated by some of the changes of the last few cycles. You just wrote about this. So tell me what you're seeing in the racial realignment of the electorate that I think deepens this mystery of the era of closed elections? Yeah, I mean, we've seen since 2012, we've seen Republicans steadily gain vote share with Latino and African-American voters, especially with Hispanic voters, but with African-Americans too. It's happened cycle, across cycle, across cycle quite consistently. And Democrats have started doing better with white voters. Some of that is because the share of the white population that has a college degree has risen. But some of it is Democrats vote performance with white college graduates has gotten a lot better. And with working class whites

has gotten a little bit better than it had been, at least in 2016. You know, one simple example I like to give is if Stacey Abrams had done as well in 2018 as Hillary Clinton did with African-American voters, she would have won that race. But she did worse, right? And that's how sort of dramatic and notable the falling away has been that African-American Democrats have done worse than white Democrats used to in the past with African-Americans. Florida in 2016 was a swing state. I mean, Clinton lost it, but she lost it very narrowly. There's a world in which she won that election by doing slightly better, you know, in the state of Florida, would have been enough to tip it. In 2024, it's not on the map at all. It's not part of Kamala's narrow path to victory.

It's also not even really part of her landslide scenario. The very large Latino population in that state has become a lot more conservative. In Texas, Democrats used to think, well, if we do better in the kind of suburbs of these growing cities, in the state. Democrats are doing much better in the suburbs of the large Texas cities, but they're doing much worse in the Rio Grande Valley. And so the state has been in a stasis, essentially, but the internal dynamics are very dramatic, just as within the U.S., we've stayed evenly divided, but not because the same groups of people keep voting each four years. This is not like asking a group of 100 people, like every four years, how many of you have a Y chromosome, how many of you have naturally red hair, where you're going to get the same answer over and over again, no matter who's standing at the front of the room asking the question. Instead, we are asking an incredibly dynamic electorate about a heads or tails choice, Republican or a Democrat. And even while we're getting a shifting electorate, the answer is still roughly coming up 48, 48, 48, almost every time.

And I want to do one more point on how interesting these shifts are, even though every election is close. A lot of the underlying questions are changing dramatically. So we live in a world where Mitt Romney in 2012 loses with 47 percent of the vote. And then Donald Trump runs as the Republican presidential nominee four years later as a totally different Republican, absolutely incredibly different views on trade and social security and certainly on temperament. But he basically wins the same share of the vote, 46%, and wins. Can you, I think to help dramatize this, talk a little bit about how different Trump offered a view of the Republican Party, despite the fact that we all know how this situation ended, he ended up winning almost the exact same percent of the

electorate. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting, right? Trump performs much worse than Romney did with sort of people in the suburbs of large cities. But he makes the Republican Party seen as a champion of economic nationalism in the Midwest. And he does a lot better in the Great Lakes states. He also does better in some weird pockets of the country, right? He does much better in Staten Island in New York City, right? And you see a realignment of lease officers in general, and you see some of this continuing. There was a good political article

about how a lot of blue-collar of paper union members are voting for Trump now and putting union leaders in an awkward position. But he has been alienating, you know, upscale women who used to be, like, loyal Republican voters, the kind of people who, you know, believe in hard work and low taxes and sort of classic Republican values. So Trump found a much more geographically optimal set of people to vote for him. And he turned what was a big electoral

college loss for Robbie into a narrow electoral college win for himself without really getting more votes in the aggregate. Yeah. And this is why I find this such an interesting question, is that the era of close presidential elections is happening in a period where you could say both the demand side is in flux, voter coalitions are changing, and the supply side is in flux. The Trump GOP is not the Romney GOP. So this is not an era of stasis. It's an era of realignment, but it's also an era of 48-48 outcomes. So one possibility.

I want to run through several possible explanations for why we may be in an era of close elections. And the first explanation is that this. is actually just a Donald Trump effect. Donald Trump happened to radicalize the college-educated cohort and push them to the left at almost the exact same level that he attracted less-educated voters. And this trade-off has put U.S. politics into an unusual state of balance where we are very likely, you know, polling errors happened, but we are very likely heading into the third straight Donald Trump election where Democrats edge out of victory in the popular vote, but it's basically a toss-up in the electoral college decided by less than 100,000 voters.

How does this make, how do you make sense of this? How do you make sense of what I'm calling the Trump effect, whereby he has happened to radicalize the country in such a way that we are pitched 4848 year after year after year? I mean, it's interesting because Trump's personality, his, I don't even want to just call it personality, his character play a very large role in our politics. If you talk to liberals about why they are upset about the election, they often cite things that are very, very much about Trump as a man, as a human being. And so you could imagine a world in which somebody, you know, election scientists look at Romney's performance and they say, oh, you know, if we come out against NAFTA and really emphasize tough on immigration, we'll do better in the Midwest. And someone who's like really buttoned down and professional and calm and organized runs a version of the Trump campaign.

But maybe you could have done way better than Trump, right? Because maybe that person wouldn't have alienated some of the people who Trump has alienated. Or you could say, well, we know what Republican Party operatives wanted to do after 2012. And it was the opposite, right? What they cooked up in the lab was, well, we should moderate on immigration in order to stay, you know, really focus on cutting Medicare and Social Security. Trump disrupted that, right? He came in from the outside with very little institutional support originally. You know, everybody thought he was going to get creamed in the primaries. And he really challenged the kind of establishment view and put on the table an idea that probably made more sense. electorally than what Republicans had come up with themselves.

So, you know, I mean, it's definitely, it doesn't seem like the Trump that we know and watch on television to say that he's somebody who like really precisely calculated the exact sweet spot of the American electorate. But he does seem to have done that, right? And he did it despite the intentions of the leadership of the Republican Party. So maybe one highly polarizing person who is pretty good at what he's doing, you know, has just kind of got us here into a 50-50 country that's really divided 50-50 on the topic of Donald Trump. Yeah, I do think it is really worth taking seriously the possibility that Trump has proven extremely gifted at dividing the electoral college in half because his appeal seems. to exist in perfect equipoise with the amount of disgust that he inspires.

And it might just be a Donald Trump phenomenon that we're trying to explain here. But there's a theory that goes back much further than Donald Trump, which is called the theory of thermostatic opinion, which to a certain extent predicts that this sort of era isn't entirely unforeseeable, that in fact, the electorate naturally finds itself swinging against incumbents by paying attention to what they do in office. Can you explain a little bit about how would you define this idea, the theory of thermostatic opinion, and how it might explain some of what we're seeing? Yeah, so there's a pretty well-established literature in political science. that public opinion tends to move to the right when a Democrat is president.

And it tends to move to the left when a Republican is president. And you certainly see isolated exceptions to this, like marriage equality became more popular during the Obama administration. But it's also notable that Obama wasn't an advocate of marriage equality during his first four years in office. When he came out for it, that was actually the only year in which support dropped, was the year in which Obama came out for it. And on the one hand, it's a little weird, right? It's like, our voters just really, like, ornery haters and we'll turn against whatever's happening.

But if you think of it as, you know, a kind of average voter who's not that political, who's a little bit tuned out, thinks both parties are kind of dominated by extremists. And when a Democrat's in office, you start thinking, you know, like they're too soft on crime. They're too indulgent of poor people who aren't working hard enough. They're given away too much to the environmental crazies. Then when a Republicans in office, you have the exact opposite concerns. Like, we've got these jerks into office. They don't care enough about the weak and the vulnerable.

They're not watch guarding, you know, corporate polluters, other kinds of things like that. So your priority is always what we want to counterbalance. And, you know, if the voters are paying attention in that sense, you would expect it to kind of keep the electorate kneeled down at the center, right? And you might think the hard question is why, why in the past did president's notice get so much running room, right? Like, why wasn't there sharper backlash against some of the things that might have been happening, you know, during, say, the Reagan administration, right? Like, how do you get that landslide in 84? That's actually the weird thing. And we've been living through a kind of a normal, you know, public

opinion balancing act. Right. I mean, the way that I've always thought about the theory of thermostatic opinion is that the government is like a kitchen with an overactive microwave and a deep freezer. And like Joe Q Public is a diner at the restaurant and Joe Q public orders a dish and says, oh, this dish is too cold. And he sends it back to the kitchen and the overactive microwave boils the dish. And they send it back to the diner. And the diner goes, this is way too hot. And he sends it back to the kitchen and they throw it in the deep freezer for a bit. And then when they serve it, it's too cold again. And that strange little game goes on and on for several cycles,

where the food is always served too hot or too cold, and we call the game democracy. But, of course, government is not just a kitchen with two terrible machines that always fail at their job. Like, government is often responding precisely to what they've promised to do. I mean, sometimes government is Barack Obama running for president saying,

I'm going to pass universal health care bill, and then he sits down to a table and he signs a universal health care bill. Nonetheless, it seems like voters are much less likely to reward government for doing things than they are to punish government for doing things. And I've always thought of this as a kind of dark and somewhat depressing implication of the theory of thermostatic opinion, because it suggests that while I would hope that most people in government are running for office to change the world for the better, there's something about this theory that suggests that most changes, even those that are objectively for the better, will be punished by the electorate because they'll be perceived as a kind of overreach. Do you have a response to my sort of depressive interpretation of the theory of thermostatic opinion,

or do you agree that in fact, this empirical theory suggests that it just is difficult to change the world as a leader and expect to be rewarded for it? I mean, it's definitely a bit of a bummer for people who like to think about big ideas. You know, I mean, I think one way I think about it is that if we're honest with ourselves, almost any big change you can think of has some kind of downsides, right? Even a good idea has downsides and will be bad for some people. And what happens is when you're pitching the idea as a candidate, you know, you emphasize the good. You're persuasive. You have other good qualities.

People look up to you. They're like, all right, you know, like, let's go, Barack. Let's like, let's fix the health care system. Then you start passing the law and people hear about, oh, you know, they're going to cut back on this or that. There's going to be less choice. people who are healthy are actually going to have to pay higher premiums to cross-subsidize the sick. And, you know, opinions start to swing against it. But then we also saw that when Trump tried to

repeal the Affordable Care Act, opinions swung against him because people have been fixated on their complaints. And once the repeal legislation comes, people start paying more attention to the downsides of that action, right? And so, you know, you can say, well, I wish voters thought more rigorously about everything. And, you know, remembered that there's pros and cons to every set of action and you need to try to take a comprehensive view. But we also know, like, the swing voters, right, the people who are changing their minds about all this stuff are people who mostly don't pay that much attention to politics.

And the downside of change tends to become very kind of salient to them. You know, we're here in the, we work in the media. it is easier to get people to read an article that calls attention to something threatening that is happening than to just kind of mention a like small, more good thing that's occurring. So, I mean, I think it's a, this is like a real problem with society, a bias or negativity, a kind of loss aversion, et cetera. But I don't think it's, I don't think it's quite as unnatural as it seems at first, if we just think about, you know, how people are.

I think there's a depressing interpretation of the theory of thermostatic opinion, which says that whenever your side wins and puts into law or regulation exactly what you ask them to do, you should expect some cohort of the electorate to punish you for it. There's something depressing there. At the same time, I think the theory of thermostatic opinion should also be a calming point for people on both sides. I know this is a point that you've made before, which is if Trump wins in a few days, there's going to be some people who say this is the dawn of a new American right that will dominate American politics for years, and there'll be people in the left who are bemoaning

the death of progressive politics in America for a generation. But we know what tends to happen when people are elected and they change the world. A coalition of voters tends to punish them for it, right? Like Trump won in 2016. he became president. He established or tried to establish a series of incredibly restrictive immigration laws and regulations, and the country moved hard to the left on immigration and race and, to your point, health care. Trump motivated a large number of Americans to move to the left. And so do you agree that, like, I think I'm setting you up for maybe the easiest answer in the world, but like the idea of thermosatic opinion also, like, it doesn't just suggest that if there's a

tax to winning, it also suggests that there is a medium-term benefit to losing, which is that losses tend to be motivating to people on your side, yes? Yeah, I mean, the parties get knocked down and they get back up again. You know, what happens is certain things are irreversible, right? We invaded Iraq in 2003, and you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. Some kinds of policy changes like the Affordable Care Act tend to be fairly durable. once they're enacted if you can get things done. But the broad pattern is that, you know, it's never as bad as it feels in the wake of a loss. It is going to turn out that a lot of the people who voted for your opponent simply don't know all of the downsides to all of the things

that they are doing, that a lot of people who aren't engaged in politics are going to get invested once they start seeing things happen, and that we do have this strong, equilibriumating property to the system, especially now that we're not in a world of dividing government all the time. Something people sometimes forget, right, is in the 20th century,

in that kind of landslide period, Democrats just controlled the House of Representatives basically the entire time. And so Republican presidential candidates would sometimes win these huge landslides, and 72, Reagan 84. The policy implications of that were limited by Congress. Today, Congress swings more. So the policy swings associated with small wins can be pretty large. But then the public opinion backlash also really, really comes. And that at least seems to be some of what's anchoring

us in this era of close elections, that, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. and we just like do this all again in four years time. So theory number one is that this is basically a Trump effect, and theory number two is that this is an era where thermostatic opinion is helping to keep us in almost perfect balance between the parties. Theory number three, I want to talk about the parties themselves. So in 2016, excuse me, in 2020, it was pretty clear to me. that Bernie Sanders was going to win

the Democratic nomination for president. And then in South Carolina, the Democratic Party and some of its leaders got together and seemed, at least from the outside, to engineer a Biden victory that carried on throughout the primary season and allowed him to exceed Bernie Sanders and get the Democratic nomination.

Four years later, Joe Biden was the nominee, obviously seeming to be behind Donald Trump by a significant margin, and party insiders got together again and pressured Joe Biden to step down from the ticket, elevating Kamala Harris, and she became the party nominee, which even if she loses, all the polls seem to indicate it will be a much closer contest than it would have been if Joe Biden had been the nominee. Despite all this talk about the Democratic Party being a hollow party, this does at least somewhat suggest that there are insiders who are helping to engineer closer election outcomes and ensuring that we remain in this 48-48 balance. How do you fold into

this picture the role that the parties have played in making this the era of close elections? I mean, I think you just looked at Democrats, right? There's this, um, it's called the UCLA School of Political Parties. And it says you should think of a political party as being an elite network of intense policy demanders. And what that network wants is it wants a figurehead who's good at winning votes because winning votes is the only way to implement their policy demands. But you don't want to compromise too much.

You don't actually want to get 60, 70 percent to the vote because that would mean that you're leaving too much policy demand on the table. And Democrats are not 100% following the template that they laid out in that article 10, 15 years ago. But it comes close, right? Going all the way back to 2008, when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi kind of like intercept a Barack Obama presidential campaign because they think he will do better than Hillary Clinton. You see a very actively engaged elite leadership network, which both tries to get good nominees in within constraints. You know, so you replace Biden with Kamala Harris because you couldn't coordinate on anyone other than the vice president, right? So there's limits to this elite discretion,

but they are doing things to keep the party in the field. And they are also pushing a policy agenda that is probably more aggressive than what kind of totally random, like, man on the street kind of people would want because they sincerely believe that climate change is very important, that transgender equality is very important, that, you know, it's sad that we have so many poor children in the United States. And so they want the party to take political risks. I feel like this theory holds up really well. and the Trump-centric theory also holds up really well,

what's challenging is to cohere them with each other. Because, you know, because it certainly doesn't seem like Donald Trump represents an elite plot among, you know, a dispersed network of high-level political operations. No, he is the exact doctor. Right. So it's like how could both of those things happen? Right.

But then the question is, is like, is that an explanation? Or is it just some observations? Just just things that have happened we're talking about. Matt, would you agree that in some sense, if in a two-party country, more or less, every election is a close election, that suggests that the parties are doing something correctly, right? I mean, even if the parties in this case are Donald Trump

representing the Republican Party and Democratic Insiders representing the Democratic Party, it does seem like to the extent that we want elections to represent voters and get as close to the median voter as possible, close election after close election after close election suggests in a way, this is going to be a very unpopular opinion, certainly online, that American democracy is doing something right? I mean, is that a totally polyanish opinion? or is there something to the idea that this is the outcome we should want.

We should want every election to be on a razor's edge, because that suggests that the proverbial diners sitting in the restaurant are getting something close to what they want. It's interesting that, I mean, people don't seem to feel that way. I'm just old enough to remember the late 90s, when voter turnout was very low, when the presidential election in 96 wasn't close. A lot of people back then, I think, would have said, but wouldn't it be better if all these elections were very competitive, if people were very highly mobilized because they felt like all the elections were going to be close? Shouldn't the party that loses, like, try really hard to get back to 50 percent?

That all, like, makes sense, right? And then our actual lived experience of it is that this is very stressful, that it seems very hate-filled, it seems very demagogic, it seems like people are behaving. you know, in ungruth and somewhat unhinged sorts of ways. On the other hand, like, yeah, I mean, it's a democracy. The parties are supposed to try to win. If they're both trying really hard and doing good job, you would expect a long series of close elections. You would also expect what we've seen,

which is that not only have there been errors in the polling, because that's a, you know, statistical sampling is going to generate errors, but the errors seem to be consequential. Right? Like politicians have done things that it seems like they would have acted differently if the polling had told them something different because the elections are close and winnable, right? If Hillary had known exactly how weak she was in the Great Lakes, she would have run a different campaign. And it means, you know, the parties and the politicians are being responsive to their understanding of public opinion and their understanding just isn't perfect because, you know,

We face fundamental limits to human knowledge and understanding. But it's not like they're just out there making stuff up or saying whatever. There was a famous Labor Party manifesto from the 80s where they said there could be no compromise with the electorate. We've just got to stand on principle no matter what happens. And there's something admirable about that, but also something deeply dysfunctional compared to one in which the parties are really out there hustling. They're getting votes. They're running close races. We're living in that world. And if you find it distasteful, you know, maybe that says more about us as citizens than about the politicians.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that I think that I do not actually think that close elections are pure automatic evidence that democracy is functioning perfectly and we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I don't think you're trying to suggest that either. I think it's just as possible that as a matter of fact, this era's competitive elections, are motivated by negative partisanship and mutual animosity more than they are motivated by sheer love for their candidates, right? We are operating in a world where presidents are unusually unpopular. I think the statistic that I saw from 538 is that no president has spent a full year, over 55% approval since 2003, whereas just about every president in the post-war era from Truman to Clinton had at least one full year and sometimes many years of approval rating over 55. So we live in an era where, strangely, the closeness of the elections suggests a –

suggest that the parties or the party nominees are doing something right or talented to keep the electorate in this equipoise while at the same time. in election after election, people are saying that they often hate the choices that they're voting for. I do think there's a rich tension there. So in review, why are we in the air of close elections? Number one, it might just be a Trump effect. Number two, the theory of thermostatic opinion. And number three, the Democratic Party seems to be doing an effective technocratic job

of meeting Trump at the 48 percentage level. I want to close with the possibility that the era of close elections might not actually be an era at all. In the essay that you wrote on this subject last week, you made, I think, the really astute point that this narrative is very contingent. Hillary Clinton was an incredibly unpopular figure in 2016, and a candidate with less baggage might have won the Democratic nominee that year, nomination that year, and the political figure of Donald Trump might not exist as he, exist in this world. I do think that while, you know, historical counterfactuals sometimes have no guardrails and so they can go berserk, I think this is a really useful historical counterfactual, and I'd love you to just unspool it at the end. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, in 2016, we know a few things, right? We know Trump was not popular. We know that there was a very strong elite consensus that he

was going to lose, right? We know that he lost the popular vote by two points, and he won the Electoral College really, really narrowly. And we also know that Hillary Clinton had a lot of, you know, idiosyncratic political weaknesses that had to do with the fact that her husband had been president in the 1990s, or with the fact that as a safe blue state senator in 2003, she voted for the Iraq War. If somebody a more generic Democrat, a more generic Democratic woman like Amy Klobuchar had had that job, you know, could she do. one or two points better, I think obviously. I don't think that's like a stretch counterfactual. In that case, you say, well, it's not the greatest landslide in history, but Republicans put

forward this bad nominee. He lost pretty badly. We lost three times in a row, which is really bad and really rare. And then you have all kinds of infighting on the Republican side. And we're talking about 2008 as having set off this era of big Democratic win. Because that election really wasn't close. 2012 was pretty close, but it wasn't that close. It wasn't as close as what we're looking at. Now, if Trump had lost the electoral college, we might have ignored the fact that it was close in the electoral college and just been like, they put this maniac up. He lost.

And like all of history would be on some kind of different trajectory. And, you know, we humans are good at coming up with patterns. And, you know, anything you follow, sports, you know, movie box office, right? Whenever something happens, like, twice in a row or three times in a row, people are like, ah, what's like the deep reason for this? And sometimes the reason is just like, you know, Marvel made a couple movies in a row that weren't very good, right? And there isn't some, like, larger.

And it's like, once they get the X-Men in there, like, people are going to like it again. And, like, that's all there is to say about it. Other times, you do see a real shift. Right. But we haven't seen, you know, so I mean, NBA season is starting. So people are like, is the error of super teams over? And but you look there that there's a specific rule change, right, in the collective bargaining agreement that is the theoretical basis. It's not just an empirical observation that like we don't, we don't see a super team necessarily. But the elections, all we really have is the raw empirics that the last few elections, have all been close. That's true. And we can start giving some reasons why they were close. But it might just change, it seems to me. I don't know that we have in this whole discussion a really deep causal mechanism other than things just happen that way. Right. One of the issues, I think, with coming up with grand theories about presidential elections at all is that there haven't even been

50 American presidents. The sample size is so incredibly small that unlike in basketball or even unlike in movie box office trends, when you can look at 80 years and thousands of movies or you can look at tens of thousands of shots, it's really difficult to draw theories that have a ton of data in the sample. In this case, I think the big question will be, you know, constitutionally, if Trump wins, he can't run for president again. If he loses in the next few days, it might be incredibly unlikely that he runs for president again,

given his advanced age. And so there we will finally have a test of whether there's something about Trump that divides the country evenly, whether there's something just idiosyncratic about the fact that this era of close elections has coincided with a great recession, followed by a painfully slow recovery,

followed by a pandemic, followed by an inflation crisis, an era of unusual crises that helped to put pressure on each side of the electorate that brought the elections into balance, there's so many different things that could be happening

is probably going to take a few more election cycles to determine whether this is an era or whether it is, to your point, three dots that we've drawn a line through. Madaglacius, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Boraldi,

our schedule for, plain English for the next few weeks. We'll be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.