We have two major parties and neither are going away
This piece in the Wall Street Journal is mostly about Chris Christie running for the Republican nomination for president, but the first half is what got my attention. It argues that Trump being nominated again will be the end of the Republican Party. The author is Peggy Noonan, who has been a longtime opinion writer for the Journal. During the Reagan Administration, she worked as a speechwriter for him.
It’s hard to tell exactly what, from her point of view, the nightmare vision would look like if it came to pass. If Trump is nominated again, she claims many people who have held onto their Republican loyalties will reach a breaking point and leave the party. I’m probably way overanalyzing the piece, but let’s go with it.[i]
It’s unclear what the GOP no longer being a party would actually mean. Would it literally no longer exist and go the way of the Whigs in the 1850s? Would it still exist, but lose elections in perpetuity? I really have no idea, but, I am highly skeptical that either of those things will happen. Even if the GOP disappeared, it would just be replaced by another party almost exactly like it. In fact, the GOP replaced the Whigs after initially starting off as a third party.
That has been the reality of the US political system for over 200 years. We have always had two major parties. We have had the same two since 1860. Since then, every president has either been a Democrat or a Republican. Congress has been controlled by either Democrats or Republicans, too. A few presidential elections have seen third party candidates get a decent share of the vote (1912, 1968 and 1992), but no such candidate has ever won. Every cycle, a third party will get plenty of talk, but it rarely amounts to anything serious.
I think Noonan is mostly venting when she writes that Trump would end the GOP. As someone who worked for Reagan and came of political age during that time, she yearns for those days. She notes that Trump took the GOP away from some of the things it had pushed for since 1980, which is true. The problem with her vision and that of many other Republicans who came of political age during that time is we’re not in 1980 anymore.
I understand the dislike Noonan has for Trump, but the GOP of today is much closer to him than it is to her. In fact, many of the ideas pushed for by Noonan, i.e., entitlement cuts, have almost no constituency. The hawkish foreign policy she favors has gone out of style since the war in Iraq turned out to be a disaster. On economic matters, she favors tax cuts for those at the top while offering very little to workers and areas that are struggling. What she offers is the same set of ideas from 40 years ago that are not up to the task of dealing with today’s problems.
While it may seem noteworthy that someone would write that one of the two major parties will die off, it’s actually very normal. I remember after John Kerry lost in 2004 how many hot takes there were about Democrats becoming irrelevant and needing to fundamentally change to have any prayer of winning. Just four years later, the same hot takes were being said about Republicans. When Trump won, the hot takes shifted to talking about how Democrats couldn’t win anymore. Now, the hot takes are about how Republicans are doomed. See a pattern?
It’s not just pundits who are bad at diagnosing a party’s problems and predicting the future. Parties themselves are very bad at it. After Mitt Romney lost, the Republican National Committee issued an “autopsy” report. It said the way to win was to not insult voters and to support comprehensive immigration reform. In 2016, Republicans nominated Trump, the antithesis of what the report said, and he won.
In late 2004 and throughout 2005, there was plenty of talk about how Democrats were out of touch. They were too closely associated with coastal elites (sound familiar?). John Kerry was a Massachusetts liberal who loved windsurfing and epitomized everything wrong with the party. The solution was to nominate either a white southerner like Mark Warner or a business-friendly Democrat from the midwest like Evan Bayh. In 2008, Democrats nominated a black man named Barack Hussein Obama and he won twice.
If Trump is nominated again, Noonan thinks he will lose and by a lot. Brainstorming a bit, let’s say that happens, what then? Knowing Trump, he would never say he lost, but after losing twice it would be hard to keep that up. Come 2026, Republicans likely would be heavily invested in winning again and would do everything they could to prevent bad candidates from getting nominated. Would Trump still boost bad candidates? Possibly, but his influence would likely be diminished after having lost twice in a row.
For now, Republican primary voters care more about fighting than winning, but that can change. By 2028, Trump will be 82. He could try to run again, but I am hard pressed to think he would still be a force. He has a substantial number of primary voters who will only vote for him, but by then that number may be small.
All that is far off in the future and not worth spending any more time on. What I am getting at is that Trump being nominated again will not end the GOP no matter what happens. It is true he has molded the party in his image in many respects. He has spawned a whole bunch of imitators and has moved the party away from its emphasis on reducing the size of government. For better or worse, that is the GOP of today and probably the future.
The GOP that Noonan yearns for is gone and is not coming back. That was always going to happen with or without Trump. Parties change over time and always have. Democrats have changed, too, in the last two decades. Republicans used to have the support of the most educated congressional districts, but now a vast majority of them are represented by Democrats. Increasingly, the higher income districts are represented by Democrats while working class districts are represented by Republicans.
The current Democratic coalition has many more middle and upper class voters compared to just a short while ago. They still have plenty of working class supporters, but not as many as before. The trend of more upscale places going Democratic while working class areas go Republican has been ongoing for a while, but it was under Trump when it really took off.
One funny twist about the new coalitions is that it is Democrats who benefit more from “dark money” groups. Those are groups that can raise unlimited sums and don’t have to disclose their donors. By having a wealthier coalition, Democratic candidates are usually going to be able to vastly outraise their Republican opponents in competitive races. In the past, it was usually Republican candidates who vastly outraised their Democratic opponents. Republicans long championed getting rid of limits on political spending and celebrated Citizens United when the ruling came out. They got their wish, but it’s not going the way they thought it would.[ii]
The once and not necessarily future coalitions
Will these trends continue in the future? Your guess is as good as mine. Given that the GOP has been changed by Trump, I don’t expect them to go entirely back to their pre-2016 ways. Where Republicans will go after Trump is unknown right now, but it probably won’t be like anything Noonan hopes for.
The current party coalitions have their pluses and minuses as all coalitions do. For Democrats, their new coalition brings some advantages that their coalition as recently as 2014 was sorely lacking. When it comes to turnout, the Obama coalition was very unreliable. When he was on the ballot, they showed up, but when he wasn’t they didn’t. The new coalition is much more reliable in showing up for non-presidential election years.
Democrats were the party in the White House in 2010, 2014 and 2022. They lost badly in 2010 and 2014, but did (relatively speaking) very well in 2022. To be sure, there were many differences, namely abortion being a major issue in 2022. Still, the coalition Democrats have now is more middle and upper class than it was in 2014. Middle and upper class people are more likely to vote than working class people are.
It was frequently lamented during the Obama years how Democrats were at a big disadvantage in non-presidential elections because their coalition didn’t show up. Now, it is the opposite. Democrats have done extraordinarily well in nearly every election held since Roe v Wade was reversed despite being the party in the White House. It is not just the abortion issue motivating them, but the fact that their coalition now has many more reliable voters in it.
While middle and upper class voters care about economic issues, because they are doing better financially than working class voters, they often focus on social issues. Abortion is certainly one of those issues. That’s not to say abortion doesn’t matter for working class voters, it does, particularly in midwestern states. But middle and upper class voters often prioritize it above all else.
All this is to say that in non-presidential elections, for now, it is Democrats who have the turnout advantage. That is especially true in elections that are held during odd times such as the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April. That advantage should continue as long as the GOP is the Trump party and abortion is a live issue.
It may be in Democrats’ best interest to have lower turnout overall. That might sound strange since they (rightfully) advocate for things that would increase voter turnout, but that’s the nature of the new coalitions. Lower turnout elections are decided by the most highly motivated and regular voters. That used to be mostly Republicans, but is now mostly Democrats. For example, the Democrat-aligned candidate won the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by 11 points. Turnout was high for that kind of race, but it will be much higher next year. Whoever wins Wisconsin next year, it’s highly unlikely to be by 11 points.
It’s worth mentioning that despite their shifting coalitions, neither party has fully abandoned its previous platforms. For example, while Democrats have fewer working class supporters than in the past, they still push for things that would help them. Conversely, Republicans still support tax cuts for their donors that do little for working class voters.
I don’t know what either party’s platform will look like in the future. For now, Republicans aren’t going to abandon their push for tax cuts. I am hard pressed to think they will start advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy even though more people from that group are Democrats now. If they started doing that in the name of being a working class party, their donors would revolt. Not even Trump advocated for that.
For Democrats, they will still keep pushing for things like the Affordable Care Act, child care, paid parental leave and the like. Those are all things that will help working class voters, but they may be structured in ways that are very beneficial to their newer coalition members. Climate change is an issue I expect Democrats to keep pushing for things on. It is more of a priority for their middle and upper class coalition members although it is something Democrats have emphasized for years.
One wild card in the future is addressing the long-term federal budget deficit. It has been on the backburner for some time and currently has no one in any position of authority pushing for it. That may change in the future and it will force some major tradeoffs. For Republicans, they don’t want to cut entitlement spending anymore, but they don’t want to raise taxes either. For Democrats, they don’t want to cut entitlement spending and they only want to raise taxes on those making high six-figures or more. Neither of those positions will be tenable when and if the chickens come home to roost.
Both parties have benefited from low interest rates for the last two decades. That allowed them to raise spending and cut taxes and not have to deal with any tradeoffs. Between higher interest rates and inflation now being an issue, tradeoffs are back. There may come a time in the near future where Congress is forced to either raise taxes on people making less than high six-figures or make draconian cuts to entitlement programs.
That scenario presents problems for both parties. Democrats have gained many middle and upper class supporters who won’t want to see their taxes raised. Republicans have gained many working class voters who rely heavily on entitlement programs and won’t want to see them cut. How will that be resolved? Probably by a combination of raising taxes and cutting spending, but it will upset many people and may lead some of them to switch their partisan loyalties. Then again, maybe we will return to low interest rates and low inflation soon enough and those tradeoffs will go back on vacation.
Two types of coalitions
So far, I have been referring to only one type of coalition and that is an electoral coalition. The other type is a governing coalition. Electoral coalitions are fluid and tend to not last long while governing coalitions are much more stable and enduring.
An example of a governing coalition is Social Security. It was created by Democrats and initially opposed by many Republicans. Beginning under Eisenhower, Republicans dropped their opposition to it and accepted it as here to stay. It was under Eisenhower when it was first expanded to include many more people. Social Security today is as popular as a program can be and almost nobody wants to touch it.
Social Security has defenders in just about every corner of American politics. There is near unanimity among all relevant players that it’s good and should be kept intact. That is what a governing coalition looks like. A program gets enacted and becomes entrenched. It initially has detractors, but they learn to accept it or even support it and abandon efforts to repeal or undermine it.
A more recent example is the Affordable Care Act (ACA). After years of being a Republican punching bag, it is now accepted as being here to stay. It has become entrenched, is now popular and has support from business, labor and other groups. Democrats won a major victory with it, which wasn’t obvious in 2010.
Despite the success of Social Security and the ACA, Republicans still win plenty of elections and Democrats are hardly the dominant party. That is because those programs have ceased to be issues. Democrats don’t have them as a weapon to use against Republicans anymore. Plenty of red states have voted to expand Medicaid, but they’re still red states and will remain that way. Both of those programs have survived attempts to get rid of them and are now seen as just a part of life and nothing controversial. That has taken away their potency as electoral issues.
I contrast governing coalitions with electoral coalitions because they sometimes are mistaken as the same thing when they’re not at all. It is common to hear pundits and others say that if one party passed legislation on certain matters, they would become the dominant party for it. For better or worse, that’s just not how it works. When a program is enacted and becomes popular, people no longer vote on it and other issues take its place. Even if a particular issue benefits a party for a long time, the second that issue gets resolved in its favor it loses its electoral benefits.
It’s important to remember that the next time you hear someone say, “If only Republicans/Democrats passed legislation on X, Y and Z, they’d dominate for decades to come.” That’s wishful thinking at best. Otherwise, it’s self-serving and/or delusional. I am very glad the ACA is here to stay and am happy about the legislation that was enacted in 2021-22, but none of that is going to make Democrats the dominant party.
[i] In her defense, she has a weekly deadline to meet. Sometimes, there just isn’t anything of interest to write about, but columnists still have to write something. When you see a columnist write something that sounds crazy, that’s probably why they wrote it. They couldn’t think of anything better to write about and so they wrote that because they had to meet their deadline.
[ii] That is the paradox of winning at the Supreme Court. When you win there, you lose everywhere else. That happened to Democrats beginning in the 1960s and is likely to happen to Republicans now and in the future.