Asymmetric partisan polarization in the 2020 US Presidential election

Luke Savage of Jacobin gives his take on the asymmetric partisan polarization that has been such a prominent feature of American politics for the last 30 years (Republicans Run Toward Their Base. Democrats Run Away From Theirs. 08/29/2020):

Though visible at almost any moment, the 2020 convention season underscored in a way that little else could the profoundly different relationships each party maintains with the voters in its electoral coalition.

America’s conservatives threw endless red meat at every part of their base: white evangelicals, anti-regulation zealots, paleocons, nationalist ideologues, Q conspiracists, gun nuts, and everything in between. The Democrats, by contrast, offered four days of programming markedly different in both tone and ideology from the mostly liberal ethos of their recently concluded primary season.

The Democratic primaries served up a similarly addled blend of social justice and pro-corporate rhetoric, antiracism, bourgeois aspiration, progressivism, and deference to Wall Street all coexisting within the same party. But DNC 2020, like most DNCs, took pains to foreground an image of competent, bipartisan moderation that was clearly pitched to suburban voters and disaffected Republicans rather than the liberal constituencies Democratic candidates were largely addressing earlier this year.

It’s a distinction that explains much about the direction of travel in American politics. While conservative politicians are pulled ever rightward by an increasingly radicalized fringe, liberal elites try (and generally succeed) to discipline their base into accepting a message manifestly crafted for someone else’s consumption. [my emphasis]

The article's title echoes what I like to call The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)  Although there is an amazing level of activism for civil rights and against police murder, that 2010 formulation is still unfortunately very similar when it comes to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party establishment. And various left-progressive groups like Justice Democrats have also developed organizations that forego the large donors to both parties that keep essentially concervative economic and foreign policies locked in place.

The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election critically depends on Democratic turnout and how successfully the Democratic Party and its voters are at evading the sabotage of the Post Office and the other Republican voter-suppression meansures under way.

Michael Moore is warning the Democrats against underestimating Trump's voting strength in swing states like Michigan, as he was also doing in 2016. (Edward Helmore, Michael Moore warns that Donald Trump is on course to repeat 2016 win Guardian 08/29/2020) We won't know until it's over how much the COVID-19 pandemic and the far-reaching sabotage of the Post Office will have unique effects in 2020 compared to 2016.

Moore is focused on the enthusiasm gap. It's the latest iteration of the problem of asymmetric partisan polarization between Republicans and Democrats.

Moore, who was one of few political observers to predict Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, said that “enthusiasm for Trump is off the charts” in key areas compared with the Democratic party nominee, Joe Biden.

“Are you ready for a Trump victory? Are you mentally prepared to be outsmarted by Trump again? Do you find comfort in your certainty that there is no way Trump can win? Are you content with the trust you’ve placed in the DNC [Democratic National Committee] to pull this off?” Moore posted on Facebook late on Friday.

Moore identified opinion polling in battleground states such as Minnesota and Michigan to make a case that the sitting president is running alongside or ahead of his rival.

“The Biden campaign just announced he’ll be visiting a number of states – but not Michigan. Sound familiar?” Moore wrote, presumably indicating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 race when she made the error of avoiding some states that then swung to Trump. [my emphasis]

The Democratic Party has not experienced anything equivalent to the effective consolidation of "Movement Conservatism" in the Republican Party that occurred during the years of Newt Gingrich's leadership of House Republicans, culminating in the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994 in which the Republicans won back a majority in the House for the first time in decades. The decisive shift toward hardright radicalism occurred in 1980 with Reagan's capture of the Presidential nomination. George H.W. Bush's one-term attempt as President to preserve a type of Country Club Republicanism that didn't rule through demogoguery (although he certainly campaigned that way!) has not been repeated. And with the establishment of FOX News in 1996 as the de facto propaganda channel for the Republican Party, the Republican Party has been in a continuous process of radicalization. Even the very conservative John McCain, who the TV puniditocracy somehow managed to imagine as a "maverick" of good judgment and respectiability, gave the radicalization process his own boost with the selection of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate in 2008.

And at the state and local levels, the process has been even more extreme and toxic. And is now entering a QAnon phase, with the explicit encouragement of President Bunker Boy.

The premise for Biden's entire candidacy has been Make America Boring Again. He's promising a return to the relative normalcy of the Obama Presidency, not focusing on promoting any particular programmatic or issue themes. And it's hard to see how they can switch from a message of Joe Biden Isn't Donald Trump to emphasizing something like, say, the public option for health insurance that Biden explicitly claims to support. So the media buys and especially the get-out-the-vote operation in swings states including Michigan really is going to be critical.

But assuming Biden wins, the Republicans polarization will not go into reverse. Instead, it will intensify. The dynamic involves dealing with failures of conservative policies and leaders by doubling-down on their ideology and repudiating the previous leaders. Digby Parton describes it as the principle that Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. Heather Cox Richardson writes of the situation in 2000:

[T]he whole point of Movement Conservatism was that there was no such thing as a moderate Republican. As [William] Buckley had laid out in the 1950s, anyone who accepted any part of the New Deal was a socialist. There was no middle ground. Either you believed in the purity of Movement Conservatism or you were a heretic. The term RINO — Republican in Name Only — had been invented in the early 1990s, but the idea took off in the 2000 election: The party must be purged of RINOs. (To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, 2014)

The "normalcy" of the Obama-Biden Administration started with a Democratic majority in the House and (briefly) a supermajority in the Senate. The 2010 midterm elections turned the House over to a Republican majority which they held until the 2018 midterms. The Republicans gained a Senate majority in 2014. The Republicans in both the House and the Senate catered to the Tea Party incarnation of radical-right Republicanism. And Donald Trump was elected President in 2016.

We definitely don't need another round of that kind of normalcy. I'm Not Donald Trump may be good enough a theme to get Joe Biden elected President. It won't be enough for a successful Biden Administration. And it certainly won't be enough to stymie the radical-right polarization process in the Republican Party.