Rehashing 2020?
Plus all the week's links
I was going to write a bit about the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, after some discussion flared up again about it, but Scott Lemieux basically hit all the necessary points already. The one big question I still have is whether some of the Biden alternatives – including those who dropped out before Iowa – could have expanded their coalitions to win over Black party actors and Black voters had they made it through Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada with sufficient momentum. I sort of think so, but others disagree with me and they could be correct.
At any rate, I’ll just repeat what I said recently: The effect of nominees on presidential election outcomes is massively overrated. Joe Biden, we’re told, really believes that he’s the only candidate who could have beaten Donald Trump…but there’s no reason for the rest of us to believe that, or that he would have done any better than Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Kamala Harris in 2024. In the event, Biden became the exception that proves the rule; he was not a viable candidate after his debate with Trump in 2024, mainly because Democratic party actors believed he was no longer a viable candidate. (And Biden failed, miserably, at proving otherwise).
Anyway, the larger point here is that almost everything is overrated when it comes to influences on election outcomes. Lots of things that seem to people as absolutely critical wind up not mattering at all; others are, at best, very small factors. We can’t always know exactly how important something is, but generally the fact that political science election prediction models work reasonably well is pretty strong evidence that the things they don’t account for – candidate skills, campaign effectiveness, plenty of events, all sorts of what the kids these days call “vibes” – matter at best on the margins.
Of course, some of those are the things that candidates and campaigns can control, so they might as well try. They can’t do much about economic growth in the election year, after all. Or how many terms the incumbent party has been in the White House, to pick another factor that many find to be important.
But for all of everything the most important reason Republicans won in 2024 was that the combination of a large inflation spike and the hangover from the pandemic made it very hard for in-parties to win in that year — as we can see from similar results worldwide. It feels as if it must have been something about Biden, or Harris, or Trump…but all sorts of incumbent parties with all sorts of policy responses, and all sorts of out-parties, had similar results everywhere. That doesn’t mean we should totally ignore the stuff on the margins, but it does mean that the worst kind of analysis simply assumes that variable X must have helped candidate Y because candidate Y won.
The flip side of this is that a ton of things matter a whole lot to governing and public policy that aren’t at all likely to affect election outcomes. That Bernie Sanders ran a strong nomination campaign in 2016 really did have serious effects on the Democratic Party’s policy positions and priorities. Choices that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and others made after being elected in 2020 had huge consequences for policy – and therefore, massive effects on people’s lives. Even if most of those choices probably didn’t really affect the 2024 presidential election.
It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not totally wrong to think of elections as blunt instruments, while policy formation contains nothing but nuance.
On to the links:
1. Josh Huder on trust and the megabill in the House.
2. Jennifer Victor at Mischiefs of Faction on Musk and the presidency.
3. Natalie Jackson on interpreting Trump’s polling numbers.
4. Dan Drezner on Marco Rubio.
5. Seth Masket on media choices.
6. Jennifer Lind on Trump and Taiwan.
7. Eric Gonzalez Juenke at Good Authority on the democratic case for a strong government.
8. And Miranda Yaver on the ACA.