Comments on Kyle Saunders

He makes claims about political realignment and AI

Party Alignment

Kyle Saunders writes,

In 1960… The dominant cleavage was economic. New Deal politics. Labor versus capital.

…As party elites differentiated ideologically through the 1970s and 80s and 90s, voters who held consistent ideological orientations started sorting into the party that matched their underlying views.

…And by 2024? The cleavage divides almost completely the cosmopolitans from the populists.

In my opinion, this analysis gets some things right and some things wrong. My overall perspective is that I think that most people do not have a political identity. Instead, they have a social identity that affects their political identity.

In 1960, social identities were regional and ethnic. In the urban Northeast, the WASP establishment was Republican. The hyphenated-Americans—Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans (then called Negroes)—were Democrats. They thought of themselves in ethnic terms, not as labor and capital.

In the South, whites were Democrat and blacks could not vote. From the Civil War through the 1960s, it was reliably Democratic, while sending conservatives to Congress. The Solid South, it was called.

In the Midwest and West, cities like Chicago behaved like Northeastern cities. But much more of the population lived in small towns or rural areas, with lower concentrations of hyphenated-Americans. There, white voters were up for grabs, what we now call swing voters. They were aligned with neither the Jim Crow Democrats nor the Eastern Establishment Republicans. On the GOP side, in 1964 their rebellion produced the nomination of Barry Goldwater to lead the ticket. Although in November he lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, the Democratic majority was not to last. These areas swung sharply toward Richard Nixon in 1968.

In the 1970s and beyond, the Solid South became Republican. Elsewhere, the up-for-grabs rural white vote shifted toward the Democrats when they nominated Southern governors Carter and Clinton, but otherwise went Republican. Carter was defeated for re-election by the economy and Ronald Reagan.

By 2008, the education divide was starting to appear. Barack Obama appealed to the college educated cosmopolitans, and the non-college educated did not yet have a populist standard-bearer. That brings us up to the most recent three elections, which have been tossups, with small shifts in the up-for-grabs sliver of the white vote determining the outcome.

A New Political Divide Caused by AI?

Saunders goes on to say that the cosmopolitan/populist divide is being further subdivided by whether people are pro- or anti-AI. He allows that AI may only be an issue among elites.

Whether the AI fracture is a cleavage at the mass-electoral level is a different question from whether it sorts elites. Pew’s recent issue-priority polling shows AI ranks well below inflation, immigration, healthcare, abortion, and crime as voter priority. What the four-quadrant matrix maps is the policy-class fracture among coalition elites and donor networks. The mass-electoral implications are slower and less clear.

I would say that AI is only a salient issue among the hard core of college-educated Democrats. The reason for their hostility to AI is obvious.

What is the value proposition for a college credential and for those who provide such a credential, given what AI can do? There may be a good answer, but it is much less obvious now than it was before ChatGPT hit the scene. While the value-proposition question hangs in the air, many of the college-educated respond by attacking AI any way that they can.

As Saunders points out, AI has its proponents among tech executives looking for support from either party. Some of them think that there is less hostility in the Republican Party. But on the Republican side, no large constituency is as passionate about AI as the anti-AI left is on the Democratic side.

So I would say that AI is not an important political divider at the moment. Anti-AI gets folded into the Omnicause on the Democratic left, along with anti-Trump, anti-ICE, and anti-Israel. The pro-AI forces will be too weak to dislodge it. I predict that anyone who dares to make a pro-AI statement at the 2028 Democratic convention will be booed out of the hall.

Most Republicans do not care as much, one way or the other. At the Republican convention in 2028, people would listen to the pro side or the anti side without cheering or booing vociferously.

substacks referenced above:

@

AIPolitics 18: The Political Cleavage Rotated and AI Has Bisected It