Trump’s win, therefore, likely doesn’t mean that we are out of the exhausting bog of 50-50 politics in which we have been mired now for about 30 years. And it doesn’t mean that Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities is well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears. This has been difficult for winning parties to grasp throughout this century. …
This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular. This is why the public moved left on key issues during Trump’s first term and right during Biden’s. Voters in this election rejected the excesses and failures of the left far more than they endorsed the right—or much of anything else.
I agree that overstating a mandate and overreaching on policy are typical hazards. And I agree that voters are unclear on what they are voting for and are more motivated by what they feel that they are voting against.
But I think that Levin overlooks two major problems that Democrats face in the near term. One is the defection of substantial numbers of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews. Now these minority groups have figured out that God will not strike you down if you vote Republican. The Democrats will have to figure out how to attract them as adults, as opposed to treating them like children.
The other problem that Democrats face is the nature of the social justice activist faction. The Woke make difficult coalition partners, alienating many people with their stridency on trans rights and DEI. I recently heard a story about a gay person told by a social justice activist that they could not be gay because they were not pro-Palestine.
All of the other factions in American politics—even libertarians—are willing to work with alliances of convenience and to accept partial victories in order to achieve some of their goals. But it is in the nature of the Woke to be intolerant of others.
Going forward, I see two factors that will affect the American political landscape: the Better/Worse factor and the Masculine/Feminine factor.
Will people feel Better off or Worse off in 2028 than they do now? Will most people feel that their economic situation has improved? Will the international situation seem less perilous?
This will depend to some extent on the strategy and execution of policy under the Trump Administration. But it also will depend on developments outside of its control. A Presidency can be upended by a financial crisis, a pandemic, or some other development.
The second factor is where we will be in what I call the latest war of the sexes. Will the feminine approach to social interaction be ascendant, or will the resistance from males be significant? (I discussed this yesterday.)
I have cautioned against interpreting the recent election as a definitive reading of the state of the war of the sexes. But there are some hints that it mattered. Jean Twenge writes, "In an election full of surprises, one of the biggest was the voting shift among young men. They favored Biden by 15 points in 2020 but went for Trump by 13 points in 2024. That’s a swing of 28 percentage points, an extraordinarily large shift in a political landscape where races are often decided by a few percentage points."
It seems that the 2024 election found Masculine values asserting themselves more than in other recent elections. I think that this adversely affected the Harris campaign. I have said before that she did not compete for the Presidency in the way that men have come to expect. If this were a sporting competition, she missed the qualifying rounds (primaries), and her approach to the finals was cautious and dilatory. She failed to man up.
Scenarios for the 2028 election
Using these two factors—Better/Worse and Masculine/Feminine—yields four possible scenarios for 2028:
Better and Masculine. People think they are better off, and we continue to see more cultural assertion of the Masculine style. In this case, look for JD Vance to coast to victory.
Better and Feminine. The enthusiasm that women voters show for Democrats enables them to do well, notwithstanding the public’s contentment with how things are going.
Worse and Masculine. Democrats can win with Team Technocrat, but they have to distance themselves from Team Woke.
Worse and Feminine. The Trump era ends with his brand of politics discredited, and with the Republican Party struggling to find a new direction.
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It seems to me that something bigger and unrecognized may be taking place. President Trump and those close to him (people like Musk and J.D. Vance) seem actually interested in the substance of issues and in the common good, whereas the Uniparty establishment views issues in a purely instrumental way for the pursuit of power, and disregards or even attempts to derail issues of importance to the electorate which don't serve their purposes, even while paying lip service. We have never had this choice on offer before, and it may be that a dawning public recognition of this will cause a political upheaval. Very large shifts in the vote across nearly every segment, even in highly partisan areas where it didn't amount to a new majority have not to my knowledge been previously seen. Trump roughly halved the enormous Democratic margin in the big cities. He made big inroads in the youth vote, previously thought to be impenetrable. I was recently in Argentina where the astonishing Milei victory was not a question of a particular "eccentric mix of interests and priorities" but rather the electorate fed up with a long history of tweedledee and tweedledum going for a candidate with a real commitment to radical change of a completely unprecedented sort, namely the drastic downsizing of a corrupt bureaucracy and a rejection of the usual lying politicians. While older voters there didn't move that much, those 18 - 24 voted 81% for Milei. So it is possible that analyses of the current US election as just the latest in a string may be missing a larger change.
"And it doesn’t mean that Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities is well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears"
This sounds like whistling past the graveyard when the top two issues in almost every survey were inflation and immigration, and the GOP (meaning Trump as its most visible spokesperson) was regularly rated as most trusted to deal with them.
I get that doesn't mean that Trump will necessarily deal with those issues to the satisfaction of voters but saying his political campaign didn't align with them is focusing on minutiae.