John Sides
Subject: The Democrats Will Rebound
Bio: Chair of the Political Science Department at Vanderbilt and author of The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and international relations. Today’s topic is The Democrats will Rebound.
Our speaker is John Sides who is the Chair of the Political Science Department at Vanderbilt and the author of the book entitled The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy.
This podcast was taped at a conference that I hosted in Washington DC. So, you are going to hear questions asked by my friends as well as me.
I want to find out from John what he learned by analyzing the data from the 2024 presidential election that explained Trump’s outperformance. I also want to hear what John thinks will be the key metrics to predict the outcome of the midterm elections.
John, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
John Sides:
No election book this year but my marriage will be intact as a result. So, it’s a net win for me. Why did Trump win and Harris lose? There was a three-point shift in the popular vote, that’s well under the historical average over the two-party competition era since 1860. If you do the shift at the county and state level, it is near the historic lowest since 1952.
Trump gained vote share in every state. In 87% of the counties that took an exit poll divided up into 109 separate demographic groups by race, income, education, gender, combinations thereof. 102 of them shifted to Trump. So, when you have an election loss that is that broad, you must have a broad explanation. It can’t be a story about Ohio or Puerto Ricans who live in the Bronx. The simplest explanation is that voters were dissatisfied with the performance of the incumbent.
It’s a performance problem. I can show you graphs where you put the price of gas, bread, milk, meat, bananas, oranges up, people’s level of dissatisfaction with the economy up, Biden’s disapproval rating up, a correlation 0.9. If you plug in Biden’s approval rating from June 2024, it’s exactly what Kamala Harris gets five months later.
Larry asked me, do you think that these trends will continue? There are two things that are happening in American politics. One is that the parties are increasingly narrowly divided. It’s going to be like this for a while. No party is going to have the dominance that the Democratic Party did in the New Deal and post-New Deal era. And fundamental political attitudes hardened. We’re going to see this tight competition with stability.
Trump’s having the same performance problems as Biden did. It’s just a repeat of Biden without the massive inflation spike. So, people’s economic evaluations as of today are lower or the same as they were when Trump took office. Trump’s approval rating is lower than Biden’s was at this point in his first term, by several percentage points, probably under-reported or under appreciated.
The one thing that looks not quite calcified is that Trump and the Republican Party support among non-white groups that have traditionally voted for the Democratic party, primarily Black and Latinos. Will that continue? And so, the crucial question here is does the Republicans share among these groups grow, shrink or stay the same?
Look at Trump’s approval rating. It’s way down with Latinos, young people and with all groups that were the harbinger of the Republican victory and realignment.
We always mistake presidential election outcomes for something bigger than they are. And that’s what gave us the vibe shift argument. When I look at public opinion, here’s what I see. The usual pattern that you would expect under a Democratic administration is for the public to shift to the right. The public is usually thermostatic. The public reacts against the tenor of the policy of the incumbent administration. So, it’s like a thermostat in your house. It gets too cold, it heats it up, it gets too hot, it cools it down. Teagan runs a conservative policy, public shifts left. Obama runs a liberal policy, public shifts right.
Under Biden, there was no shift in public opinion towards wanting smaller government. Trump misinterpreted that and gave us DOGE and other ways to cut government when the public wasn’t asking for it.
On immigration, there is a thermostatic thing going on. We’re misinterpreting election outcomes as grand shifts which provide presidential victors with their mandates to carry out their policies. And instead, the public goes, “no, I don’t want that. Sorry.”
Larry Bernstein:
There’s two people on the ballot and the public must choose. They don’t get to pick, there’s no rank order system, there’s not a bunch of other guys. What is the importance of two candidates. There are only two people, and when we see that Trump won, we say, there must be something special about Trump and his policies. There must be something unattractive about Harris and her policies, but maybe it’s something different. How should we evaluate these rather rare public voting occurrences?
John Sides:
If we’re talking about at the presidential level, it’s hard to prove that policy matters. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that in an era of strong party loyalty, people will tolerate a lot of policies. They’ll go with their side no matter what. That’s a consequence of calcification that I mentioned earlier.
The other thing is the limitation that we don’t observe candidates that are far out of equilibrium with the policy goals of the electorate because we select better candidates. And when we do see them, down the ballot, that’s where the penalty is. It does impose a significant challenge on voters. If you take policy voting and you take spatial voting models from economics and political science, it requires voters to learn and to use those in a sophisticated way. And it’s not clear that the swing voter is the kind of voter that’s going to do that work.
Jay Greene:
Might we consider retrospective voting as a parsimonious explanation for what you’re describing rather than focusing on thermostatic, we could say policy is multidimensional. Swing voters don’t collect a large amount of information about prospective policies. They’re condensing all the information they have in a multidimensional way, holistically assessing their life. Good then vote for the incumbent. bad then vote against. That’s the theory.
If it’s true, then we have no idea what’s going to happen, because we don’t know how life is going to be even for the midterms and we have no idea after that.
One other thing, a 3% swing in the total population vote feels huge. I understand by historical standard is not as big, but there’s basically 10% in play. It’s a 45-55 game. And so, you have 10% in swing and if you move three percent, you’ve moved 30% of those in play. That’s a lot.
They’re responding to something. Now you also kept referencing the thing they were responding to is scope of government, but maybe it’s other dimensions like values. So can boys be girls, girls be boys? This bothers them, they’re responding to this.
The swings are occurring in a big way because the nomination system is not giving us median voters. The public keeps retrospectively moving us towards the median voter.
John Sides:
Is 3% large? What’s the denominator we want to put underneath that number? It’s still smaller shifts than it used to be and the pool of swing voters is smaller than it once was. But I’m comfortable describing it as a trend at the absolute level, 3% it’s a huge difference between having Harris president.
The other question you’re posing is how do we separate what is the role that values play separate from policy attitudes? The skeptic says voters don’t know enough to vote based on specific policy issues. And moreover, what they’ll often do is pick a candidate for some other reason and then they’ll just adopt the views of that candidate as needed. And there’s plenty of evidence of this. You can look around and see Democratic and Republican voters shifting in response to the messages they’re getting from their party leaders.
I will freely admit that part of our challenge with explaining election outcomes is being able to precisely measure and quantify a range of plausible hypotheses. I gave you my best Occam’s razor explanation.
Larry Bernstein:
I had on my podcast Eric Adelstein who ran advertising for the Harris campaign, and I asked him which was the most effective ad for Trump, and he said she’s for they/them, he’s for you. And I asked him at the time, I said, “You knew this was effective, so what did you do?”
Adelstein asked Harris what she wanted. Three options. She could say it’s not true, I’m with him on the trans issue. And she said, “I can’t do that, it’s core.” The second choice was, “I’m an advocate for they/them.” And we said, “no, we can’t push this idea.” So, we decided to ignore the Trump attack entirely.
Does it matter that Harris spent three times more than Trump did on campaign advertising? And, f it doesn’t matter, do these issues like trans matter?
John Sides:
I wrote a paper about ad effects in presidential and down ballot elections. And what I can say is that the best evidence is that the overall balance of advertising, like who runs more ads, Democratic or Republican, has a very, very small effect at the margins in presidential election campaigns. It matters a bit more down the ballot where voters are less informed.
In 2020 Biden outspent Trump by orders of magnitude, he was buying National ads everywhere.
And when you factor in 2020, our back of the envelope estimate is that the effective advertisement in presidential elections is even smaller because 2020 is such a weird outlier that may give us pause on what happens when you have an imbalance in ads. And it turns out it doesn’t buy you much extra.
Television advertising in a presidential general election campaign, the effects are very, very, very small. Which makes me skeptical of the magic ad that helped us or hurt us. It is possible that there was a general conversation that involved advertising and news coverage around trans issues. That was not helpful to Harris. But whether it’s that ad that made the difference, I would bet not.
The fact that they spent three times as much, does it matter? It may not. We may be moving to at least with television or digital advertising where your ability to shift votes or to increase your vote share is now even smaller than it was through 2016.
There’s lots of good experiments that have been done over time about how do you communicate with voters to get them to vote. So, if you can target your voters accurately using information in the voter file, what should you send them? What should you tell them to get them to vote? And again, in presidential general elections, those effects are small.
To the extent that the campaign matters, then Larry, it might not be the specific tactics or the specific, how many doors knocks you do, how many ads did you buy? I’m back to Jay’s question. It might be like who is more effective at centering voters thinking on the issues that were advantageous to them as opposed to advantageous to their opponent? That’s a little trickier to measure, but that may be the best way to think about it.
Ryan Claffey:
Kamala Harris is focused on social problems and San Francisco values. She’s thinking about the coasts, I’m thinking about you, the working man, the economic populist message that brought him into the White House back in 2016 when you had all these localized mini recessions in rural states. I’m focused on that.
We had Batya Unger-Sargon who was here at our DC conference last year, and she’s like, you got to hit on the economy and healthcare. Trump must focus on these two issues and that’s how you win elections. And she was right. And the next week Trump won.
My main question is for candidates going forward as we look to 2028, is the winning message not necessarily focused on social issues or it’s more I’m protecting you, you’re going to be safe from immigration or a crime in cities, you’re going to be safe in healthcare, you’re going to be able to see a doctor. You’re going to keep your jobs; it’s not going to be shipped overseas. Is that populist economic message, is what’s going to carry political candidates to victory going forward?
John Sides:
It depends on what concerns voters have at that time. One of the reasons why it was difficult for Harris to be for you is because voters were fundamentally dissatisfied with the way that her administration had done. The cost of living was up, borrowing costs were up, credit card defaults are up. And when you’re the incumbent, you have the chance, and you didn’t do it.
If things don’t get a lot better, and people are economically pessimistic, the same message that appeared to work for Trump in 2024 might be the message that works for Democrats in 2028.
Jeff Young:
I wanted to ask about social media and podcasting. The internet is Republican. There’s plenty of Democrat podcasters and social media sites, but they never get viral. They’re not that popular. And it seems in our more decentralized world, it appears that landscape benefits Republicans. In elections where we’re split, it’s the virality that makes a difference.
John Sides:
Is the internet conservative? You want to talk about Joe Rogan and Theo Von. I would absolutely agree that the most popular podcasts are not liberal. The thing that is interesting to me about these voices that have emerged as popular figures is many of them are not easy to classify ideologically.
Charlie Kirk or a Turning Point viewpoint is easy to categorize, but the headlines where Rogan and Von breaking with Trump and getting queasy about the Israeli incursions in Gaza. They’re very inconsistent ideologically in ways that most Americans are.
There’s a similar thing going on in black media as well. A radio host in New York City called “Charlemagne tha God” and watch him do interviews with political figures. This is not Jesse Jackson. He is not like we got to fight the fight to win the battle. He is heterodox, difficult to pin down, and willing to entertain ideas that are very much outside of the traditional black Democratic political tradition.
His audience is primarily young black men and they’re a group that was a little swinger in 2024. I want to insert one note of caution that these guys are wild cards.
Ron Miller:
I’m a middle market investment banker, and Larry was my little brother in our college fraternity. To triangulate off what you, Jay and Larry were talking about, you only have two choices, and it seems like our choices have gone far to the left and far to the right. Is this different than in prior years and maybe what rank choice voting would be and whether that could be constructive?
John Sides:
The average Democratic politician, the average Republican politician seemed to be further apart ideologically than they were in the 1960s and 70s, and there’s a huge literature on that polarization. It’s a robust and reliable finding. What we know about rank choice voting is more limited in part because it’s being used only in a handful of places. The rank choice people are religious. I have a disclaimer that we haven’t yet gotten a lot of evidence about it.
People say the same thing about having a top two or a top four primary. California has an open primary system where you let every voter vote, even if they’re not affiliated. So, all the independents come in and there’s a moderating force. If there’s any effects at all, they’re tiny. It’s in part because polarization is like tectonic forces moving the plates of the continent around. These reforms tend to have relatively small effects that are neither as good as their supporters want or as awful as their opponents fear. I don’t know if the rank choice voting might produce other outcomes that are more palatable. If nothing else, it appears to have kept Sarah Palin off the ticket in Alaska. So maybe that alone is worth the price of reform.
Larry Bernstein:
The midterms?
John Sides:
I looked at prediction markets to see where they were. And it was 65% chance Democrats take the House and 30% chance they take the Senate. Democrats can probably flip enough seats to get a narrow House majority, which will change politics a lot for the next two years.
The Senate is a hard road because Democrats must hold a few seats that are challenging and flip four seats. And that means flipping some Republican states.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to John for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Bolton on Gaza and Ukraine. Our speaker was John Bolton who is Trump’s former national security advisor. We discussed whether the events in Gaza will lead to peace. In addition, we heard what Putin’s motivations are in Ukraine.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Bolton on Gaza and Ukraine, here.
