Why is the US election so close?
Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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No matter who wins the presidential election, a central fact of US politics is that there is an unmovable conservative bloc of about 46 percent of the electorate. It’s Trump’s floor of support, and it’s the reason so many people ask themselves how, after everything Trump has revealed about himself, the race can be as close as it appears.
There are many explanations. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn reviewed many of them here. Cohn argues that the “national political environment just isn’t as conducive to a Democratic victory as many might imagine”. He hangs that judgment on several factors: the unpopularity of President Biden, opinion polls showing that large majorities feel that the country is “on the wrong track”, and the pattern of backlash against ruling parties in the post-covid world of disruption and inflation.
These factors may explain why Trump has a consistent support of 46 percent in the current polling averages (46.9 in ABC’s 538 average). But they don’t explain why he received 46.8 percent of the popular vote in 2020 or 46.1 percent of the national popular vote in 2016. In other words, a solid conservative bloc in the electorate is willing to support Trump no matter what. And it has persisted for quite a long time. Even in the 2008 election—held during an historic meltdown in the economy that should have reduced the incumbent Republicans to non-existence—Republican John McCain received 45.7 percent of the vote, against Democrat Barack Obama’s “landslide” of 52.9 percent.
Despite the media’s obsessions with Trump’s alleged working-class base, it’s clear that most people who voted for him in 2016 were the same people—or at least the same types of people—who voted for stuffed-shirt capitalist Mitt Romney in 2012 or for faux cowboy George W. Bush, the scion the quintessential Republican establishment family, in 2000 and 2004.
For more than a generation, the Republicans have depended on solid support from 20 states in the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West. Various GOP (Grand Old Party) interest groups and voters have been held together by the Republican trinity of tax-cutting economic policies, a bloated Pentagon and security state, and conservative positions on social issues such as opposition to abortion.
The Republicans built a mass base for these politics using what’s been called a “dog-whistle” approach to racism—they avoided openly racist rhetoric, but the intended recipients got the message from racially tinged rhetoric on issues like “drugs” and “welfare”. Although on the losing end of the biggest presidential landslide in US history, Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign road-tested that approach. Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an infringement on private property rights.
While the electorate overwhelming rejected Goldwater, conservatives found that they excited passions not when they talked about property rights, but when they focused on so-called “cultural” issues that appealed to sections of the population—particularly to white Southerners moving away from the Democratic Party as the civil rights movement challenged the old order.
Later, Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, explained the strategy: “We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime. Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation”.
These social factors made it possible for right-wing pro-business politicians and activists to pose as “populist” opponents of “big government” and “the liberal elite”, rather than being viewed more correctly as water carriers for big business. Right-wing leaders were very conscious of this. As right-wing pugilist Pat Buchanan wrote in 1977: “If there is any political future for us, it is forfeit, so long as we let ourselves be perceived as the obedient foot soldiers of the Fortune 500”.
Today, the Christian right is viewed primarily as the vehicle by which conservatives built opposition to women’s rights and gay rights. But one of the foundational events in the formation of the Christian right in the 1970s, which was led by one-time segregationist ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was a fight with the IRS to preserve tax-exempt status for Christian schools, the majority of which were formed as “white academies” in the wake of school desegregation decisions.
The conservative political positions that the Republicans promote regularly garner support from a minority of the US electorate. The average GOP voter is a middle-aged, affluent white person, more likely to be a man than a woman, in a country that is increasingly less affluent, less white, and less religious, and in which women make up most of the population and electorate.
That’s a central reason the Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight national presidential elections while scoring big political gains during low-turnout “midterm” elections between the presidential votes every four years.
The Republicans rely on mobilising a shrinking “base”, which has led their key political operatives to turn every election into a death match against nefarious forces who are “taking away” the idealised 1950s version of the US that conservatives embrace.
This is the dirty secret about the Republican base that the 2007-08 Great Recession uncovered. Not only did economic devastation push at least a section of the conservative middle class to embrace more far-right politics, but free-market economics has delivered less and less to them. So, to keep them hitched to the GOP coalition, the Republicans amped up their “culture war” and turned it not simply against liberal policies like abortion rights, but into a defence of what the liberal historian Allan Lichtman called a “white Protestant nation”.
Despite media speculation to the contrary, Trump’s base is not the “white working class”. It is a new incarnation of the 2010 Tea Party—specifically, in the words of Kate Aronoff, writing in Jacobin, voters that the Tea Party movement activated who “are partial to candidates that buck the establishment, and thus extremely receptive to the billionaire’s appeals”.
Research has shown that these conservatives are less concerned with free-market nostrums, and more “worried about sociocultural changes in the United States, angry and fearful about immigration, freaked out by the presence in the White House of a black liberal with a Muslim middle name, and fiercely opposed to what they view as out of control ‘welfare spending’ on the poor, minorities, and young people” in the words of political sociologist Theda Skocpol.
Undercurrents of racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and socially conservative politics have long coincided with the economic conservatism supported by the more upscale voters among the Republican base. But the 2008 financial crisis discredited the kind of elite-friendly, neoliberal politics that the Republican establishment promoted, and shifted a section of the middle-class Republican base in a more extreme direction.
Of course, the irony here is that Trump—the supposed “populist” standing up for the “forgotten American”—delivered as much, and probably more, for big business and the rich than any establishment Republican could have. Trump’s con game is so transparent—and, to date, so successful—that the rest of the party is following suit.
But it isn’t just the dynamics of US politics that will preserve Trumpian “populism” as a viable right-wing politics in the Republican Party. Trumpism is part of a worldwide phenomenon that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
In country after country, the recession produced a political polarisation that has firmly established the more extreme right. Longtime governing parties, from mainstream conservatives to social democrats, embraced neoliberal austerity, while right-wing “populist” parties like the National Rally in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, blaming immigrants and Muslims for deteriorating living standards, presented themselves as opponents of a corrupt status quo.
As the late Marxist historian Neil Davidson wrote, these forces filled a vacuum created when the two major political blocs in capitalist politics—the traditional right and the social democratic or liberal “left”—converged around neoliberal economic policies. With substantive differences over economic policy taken off the table, differentiation between the two blocs often came down to differences on “cultural” issues like religion, race and immigration.
The Great Recession shattered whatever popular appeal neoliberal economics had, breaking up the stable bipartisan regimes that dominated most rich countries. As Davidson put it:
“The revival of the far right as a serious electoral force is based on the apparent solutions it offers to what are now two successive waves of crisis, which have left the working class in the West increasingly fragmented and disorganised, and susceptible to appeals to blood and nation as the only viable form of collectivism still available, particularly in a context where the systemic alternative to capitalism—however false it was—had apparently collapsed in 1989-91.
“The political implications are ominous. The increasing interchangeability of political parties gives the far right an opening to appeal to voters by positioning themselves as outside the consensus in ways that speak to their justifiable feelings of rage.”
In many countries, one part of the broader conservative side of the spectrum sliced off in an anti-immigrant or “populist” direction, with the mainstream right accommodating itself to that. For example, in the wake of a huge economic collapse in Brazil in the late 2010s, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won over sectors of the traditional right, like agribusiness, and a radicalised middle class that used to form the base of the mainstream neoliberal party of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
In the US, the same global forces are at work, but the US’s national particularities remain. Despite the seriousness of the 2007-08 recession, the US did not plunge to near-depression levels like Greece or Spain—or Brazil. So, the echo of the far right was fainter in the US, and it found a hearing in and around the main conservative party, the Republicans. So far, the polarisation that, in the Spanish state, cracked the previously bipartisan regime into, initially, at least four main parties, has mostly remained within the confines of the two main parties in the US.
The Trumpification of the GOP has proceeded apace since Trump first emerged on the scene. Indeed, as socialist Sam Farber warned: “The alliance of religious conservatism and white nationalism that Trump built may turn out to be more solid and enduring than the Republican neoliberal-religious alliance that preceded it”. That has remade the GOP into more of an “illiberal” anti-democratic party like Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary. It has also given license to the organisation of far-right forces like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—the street fighters in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot that tried to install Trump as president after he lost the 2020 election to Biden—under the broader Trumpist umbrella.
The story so far has been about how the modern GOP built itself as part of the conservative backlash against the gains of the 1960s civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But the GOP would not have gotten as far if the other part of the capitalist party duopoly, the Democrats, didn’t help—or at least not impede—it. Since 1992, the first post-Cold War election, Democrats have held the White House for 20 of 32 years. In that time, they became, in some ways, the most zealous advocates of market reforms, free trade and global military deployment for “humanitarian intervention”.
As Bill Clinton’s administration presided over an economic expansion in the 1990s, his party itself transformed, in the words of political analyst Kevin Phillips, “into a party of the wealthy cultural and technological elite, indeed one whose fortunes and supporting middle-class numbers in the North matched those of the GOP”. The Clinton administration pushed through conservative policies—such as ending welfare payments as a right and balancing the federal budget—that Republicans never could have implemented. Former Federal Reserve chair, the conservative Alan Greenspan, quipped that Clinton was the “best Republican president we’ve had in a while”.
Abetting the shift to the right in the Democratic Party was the atrophy and decay of the popular constituencies that comprised the party’s New Deal and Great Society coalitions from the 1930s through the 1970s. Organised labour’s continual decline (today representing about 10 percent of US workers from twice that in the 1980s) has left it without significant influence on the Democratic agenda. The same decay in vision and mobilising power among labour unions also took hold of civil rights and women’s rights organisations. Increasingly, these organisations became little more than lobbying groups whose independent political stances became indistinguishable from those of Democratic politicians.
“For far too many decades, the mainstream pro-choice movement has relied on Democrats to protect the right to legal abortion, even as Democratic Party politicians from both the White House and Congress have consistently failed to fulfill their pro-choice campaign promises”, wrote Sharon Smith in 2022. “The consequence is that abortion rights have been so eroded over the last decades—with restrictive waiting periods, parental notification and consent laws, laws criminalising transporting a patient to another state to procure an abortion, and the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding for poor women’s abortions, reinstated each year by Congress since 1976—that there was little left to salvage.”
The current reality, after the Trump-packed right-wing Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, is a hellscape in much of the country. But the Democrats now see that abortion is overwhelmingly popular. Most activists knew that for decades, while Democratic politicians accommodated the right by insisting that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”.
By running away from defending abortion, Democrats amplified anti-abortion messaging. Today, they are doing the same with their insistence, for purely electoral calculations, that they are “tougher on the border” than Trump. And they wonder why public opinion has shifted against the benefits of immigration to the US.
The hope that a Democratic victory in 2024 will defeat Trumpism is in vain. Trump may end up in prison, but the forces he helped to concentrate will remain. Without a mass upsurge in working-class or social struggle that alters the political balance of forces in the US, the same pressures will continue to batter the two-party system.
If the Democrats in power think that they can resume their normal, wonky bipartisan ways, they are in for a rude awakening. They might even face a more extreme right-wing opposition, whose leaders will be far more competent—and thus more dangerous—than Trump and his entourage.
