Of course, setting up a third party is hard, so we could likely see an uptick in the number of candidates who run as independents. But if her standing among GOP voters worsens or if party leaders continue to push her aside , the pressure to leave the party could become insurmountable. So, if some voters are truly dissatisfied with the state of politics and democracy which polls show is consistently the case , there may be a real opportunity for more independent candidates.
Bernie Sanders or Maine Sen. Angus King were well-known , not unlike Cheney. Lisa Murkowski, for example, ran as a write-in candidate after losing to a Tea Party-backed candidate in the primaries — and won reelection. That said, as FiveThirtyEight elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley previously reported , few Americans are actually independent; most Americans identify with one of the two major parties.
Most Republicans in Congress agree that Trump is the undisputed leader of the party, and other Republicans have had trouble emulating him with the same degree of success. Trump are simple too but less tabloid and for many Americans a little esoteric — pressuring a foreign power to provide dirt on domestic rivals while holding back American security aid.
And the case comes in the context of a president who has defied so many norms that governed other presidents. Both presidents enjoyed strong economies that bolstered them in the face of impeachment but Mr. Clinton was far more popular throughout his struggle to stay in office, with approval ratings over 60 percent and peaking at 73 percent in the days after the House voted to impeach him, while Mr.
But Mr. Trump seems far more in command of his party than Mr. Clinton ever was over his. While many Republican lawmakers in private express disdain for their president, in public they have stuck with him with remarkable solidarity. Not a single House Republican voted to authorize the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump and not a single one is expected to vote for articles of impeachment when they reach the floor in the coming days.
At one point, the House Democratic leader identified House Democrats as possible votes for impeachment. At another, the White House listed a dozen Democratic senators they believed were on the verge of abandoning Mr. Clinton to pressure him to step down. All of which led Mr. As long as it was an us-versus-them choice, then Democrats would stick by their president, ensuring that even if he was impeached in the Republican-controlled House there would not be a two-thirds vote to convict in the Senate.
That was why Mr. Bipartisanship was dangerous for the president. That does not mean Senate Democrats did not ever coordinate with Mr. During the trial, senators were allowed to ask questions of the prosecution and defense by submitting notecards to Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist, who presided and read them aloud. Charles F. Ruff, the White House counsel leading Mr. If he wanted a chance to rebut a point made by the House Republican prosecutors, or managers, he would lay his pen down on the table in front of him. Democratic aides would then submit a question in the name of a Democratic senator asking Mr. Ruff to comment on any assertions made by the other side. Highly educated people tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views than working-class ones.
We see this in issue polling and ideological self-identification. College-educated voters are way less likely to identify as moderate. When you say that white liberals are to the left of the typical Black Democrat on racial issues, how much does that depend on the definition of a racial issue? For example, one policy fight that often pits the interests of white liberal Democrats against those of the Black working class is housing and school integration. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I do think if you asked about affirmative action and inclusionary zoning, rather than these more abstract questions that political scientists use for measuring racial resentment, you could find a different breakdown.
But I think the split on those abstract questions captures something real. In liberal circles, racism has been defined in highly ideological terms. And this theoretical perspective on what racism means and the nature of racial inequality have become a big part of the group identity of college-educated Democrats, white and nonwhite.
How do they differ? But if you look at the concrete questions, white liberals are to the left of Hispanic Democrats, but also of Black Democrats, on defunding the police and those ideological questions about the source of racial inequity. Regardless, even if a majority of nonwhite people agreed with liberals on all of these issues, the fundamental problem is that Democrats have been relying on the support of roughly 90 percent of Black voters and 70 percent of Hispanic voters.
Because these issues are strongly correlated with ideology. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. Most voters are not liberals. Most voters may not identify as liberals. Those are all extremely unpopular positions. I agree with everything you said. I do think that liberals sometimes take the ambiguities of ideology too far. A lot of progressives insist that ideological self-identification means nothing.
One of the big patterns of the last 40 years is that ideological self-description has become increasingly correlated with partisanship and increasingly correlated to views on issues. But there is still a large universe of policy questions — mostly economic but not exclusively — where a large majority of the public agrees with us.
What I take from that is: Ideological polarization is a dead end. If we divide the electorate on self-described ideology, we lose — both because there are more conservatives than liberals and because conservatives are structurally overrepresented in the House, Senate, and Electoral College.
So the way we get around that is by talking a lot about progressive goals that are not ideologically polarizing, goals that we share with self-described conservatives and moderates.
Even among nonwhite voters, those tend to be economic issues. Meanwhile, Democratic messaging about investing in schools and jobs tended to move Latino voters away from Trump. I mean, Hispanic voters are more liberal on immigration than white voters.
But I think that, for one thing, the extent to which Hispanic voters have liberal views on immigration is exaggerated. Now, how we should campaign and what we should do once in office are different questions.
Our immigration system is a humanitarian crisis, and we should do something about that. But the point of public communication should be to win votes. And the way that you do that is to not trigger ideological polarization.
What do they need to achieve, in statistical terms, to pull that off? And then, from a substantive point of view, are there things that they can do in office to make hitting those marks easier? As a baseline, midterms are usually very bad for the party in power. In the past 70 years, the incumbent party has gained seats in the House and Senate maybe once or twice. The last one was in Generally speaking, over the last 30 to 40 years, the party that controls the presidency gets about 47 percent of the vote nationwide.
Add in the fact that the House already has a fairly substantial pro-Republican bias — the median House seat is something like three points to the right of the country overall — it means that in the base scenario, Democrats are headed for near-certain doom.
If we replicate the second-best presidential-party midterm from the past 40 years, we lose. The best predictor of how a midterm is going to shake out is how popular the president is. So, for now, everything looks about as good as you could hope for.
But we have no margin for error. And due to the way that our electoral system works, we really could be locked out of power for a very long time , just like we were after So that means the need for messaging discipline is stronger than ever. And then the Senate is even more biased against us than the House. Currently, even if we have an exceptionally good midterm, the most likely outcome is that we lose one or two Senate seats.
And then, going into , we have something like seven or eight Democrats who are in states that are more Republican than the country overall.
Basically, we have this small window right now to pass redistricting reform and create states.
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