The increasing legal peril faced by former President Donald Trump raises an important political question: can anything break the persistent electoral deadlock that has kept the country virtually exactly divided between the Republican and Democratic coalitions?
Crime allegations against Trump are uncommon for a current presidential candidate, let alone a previous one. Despite this setback, his position as the GOP’s presumptive nominee for president in 2024 has become stronger. While there are certain red flags for him as a general election contender, polls more often than not show a close race, with Vice President Joe Biden maintaining a slim advantage and a handful of swing states deciding the outcome. However, in a hypothetical contest, Trump and Biden both received 43% of the vote in a New York Times/Siena College survey published on Tuesday.
Next year could be a boon for Democrats, especially in the presidential election, since several major trends are aligning, including a decline in inflation and an increase in Trump’s legal issues. But the entrenched demographic and geographic divisions that have led to one of the longest eras in American history in which neither party has been able to establish a persistent or conclusive lead over the other are an immovable object against which all of these forces must struggle.
It’s unclear what could give one side an edge in the tight race between the parties, given the wide gap in their respective coalitions’ views on America’s future and, in particular, whether the country should embrace or fight ethnic and cultural diversity. And it includes the possibility that the Republican Party may nominate a presidential candidate who will spend equal time on the campaign trail and in court.
Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political scientist and co-author of books on the 2016 and 2020 elections, has observed, “The two political parties are farther apart on average than they have been in our lifetime.” As a result, “people are less likely to consider going over to the other side.”
Since the contemporary party system was established in 1828, the Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. That indicates the national Democratic coalition is larger than the national Republican coalition.
However, the Democrats’ lack of success outside of major cities, as well as the bias against small states in the Senate and the Electoral College, has kept the Republican Party in the running. The political system has reached a standstill and impasse in virtually every important respect. Compared to the late 20th century, majorities in the House and Senate have typically been substantially smaller this century. Every level of election, from the presidency down to Congress and state legislatures, is now firmly in the hands of one political party in a vast number of states. Forty out of the fifty states, or 80%, have voted the same way in each of the last four elections for president. This is a higher percentage of states voting the same way than in Franklin Roosevelt’s four straight election victories from 1932 to 1944.
This stalemate was recently quantified by a poll conducted jointly by Tony Fabrizio and John Anzalone, Trump and Biden’s respective 2020 chief pollsters. Two researchers polled voters in 40 congressional districts identified as potentially competitive by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report as part of a study commissioned by the powerful AARP advocacy group.
The election contest appears to be quite solidified at this stage, according to the results. When asked who they planned to vote for in the upcoming congressional election, respondents were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In all 40 of these districts, it showed that Biden had a lead over Trump of exactly four percentage points in 2020.
While the Anzalone/Fabrizio survey for AARP is only one poll, it does reflect the general trend of public opinion polls in recent years. Polls typically show Biden ahead of Trump now, but the president’s margin of victory is rarely more than the four points he won by in 2020. Biden also leads Trump in 2020 by four points, according to the most recent national NBC survey, which was conducted by a bipartisan team of top Republican and Democratic pollsters.
According to Bill McInturff, the survey’s main Republican pollster, Trump led among those who voted for him in 2020 by a margin of 93% to 1%, while Biden led among his supporters by a margin of 93% to 3%. “The two partisan coalitions are locked down and difficult to move,” McInturff stated. Rather than shifts towards or away from each man among the important voter categories, McInturff thinks that unexpected changes in the electorate’s composition, such as whether youth turnout is higher or lower than predicted, would be more likely to affect the outcome in a rematch.
In their book The Bitter End, political scientist Vavreck of UCLA and authors John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch contend that American politics will remain this evenly balanced for years to come. They attribute this to the fact that people are no longer basing their party preferences on issues such as economics, foreign policy, or even judgement of the current state of affairs, but rather on beliefs about changes in America’s core identity. When it comes to identity-based issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights, the gap between the parties has widened to the point that few voters can imagine switching sides to criticise the current administration.
Perhaps in the 1980s, Vavreck argued, voters who were dissatisfied with the performance of the sitting president could “give the other side a go” because “they weren’t that far apart on those [identity] issues.” She continues by saying that the gap between the parties is so wide now that “you can’t cross over because you think, say, interest rates are too high,” referring to the fact that cultural and racial issues are “central to the kind of society and community that people want to live in.” Because if the other side is allowed in, they will construct an environment in which no one would be interested in purchasing a home.
According to Vavreck, the political impact of the COVID pandemic, or lack thereof, underlines the persistence of this political alignment more than anything else. She points out that political scientists in the early 2000s might have foreseen how a tragedy of this magnitude, like the Great Depression, could reshape popular allegiances. Instead, the epidemic rapidly became another front in the parties’ longstanding cultural war fault lines. Quickly, “it became politicised and subsumed by this existing dimension of conflict about identity things,” she explained.
Trump’s legal woes may be escalating in a similar fashion. According to a comprehensive national poll released last week, these important events also fit almost entirely inside the existing partisan split. The poll was conducted by Bright Line Watch, a collaboration of political scientists researching risks to American democracy.