Ohio’s recent trust in Republicans doesn’t extend to the abortion issue. Virginia might like and trust Governor Youngkin himself, but they have no faith in an empowered Republican Party. Kentucky, meanwhile, placed its trust in Republicans, only to watch them completely botch critical tax policy.
The Republican Party didn’t have the best night last Tuesday, when Democrats re-elected an incumbent governor in deep red Kentucky, flipped control of the state legislature in reasonably deep blue Virginia, and succeeded in enshrining a right to abortion in reasonably deep red Ohio. In some sense, none of these developments were unexpected. Kentucky is a Republican stronghold, but after conservatives failed to keep their promises on tax reform, a favorite native son, Andy Bashear, was swept into office as a Democrat in 2019. Incumbents, even of party’s not popular in a state, are generally favored to win reelection and Governor Beshear was leading in most polls, at times by a margin of 16 percent. Virginia elected a conservative Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, in 2020, but the state has been trending blue for almost 20 years now. Governor Youngkin is the exception to the rule, not a new rule himself. Ohio has taken the opposite path, moving increasingly in the conservative direction, but abortion has altered the political kaleidoscope as Republicans struggle to adjust to the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade. At the same time, Republicans were hopeful because the general public appears to be souring on President Biden, perhaps permanently so. Recent polls against his likely opponent next year, former President Donald Trump, have him behind by 1.1 points in the Real Clear Politics average, something that did not occur throughout the entire 2020 race. Even more troubling for Democrats, a New York Times and Sienna poll found President Biden losing five of six battleground states, some by substantial margins, after he swept them all in the last election. This has prompted some serious people in the Democrat Party, like the architect of President Obama’s two election victories, David Axelrod, to suggest President Biden should step aside and not to run at all. The presidential election, however, is a year away and in the meantime, the public in these states did what it has done before in recent years: Delivered a stalemate, split decision, political push, or whatever word you would like to describe for closely divided government, putting their support behind individual candidates regardless of party rather than any party.
Given a similar outcome in 2022, along with extremely close elections in both 2020 and 2016, this should not have been surprising, but when you consider how diametrically the two parties are opposed on just about every issue imaginable, there is a certain mystery to it. Why does the public keep delivering split verdicts on completely opposite sides of the political fence? How can a state like Kentucky, for example, that voted for President Trump by almost 26 points in 2020 possibly continue to back a Democrat supporter of President Biden? Virginia has trended Democrat in recent years, but then why back a conservative Republican in Governor Youngkin, who has proven to be popular with voters in the state, only to completely stymie his plans by turning control over the lawmaking apparatus to progressives? There is, of course, the old adage that all politics is local and personal, based on the appeal of the individual candidates. There’s certainly some truth to that, and yet rarely have the parties been so far divided on both culture and policy. Pick an issue, any issue, no matter how large or small, and chances are Democrats and Republicans will be on completely opposite sides, from taxes to transgender. Whether or not the Democrats have moved left as Republicans insist, or the Republicans have moved right as Democrats insist, is irrelevant. The undeniable truth is that it seems we inhabit entirely different worlds at times, agreeing on next to nothing, not even basic facts, much less complicated policy positions. Moreover, neither party does anything to hide this. Instead, they frequently promote how strenuously they disagree with one another and generally make it plain that electing Republicans will thwart any Democrat plan, while electing Democrats will stop Republicans. Rare is the politician that promises to “work across the aisle” as they used to say. Today, it’s mostly about stopping what might happen on the other side of the aisle.
History does not offer many parallels, fortunately or unfortunately. Some have claimed that the current polarization is as extreme as its been since the Civil War and even supposedly respected publications like Time Magazine have suggested that the stage might well be set for another conflict on that scale, but the analogy has its limits. The Civil War was largely fought over a single issue organized regionally into North and South. Slavery was the dividing line, and how one felt about the horrific institution generally dictated which side you were on. Federal versus states rights served as a proxy for the larger debate that would become a war, offering those in the middle a way to avoid facing the reality that almost everything was driven based on those who were for slavery or against it. The war ostensibly began because the South believed they could secede from the Union and they assaulted Federal facilities during these acts of succession, but very early in the conflict it became apparent to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis that the war would not end until the slavery issue was settled once and for all. The aftermath of the war largely revolved around the fallout from the issue itself as debates over Reconstruction raged for more than a decade during which the Republicans dominated both the executive and legislative branches. It was only after the compromise election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 that politics resumed its normal course, and the gap between the public’s preference for the party’s respective policies narrowed. James Garfield won a narrow election in 1880, eking out 48.32% of the vote compared to General Winfield Scott’s 48.21%. Grover Cleveland was the first Democrat to win the White House since the Civil War with just a .5% victory in the popular vote against James G. Blaine. Cleveland lost in 1888 even though he won the popular vote, only to win another narrow election in 1892. It wasn’t until 1896 that Republicans regained an edge with the election of William McKinley, prior to Teddy Roosevelt’s landslide election in 1904, the largest in history at the time.
Crucially, however, the respective policy positions of the party’s during these periods were mixed and highly varied. Debates raged over what seem like obscure topics today, primarily tariffs and the gold standard, though there was a burgeoning movement for workers’ rights, but politicians in both parties were on both sides of these issues, largely divided by region, this time East versus West rather than North versus South. Grover Cleveland, for example, was infamously betrayed by his own party when trying to reform the tariff system. He also fought his own party vigorously over plans to expand the gold standard to silver. Likewise, the new progressive movement that promoted unions was variously supported and opposed by both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats were nominally more progressive, but it was Democrat Grover Cleveland who deployed thousands of troops against striking workers in Chicago in 1884 and it was Republican Teddy Roosevelt who fought for and passed important progressive reforms in the early 20th century. In other words, it was extremely difficult to predict a politician’s position on an issue simply by knowing their party affiliation, a situation vastly different than today when we know how someone will vote 99% of the time based on whether there is an “R” or a “D” after their name. The political situation changed after World War I when Calvin Coolidge began to cement the modern Republican Party’s position as low tax, light regulation, and generally pro business, but the electorate also began to swing wildly between the parties as well, changing their own policy preferences based on the conditions at the time. Republicans controlled the Presidency from 1921 to 1934, when Roosevelt was swept into power and ushered in almost 20 years of Democrat dominance. The Republicans took control with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower for two terms, who admittedly was something of a political cipher and was recruited as a potential candidate by both parties. Since then, we have switched back and forth between Democrats, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, Republicans, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Democrat Jimmy Carter, Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George W. Bush, Democrat Barack Obama, Republican Donald Trump, and Democrat Joe Biden. The size of some of these victories in our polarized era seems almost impossible to believe. Reagan, for example, won 58.8% of the popular vote and 49 states in 1984. Since then, the largest margin was President Obama who carried 52.9% of the vote and 28 states in 2008. This much more tepid victory seems virtually impossible barely 15 years later, as we increasingly see split results rather than changing party preferences. The question is: What’s changed? Why did America go from backing one party for a time followed by another before repeating the cycle to seemingly backing no party at all, or perhaps more accurately, backing the parties fighting one another rather than passing their policy preferences?
Of course, there is no single reason for this seemingly ahistorical turn of events. Some, for example, might blame the rise of gerrymandering, where the majority of Congress are from safe Republican and Democrat districts and therefore have no incentive to compromise. Similarly, both parties appear to be pursuing electoral strategies that focus almost exclusively on exciting and turning out their respective base voters, reducing the need to persuade those in the middle. Others might point to the rise of cable news, streaming, and social media, where people can tailor their experience to match their political views and effectively live in their own echo-chamber, never hearing anything from the other side except negative, not necessarily accurate information. Some might claim the “uni-party” makes all the decisions anyway and therefore it doesn’t matter. A few might even believe that voters are gullible and a combination of all of these factors has made it all too easy for politicians to spread lies and misinformation, meaning that the average voter has no idea what they are actually voting for. There is likely some truth to all of these and others, but ultimately, all this strikes me as symptoms of the disease rather than the cause. Fundamentally, I think there is a far more basic lack of trust in both the parties, the institutions they control, and the media that is supposed to serve as a watchdog.
Americans have always combined an innate optimism with a high degree of skepticism, but trust in just about everything and anything has plummeted almost across the board over the past two decades. Last July, Gallup reported that “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues.” “Americans’ faith in major societal institutions hasn’t improved over the past year following a slump in public confidence in 2022. Last year, Gallup recorded significant declines in public confidence in 11 of the 16 institutions it tracks annually, with the presidency and Supreme Court suffering the most. The share of Americans expressing a great deal or fair amount of confidence in these fell 15 and 11 percentage points, respectively.” Incredibly, “The five worst-rated institutions — newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business and Congress — stir confidence in less than 20% of Americans, with Congress, at 8%, the only one in single digits.” The only two institutions scoring over 50% were small businesses and the military. The third highest was the police at 43%. Further, “Most of the institutions rated this year are within three points of their all-time-low confidence score, including four that are at or tied with their record low. These are the police, public schools, large technology companies and big business. Only four institutions have a confidence score significantly above their historical low: the military, small business, organized labor and banks. However, the lows for these institutions were recorded more than a decade ago, while the recent trend for each has been downward.” I’m reminded of a memorable line from Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime: Who do you trust when everyone’s a crook? In my opinion, the voters have answered this question with a resounding “no one,” and so they have decided to play both ends against the middle like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars.
Trust, of course, has never been an easy thing to define and a lack of trust can have a myriad number of causes. I might not believe what a person or institution says; I might not have faith that they will do what they say; I might not believe they will act fairly or impartially; I might doubt they have my best interests at heart, likely all of these reasons and more. The reason isn’t really important, merely the fact that trust is hard to come by in the modern world and voters are acting accordingly. In this view, Ohio generally trusts Republicans in positions of power, but that trust does not extend to the abortion issue. Virginia likes and trusts Governor Youngkin himself, but they have no faith in an empowered Republican Party even under his leadership. Kentucky, meanwhile, placed its trust in Republicans, only to watch them completely botch critical tax policy to the detriment of the state, and as a direct result, have bucked the normally dominant party in the state by keeping a Democrat in the Governor’s Mansion. If these were isolated issues, or America had one close election, we might simply say that voters were confused or even tricked, but this has been the dynamic since at least 2016 and it seems obvious to me that voters are intentionally setting up a political stalemate, specifically because they do not trust politicians or the institutions they represent to properly advance their interests. To some extent, I cannot say I entirely blame them: I have little trust in the party I vote for as well, having watched them mangle healthcare reform, refuse to support a clean tax reform program, explode the deficit and the debt, and other myriad failures, too many to mention. At times, it’s difficult to say if doing nothing would be worse than what they have done in many cases and it shouldn’t be all that surprising if many voters want them to do precisely that.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 