We discussed the problems with the Republicans; now let’s move on to the Democrats. They’ve got a different set of problems, but make no mistake, they are just as screwed. The Democrats have opted for a “big tent” coalition, meaning they try to appeal to as many voters as possible. The problem is, you cast such a wide net, and you’re bound to end up with conflicting interests.
The candidates can’t develop a clear policy platform, they have no charisma, and the strongest slogan they can come up with is “we hate Trump”. Oh, and the Democrats are losing more and more of their core base, including younger voters, Hispanics, and organized labor.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the Sierra National Forest in California, just outside of Yosemite. I’m still in the Fernandez Lake, Fernandez Pass region. And as promised, we’re now going to take the whip to the Democrats. Now that we’ve already dealt with Trump.
Okay, so there are two strategies that political parties can use in the United States. You see, we have a first past the post system, which is a fancy way of saying you vote for one person who will represent a set list of voters. And in doing that, you want to throw a relatively wide net, so you get one more marginal voter than the other guy. The Democrats follow a different strategy than the Republicans.
The Republican strategy is to not necessarily get the most voters possible, but to get the most reliable coalition possible. So, you know, your business voters don’t care about what happens with national defence. Your military voters don’t care about what happens with abortion. Your abortion voters don’t care what happens with fiscal issues. Everybody has the issue that they care about. They show up and they tend to win because it’s very, very reliable, even though they don’t have more voters than the Democrats. Now, this strategy is now failing under Trump, because he has gone out of his way to eviscerate four of the main factions. And it’s not clear that there’s enough left to vote for him to win anything ever again.
But the Democrats, not to be shown up when it comes to dysfunction, have their own problems. See, their strategy is the full big tent strategy. You throw as wide of a net for potential voters as possible so you can get every possible vote. The problem with that is you’re going to include factions that are opposed to other factions in the coalition.
So, for example, green voters and union voters very rarely get along when it comes to economic policy. The White Tower crowd on the coast really doesn’t care about youth voters and vice versa. So getting all these people to show up to vote means you can’t talk about policy. And if you do, you’re going to fracture the coalition and people won’t show up. So any candidate that tries to run on being a bit of a technocrat and running on the issue, say, a Hillary Clinton or a Michael Dukakis, they’re probably going to lose. But a candidate who can ignore the policy issues and run on charisma and paper over the difference. Then you get everybody showing up in numbers, and that’s a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton. Well, the Democrats this round have two real problems. Number one, they don’t have anyone with charisma at all. And it’s a by-election. That’s not entirely their fault. They don’t have a president to rally behind or presidential candidate to rally behind. But I mean, ever since Joe Biden became president, and especially since he left, the Democrats have been leaderless, rudderless and policyless. And it’s just really hard to generate an electoral program that is more sophisticated than we hate Trump. And, you know, that’s a lot, especially in this today’s environment. But that might not be enough because it wasn’t enough the last couple times they tried that. That’s piece one.
Piece two is that the coalition the big tent has failed while Trump has imploded the Republican coalition, he has succeeded in drawing a lot of voters away from the Democratic coalition. So if you look at how people actually voted the last time around, under 30 split almost right down the middle, so did Hispanics, so did organized labor. And these have been three vote banks for the Democrats going back 50, 60 years. So it’s just not clear that the Democrats can play to their strengths without also suffering from their weaknesses. About the only real hope that I see for a meaningful shift is if so many Republicans, old school Republicans who don’t like MAGA, stay home or start acting like swing voters, which honestly is what they are now. Then you can see in the places where there was redistricting done, that all of a sudden, these groups that were leaning Republican all of a sudden have a lot of people who were leaning Republicans start to vote for the other side, and then you can actually get a blowout. But even in that specific scenario, which I think has an even chance of happening, you’re still not going to get two thirds of the Senate to be blue. And without that, we’re in a situation where Congress is hung, the president cannot be impeached, and we just have another two years of what we’ve had this last year. Whether that’s the best case scenario, the worst case scenario, it depends upon your politics. And I hope you enjoy how it’s going to go.
