MICHAEL BARONE: The Coming Electoral Crack-Up: Will voter discontent shatter the partisan deadlock in U.S. politics this November?

Heading into the 2016 presidential election cycle, the most influential guide for political journalists was a 2008 book called The Party Decides. Written by four eminent political scientists, it explained that for several decades presidential nominees have effectively been chosen by unelected political insiders, as candidates fight in “invisible primaries” for endorsements by prominent politicians and interest groups. The voters, it argued, tended to ratify these choices and rally around candidates with widespread and prestigious support.

But like John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 book The New Industrial State, which argued that big corporations, tempered by big government and big labor unions, determined the course of the economy, The Party Decides turned out to be a better description of the recent past than an accurate forecast of the near-term future. . . .

One way to look at this election is as a collision of an irresistible force with an immovable object. This irresistible force is the widespread discontent with the direction of the nation today. The immoveble object is the persistent partisan divisions that have prevailed and intensified in presidential, congressional, and state elections over the past twenty years.

The sources of the irresistible force of discontent are not hard to discern. After resurgent growth and victory in the Cold War in the 1980s, and continuing economic growth in the 1990s, the 21st century brought Americans 15 years of mostly sluggish growth and a series of mostly unsuccessful, or at least inconclusive, foreign military interventions. Major legislation passed by one-party votes, notably the 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, have proved to be far less popular than their sponsors expected. Major bipartisan legislation, frequent in Bill Clinton’s presidency and the first term of George W. Bush’s, has become rare if not extinct, with a President lacking the inclination and skill to negotiate and a Republican House majority often unwilling to trust its leadership.

This discontent found an outlet in the disruptive candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Each attracted constituencies different from those in his party’s recent nomination contests. Republicans in 2008 and 2012 were divided between countryside and suburbs, between white Evangelical Christians and less intensely religious groups. The divisions can be seen in the critical contests between John McCain and Mike Huckabee in 2008 and between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in 2012. In both cases the eventual nominee piled up big majorities in the relatively affluent and somewhat less Evangelical suburbs, while his opponent carried rural areas and small towns, but not by enough votes to prevail.

In 2016 the divisions were different. White evangelicals did not vote solidly for any candidate, but split their votes between Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Large suburban counties in many states gave Trump pluralities or even majorities. One clear pattern is that Trump ran better among voters without college degrees (“I love the poorly educated!” he exclaimed after winning the Nevada caucuses) than college graduates, but he got sizeable numbers of votes from graduates as well. Certain demographic groups resisted Trump’s appeal: Mormons, Dutch-Americans in northwest and central Iowa and western Michigan, German- and Scandinavian-Americans in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest states. Other ethnic groups tilted toward Trump. A majority of Italian-Americans live within a hundred miles of New York City, and in that arc Trump won more than 50 percent of the votes, including 81 percent in heavily Italian-American Staten Island. In addition, he ran strongest not in Florida’s Southern-accented congressional districts, but in those with the largest number of migrants from New York and the Northeast. Examining the returns, I argued that Trump fared poorly with those groups with large degrees of what scholars Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have called social connectedness or social capital, and did very well with groups with low social connectedness. His percentages in Appalachia—from southwest Pennsylvania through Tennessee, northern Alabama, and Mississippi—were especially large.

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