Today i’m going to talk about another candidate in American political history that i think exemplifies what i’m going to call ‘trump-like’ characteristics. Because Donald Trump isn’t a unicorn or a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky. Trump is part of a cycle, not an exception.

Barack Obama ran as an outsider in 2008 because people were not at all pleased with the status quo. 8 years on the numbers have become dramatically worse. None of us have a right to be surprised and light our hair on fire that the voters chose an outsider. There was an opening in the political discourse and spectrum you could land a metaphorical 747 in. The only surprising thing to me is that Trump was able to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican party and use it as a vehicle for his outsider, anti-establishment message. But once again, this is not totally without precedent. With that in mind, let us turn to Andrew Jackson and the elections of 1824 and 1828.

Old Hickory, as Jackson was affectionately known first by his troops and then by others, came a long at an interesting time in the history of the young American republic. As i have alluded to before, the American system was originally designed not to be a democracy in the terms we would think about it today. The founders conceived of it largely as a republic run and directed by elites periodically seeking the consent of those they governed for. The ‘Mob’ was something very much to be guarded against, just as much as oligarchic concentrations of uncountable elite authority. Campaigning was taboo. One should not seek the presidency but be offered it and, like Cincinnatus, consent to enter the service of the people.

Of course this was nonsense. Candidates went to extraordinary lengths to try and become President. They just tried to ensure that it didn’t look like they were doing so.

Another important part of this equation is the political consensus that reigned at the time. The initial fears of Washington and others that the fledgling United States would be riven apart by factions and the polarization of party politics had given way to the ‘era of good feeling’. This was essentially one party democracy. The Federalists had fallen apart, leaving only the Democratic Republican party (Democratic Republican?! Don’t ask. Just go with it. We’ll get there another time, i promise) as a major national political force. Victory in war and a growing consensus on policy meant James Monroe ran essentially unopposed for the presidency.

But all was not well. There had been a huge market-crash based on land speculation, breaking the faith of many in the efficacy of the establishment. The calm political exterior belied the  forces moving beneath the surface. Because the Revolutionary generation who had shepherded the nation through the war and into existence was dying off. And the one-party structure allowed patronage and corruption to reach previously unheard of heights, at least in the opinion of the electors.

The ‘Wyoming Letters’ give a sense of this mood.

look to the city of Washington, and let the virtuous patriots of the country weep at the spectacle. There corruption is springing into existence, and fast flourishing. Gentlemen, candidates for the first office in the gift of a free people, are found electioneering and intriguing, to worm themselves into the confidence of the members of congress, who in support of their particular favourites, are bye and bye to go forth and dictate to the people what is right.

If that sentiment sounds familiar, it should. Washington, people believed, was no longer filled with public minded patriots but self serving office-seekers prostituting the peoples interests to their own. A corrupt political class controlled the levers of power and operated them for their own benefit. And so some began calling for someone outside of the political establishment, a man in touch with the real lived experience and interests of the common citizen. And more than that, a man who would batter the corrupt and the dissolute into oblivion and once more cast the money-changers out of the peoples temple.

Jackson was a war hero, having defeated the British in the battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. Moreover, he had served as a boy in the Revolutionary war. He seemed to promise a return to the old values of the heroes of that conflict, of leadership and duty rather than technocratic managerial skill. When it comes down to it,  he promised to make America great again.

He was also a violent departure from the norm for persons considered suitable for the office of the Chief Magistracy. He was violent, bellicose, loud and crudely educated to the eyes of the elites. His visage was scarred, his body riddled with bullets from duels and battles that would hemorrhage and require draining. He was, and cultivate the image of, a rough frontier type and the very antithesis of the elite intellectual.

Needless to say the aforementioned elites were aghast. This man had suspended habeas corpus, ignored courts, issues summary orders for execution and in a variety of other ways behaved as more of a dictator than a democrat. Thomas Jefferson wrote the following of Jackson

“I am much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson become President.  He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.  He has very little respect for laws or Constitutions.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement from the nations third president. But there is more.

“When I was President of the Senate he was a Senator; and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings.  I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage.  His passions are no doubt cooler now…but he is a dangerous man.”

Jefferson echoed the sentiments of many. As i often hear said of Trump now, Jackson was considered an aberration and a danger to the Republic. But as is so often the case with these sort of claims, what they really mean is that you are a danger to my Republic. The one i want, the one consistent with my values.

Which isn’t to say that is a bad thing. Everyone has their ideas about how we should organize ourselves and live together. And a lot of them are mutually exclusive. But the Republic has weathered the storm. And i firmly believe if it can survive the extra-judicial, racialized populism of Jackson then the bungling of the hypothetical Trump administration will be a walk in the park.

There are important differences. Jackson had more political and relevant executive experience (if you count the Military, which people back then were loath to do, fearing the advent of some kind of usurping american Ceasar) and a much greater connection to the Party establishment than Trump has ever had.

The point of this exercise on my part is not to tell you that Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump are interchangeable. In fact, they are different. But the differences are the point. The differences show us how the system has changed, evolved and matured. By the same token though, the similarities tell us what is persistent and analogous.

And so, next time someone says to you ‘How could they nominate a man like Trump?’ you can tell them the truth. That men ‘like’ Trump are a normal feature of the American political milieu. That, like a old forest, sometimes a wildfire needs to come through to purge the dead wood and re-invigorate growth. The challenge is to know what to sacrifice to the flames and what to preserve.

The phrase ‘down-ballot’ in American political parlance is used to describe people running for relatively less prominent positions. Trump is on the ballot in Ohio for President of the United States, but innumerable other state and federal officials also running in Ohio will be listed below his illustriousness. These are the ‘down-ballot’ races.

Conventional wisdom goes that a successful presidential candidate can give your down-ballot chances a boost as voters are more disposed to vote for your other candidates if they are voting for the one at the top of the ticket.

So the question people are asking right now is whether or not Trump and his fairly poor polling numbers will drag down Republican candidates in otherwise competitive races?

There is evidence of this in Pennsylvania, where Pat Toomey has gone from a seemingly comfortable re-election to fighting for his life. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire also seems to be in a serious race now. In fact the chances of the Democrats regaining control of the Senate and ensconcing Harry Reid once again in the luxurious confines of the office of the majority leader seem to have increased markedly.

But then there is Rob Portman. He seems to be swimming against the current. The last poll i read had him up by about 8 points relative to The Donald. So what are the factors underlying that divergence, and its it replicable?

1. An independent political brand. Portman has been conspicuous in Ohio politics for more than 20 years. He has a long standing and fairly consistent portfolio of positions, high name recognition in his state and a political network of his own to rely on. That helps a lot, but is hard to replicate for someone with less experience in their state and in governance.
2. Issue Differentiation. Portman isn’t a Trumpian candidate. He is a fairly down-the-line, old school pro-business Republican. He is not that crazy, and acts like he isn’t that crazy. He seems to be intentionally behaving like the anti-trump.
3. Resources. Portman has the support of the Ohio republican party. Owing to the leadership of John Kasich and others, the GOP in Ohio has maintained considerable distance from Trump and his campaign. Additionally, Portman has a large war-chest with which to get his message on the airwaves. So not only is he not trump-like, but he can afford to inform everyone how not trump-like he is. This is replicable, but not really at this stage of the game.

So will Trump’s numbers lead to a bloodbath for otherwise viable GOP candidates down-ballot? I’m inclined to say no. He might lose them a couple, but with the current level of polarization in the country a Trump defeat is unlikely to be of historic proportions. In other words, there are enough people right now who would vote Republican no matter what that the outcome with Trump on the ballot is unlikely to fall outside of the range of plausible outcomes that existed beforehand. Ayotte might lose. Toomey might also lose. But those seats were never terribly safe anyway.

But, as always, time will tell. I’ll post more about the Senate and Gubernatorial races worth watching in the future. But for now, be cautious whenever you hear that Trump will destroy the chances of other Republicans. The evidence is far from conclusive.

The fundraising gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton persisted last month. Although the discrepancy between the blue and red money piles was less dramatic, Clinton still spent way more. For instance, the Trump campaign has only just started running its first paid ads of the general election campaign. Clinton, by contrast, has run nearly 60 million worth of ads, with about as much more ad time reserved for the future.

So where is Trump’s money going? Well, it seems like most of it is staying with the organisations that raised it. Campaigns don’t just fundraiser for themselves, you see. Each one has a complex  ecosystem of sub-committees, regional organisations and other bodies that raise money on their behalf.

For example, rather than donating to the Clinton campaign directly, i might give to ‘Democrats for Hillary’ or ‘Republicans for Hillary’ or even the joint fundraising comitees set up between the presidential campaigns and bodies like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

What Trump is doing is essentially outsourcing large portions of traditional campaign spending to these subsidiary organisations and to the Republican National Committee in particular. This is being sold as a move to strengthen the party as a whole, and counteract the much speculated upon down-ballot reverberations of Trumps currently fearsome unpopularity.

While this is likely to help Trump in terms of his relationship to the party elite (who will be grateful for the extra fundraising muscle), it is also a risky strategy.

Because the RNC and such bodies have a primary loyalty to the party as a whole, not to the trump campaign in particular. They are incentivized to support Republicans, not necessarily Trump. More importantly, they are not necessarily going to follow the strategy of the Trump campaign, or co-ordinate with it to the degree desired.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. But right now i am inclined to wonder about the wisdom of such a strategy on Trumps part. When you are behind, and require unlikely voters turning out for you to make your theory of the election work, the last thing you want to do is make your campaign less coordinated and more unwieldy.

Bias is a word that my professors beat out of my vocabulary at University for one very simple reason. It seldom has any effective content. To say something is ‘biased’ is essentially saying it was written by a human. Everything is ‘biased’, always and unavoidably. Therefore i won’t say i try and be ‘un-biased’ when i write here. What i do try to be is non-partisan.

It will come as no surprise to most of you that i am no fan of Trump, or Conservative politics in general. The title of this blog should make that obvious. But i’m also not interested in using this space to advocate for a particular policy or agenda. I say all this so you will understand that what follows is not intended as a defense of Trump, but an attempt to put his place in American political history in its proper context.

The way people around the world are reacting to the metamorphosis of The Donald from reality-show host to Presidential aspirant suggests he is an aberration in the history of American politics. But this is sadly untrue. Trump is just not that weird by historical standards, and in hindsight we should have all been less surprised by his rise.

To demonstrate the many parallels between Trump and previous candidates, and between the current national mood and popular feeling at other points in American history, i’m going to do a series of posts on previous presidential candidates with trump-like characteristics. Because Trump is not the disease affecting American political discourse, he is just the virulent rash it is currently breaking out in. This cycle has already happened. We have played this game before. And although some of the pieces were in different places, the moves made with them were really the same. And so, without further ado, i give you Henry Ross Perot.

H. Ross Perot, Reform Party. Ran 1992 and 1996.

The first thing to know about Perot is that people who called him Henry didn’t get on the Christmas card list. He hated it. So Ross it is.

In 1992 the country was in a funk. The United States experienced a recession in the previous year, the deficit was growing and unemployment peaked at 7.8%. People all over the country felt like the place was on the wrong track. The government did not seem to be serving their needs. They felt Washington was dominated by special interests whose only preoccupation was enriching themselves and elites who didn’t understand their struggles or share their concerns.

Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on a deficit reduction plan. Political gridlock reigned. The sitting president, George H. W. Bush, seemed a distant and ascetic figure more concerned with technocratic minutiae than the plight of the common man. The ‘establishment’ had sold out the citizenry, the professional politicians participating in a revolving door system that just returned the same people spouting the same soundbytes. There was a hunger for authenticity, for plain speaking and for someone to actually solve the nations multitudinous problems rather than just talking about them and blaming the other guy. If this sounds like what people are saying in 2016, well done. You are getting the point.

Enter Ross Perot. A short man who spoke with a distinctive Texan drawl, Perot was a self-made billionaire. With his military-style haircut, (short back and sides, no Trump Pelt  nonsense here), piercing eyes and direct speaking style he seemed the antithesis of the Washington insider.

But its the message that makes him similar to Trump. He didn’t have any experience in Government. But that was a good thing. Government was the problem. Government had wasted your money. Government was inefficient, incompetent, corrupt and vaguely un-masculine. While the Washington big-shots quibbled over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, Perot had been out there making jobs, making money and making deals. This is what he promised to bring to the Presidency. He would do in government what he had done in business, fix things and not ‘spend 10 years solving a 10 minute problem’. His experience outside of government qualified him because government had failed the people, because their institutions were no longer serving the citizens. Screw politics, Perot said, i know how to get results. I got them in business, and i can get them for you if you just elect me.

It is, fundamentally, the same pitch Trump is making. That is not a coincidence.  When confidence in the system is low, those from outside the system have an advantage. Usually its people successful in business or the military that step in to fill the gap. It is not terribly mysterious.

Perot cut through the traditional formulations of the binary political system. The problems of the nation weren’t complex and intractable. The politicians were just incompetent. The system was broken, said Brother Ross, and he was the cure.

Like an Olympian Colossus he would bestride the political divide and hurl thunderbolts of organisational and   administrative genius at the Titans endangering good governance. He would balance the budget before breakfast, rewrite crooked trade agreements that hurt American workers and businesses over lunch and then have the inner cities cleaned up before tea time.

The deficit. Unfair trade deals. Law and order. Sound familiar? It should. It is Trumpism writ large.

But in fairness to H. Ross and his crusade, he did have one big advantage in my eyes over trump. He tried to explain things, and persuade you that he had the solution. He booked a half-hour long infomercial in prime time, replete with graphs and figures and him calmly explaining how he would fix the deficit and have money left over for things people wanted. Trump would not be seen dead in such a capacity. His solutions are for him to know and you to find out. Explaining it would only give the game away to the Chinese, or the Mexicans or whoever the bogeyman de jour is.

Another difference is that Perot essentially constructed his own party. And that isn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds for someone like him. He was polling incredibly well for a while, looking like he might push Clinton into third place.

Although it eventually came to little, the problem with the Perot campaign was not the message. It was Ross’ perpetual micromanaging, his reluctance to commit enough money to the campaign to make it truly competitive and his bizarre behavior that doomed it. He thought the CIA was spying on him, thought the Bush campaign had used the CIA and FBI in some sort of foul play involving his daughters wedding, that someone had broken in and tampered with his automatic stock trading program to try and ruin him and a host of other strange and paranoid theories. He was, in other words, a bit of an odd duck.

But the message resonated. It took a diminutive Texas businessman with a good helping of paranoia and made him both a household name and a serious presidential contender for a while. With that in mind, is it really so hard to imagine that a plurality of Republican primary voters might be persuaded by a similar message two decades later?

Trump isn’t new. He is old. He is a very well aged wine poured into a new bottle. Admittedly this bottle has some particularly baroque edges, an objectionable shape and infuses the wine with a bitter and sickening aftertaste. But its not an innovation. It is merely a variation on a theme. The Republic has survived worse than Donald J. Trump, and it will endure long after he has gone back to his habitual private pursuits: filing for bankruptcy, defrauding consumers and decorating his buildings like a deranged magpie.

 

 

I remember the heady days of the Trump primary campaign. Everything seemed possible for His Orangeness The Donald. Cherished assumptions about presentation, temperament and the dynamics of Presidential politics were unceremoniously rent asunder, the chattering classes thrown out and their tawdry rags cast after them. We were living in the Era of Trump now. Post-factual, post-partisan, post-consistency and logic. It reminded me of nothing so much as a cut-price Cultural Revolution put together by a team of door to door steak-knife salesmen.  The only necessary element remaining in the campaign appeared to be the candidate himself, gesticulating wildly and spouting a word-salad of meaningless cliche and innuendo with breathtaking rapidity.

Some, like yours truly, attempted to apply some sort of schema in the hopeless task of comprehending the coming apocalypse. Early polls had been a very, very poor predictor of primary performance in previous cycles. So i comforted myself and others, assuring them he would be a mere flash in the pan. Oh we were giddy fools my friends.

Now that i have finished and digested the large helping of crow thrust in front of me after his primary victory, i can look with some satisfaction on events. Because, dear reader, the Age of Trump seems to have been and gone. And there was much rejoicing.

The theory was that nobody really cared what Trump said. Voters didn’t vote on policy, they voted on image and temperament. Trumps image was one of strength we were told, and his temperament was that of a mighty eagle with terrible hair, crushing its squishy and salmon-like Liberal prey in its unbreakable talons. I told them he could not win a general election, and they would reply that he could pivot till his hearts content without consequence. The media had already savaged him as best they could to no avail, so who would enforce any kind of consistency upon this savage beast? Trump will just start saying a whole bunch of moderate things come the General Election campaign. It will be like all this never happened.

This theory is currently experiencing some problems. If the theory was a train the train would have caught fire, derailed and sunk into a swamp. Service is now suspended. It will not be making any  further scheduled stops.

I wish i could say it was something to do with the Clinton campaigns masterful strategy, but really it is all down to trump once again. Like the biblical Joshua, he surrounded the fortress, gave a great shout and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Unfortunately, Trump did it to his own city this time.

We know Trump reads polls. He talks about them constantly. So it should not surprise us that the recent collapse in his electoral fortunes has caused ructions in the House of Trump. A few months ago the campaign fired Corey Lewandowski, the man previously responsible for running what was rather optimistically called the ‘trump campaign’.  To try and rein him back some way towards both Republican orthodoxy and the reality of modern professional political practice Paul Manafort was installed in Lewandowski’s place.

Now Manafort too has been unceremoniously dumped. He has been replaced by former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon. I could write a whole post on what i think of Breitbart (not much) and Bannon in particular. At one point i probably will, but at this juncture it will suffice to say he is not a ‘catch more bees with honey’ kind of guy. But Bannon isn’t really the problem.

The problem is thus: Can trump actually moderate himself and appeal to more centrist General Election voters?

I’m inclined to say no. There is simply no evidence of this, and it undermines the whole concept of the Trump campaign. Its about attitude. He doesn’t say what is true, he is ‘truthy’. Its an attribute he possesses, not a description of the content of his multitudinous speakings.  He does not speak the truth, he says what he wants to say, what he thinks is true. To start to censor himself, to bow to such mortal preconditions as reasonableness and honesty, would be antithetical to the entire edifice of Trumpism. The sort of authenticity as a substitute for actual knowledge or understanding message can’t survive any hint of contrivance. Or else he is just a politician. And if he is just a politician, he is an incredibly bad one.

That is why i don’t see the much talked about ‘pivot’ working, or even being seriously attempted. Trump is riding the tiger, and he dare not get off for fear it will turn on him and devour him wholesale. One Republican has been quoted saying the campaign reshuffle amounts to re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic. Mike Murphy, an alumni of the Jeb Bush campaign, said of the Trump ‘reset’ that ‘It’s unlikely. Like, my Labrador could walk up to the piano and start playing. Not going to bet on it. Trump is Trump’.

This reminds me of the last cycle. A memo was leaked from the Romney campaign joking that they wanted to fire a staff member. ‘He works on the top floor, and his name is Mitt’, they said. No quantity of ‘top-tier operatives’, as the Trump campaign seems determined to call them, can compensate for a candidate who will simply not stop slashing wildly at his nose to spite his face.

Since the convention he has picked a fight wirh the parents of a highly decorated deceased war veteran, doubled down on calling an American judge Mexican in an unmistakably pejorative way and committed a host of other easily exploitable errors. And now he has picked a fight with virtually the entire media, including the usual GOP cheerleaders over at Fox News. There is an old saying in politics: Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Make no mistake, the repeated scandals are starting to bite. It seems very clear now that the strategy that worked in the primary with the small and demographically unrepresentative Republican electorate in a crowded field is cutting very little ice with the wider populace.

In another concerning development for Trump, he is getting a smaller percentage of the media coverage. Previously his weakness on paid media (ads he runs with money) was offset by dominating ‘earned media’ (news coverage you don’t have to pay for). As Clinton gets more and more press, this advantage is beginning to slip away.

So can the metaphorical leopard change its spots in this instance? I am extremely doubtful. I’m not even sure this particular leopard understand what spots are, much less what they should be. And with so much of Trump’s wit and wisdom already baked in to the collective consciousness by now it is hard to see how perceptions could be easily reversed.

 

 

 

 

I thought it might be interesting at this point to examine the minor party candidates for the Presidency. And there are a few, although as will become very apparent none of them have the remotest chance of success. Many of them are not going to be an option for voters in some states. Places like California have very onerous demands for even getting on the ballot. Thousands of signatures from different parts of the state, all within a set time in order to meet the eligibility criteria. And having access to less electoral votes means you need to win the ones you do have access to even more urgently. All in all its not good for third parties out there. So, lets run down the list.

Gary Johnson (Libertarian, Access to 456 Electoral Votes) 

Former Governor of New Mexico, and also former Republican, Gary Johnson is the Libertarian nominee for president this cycle. And he is, just a little bit odd for a Presidential candidate. He wears sneakers seemingly everywhere and used to be the CEO of a medical marijuana company. He is, in other words, not cut from the same cloth as the standard candidate. But that makes sense, because neither is his party. The Libertarian party has been around for ages, and is overwhelmingly the most successful third party around right now. But that isn’t saying much. They control some local offices across the country, but have no representation in federal office. Last time Johnson did this he managed to capture about 1% of the popular vote. Johnson and his party present an interesting ideological melange. He holds positions usually reserved for the extremes of one party or the other. This might suggest he has cross-party appeal, which may prove true, but as Aneurin Bevan noted when you stand in the middle of the road you get hit by cars going both ways. Democrats won’t like his ardor for tax and spending cuts whereas Republicans will recoil at his positions on Abortion and drug legalization. The more votes Johnson can get, the  closer he gets to unlocking more public funding for the Libertarian cause. In that sense this is not a quixotic exercise, but the polls do give some reason for optimism. He won’t win, but in some surveys he is capturing 10% of the vote in a field dominated by two candidates with truly epic unfavorability ratings. I don’t think it will last. Numbers for third parties usually drop off towards polling day. But i wouldn’t be at all surprised if he got 3-5% in the end. Still a considerable increase. But no, Gary Johnson will not save you from Donald Trump right now.

Jill Stein (Green, Access to 425 Electoral Votes)

The Green party in the United States is a shadow of the Australian movement, and even more anemic than its British counterpart.   They have about the policy proscription you would think they do. Their ‘policy pillars’ are ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence. Which is all very nice, but isn’t really where a lot of the electorate is over there. The American Greens have some officeholders, to be sure, but again it is mostly on the local level. Their prospects are limited. They are just trying to catch up to the Libertarian party, and we have already been through how far away they still are. So no. Jill Stein will sadly not be riding in on her white horse to save the American left. The better candidate for this was Sanders, and as you will all have noticed he chose to carry out his crusade within the Democratic party, rather than outside it. That does not bode well for them.

Is that it? 

Well, really yes. But also no! Nobody after this point can win, even in theory, because their name is not on the ballot in enough states. But here we go anyway.

Darrell Castle (Constitution Party, Access to 187 Electoral Votes)

See, this is where it gets ridiculous. Take this Darrell Castle guy right here. He is running for the Constitution party, as down the line conservative as you can get, but he seems to be a Libertarian. Or what we would approximate as Libertarian at least. This is what happens with small parties, they are subject to being essentially annexed as wholly-owned subsidiaries for a time by a powerful personality and the central structure is too weak to maintain its ideological integrity. If it sounds like i just described what happened to the Republican Party with Trump coming along, that isn’t a coincidence. Its not a good sign for a Party. Maybe its not some aggressive play on Castles part. Perhaps the Constitution party were just running short of enthusiastic sacrificial lambs and Brother Darrell offered himself up. In any case, he is almost certainly not worth having on your radar.

Party for Socialism and Liberation / Peace and Freedom Party / Liberty Union Party(Access to 135 Electoral Votes) 

Ok, no. I’m not looking up these people. Its not going to be a thing. I’m really just including them note that the Party for Socialism, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party USA and the American Solidarity Party are all running their own tickets. So the next time you hear someone say Clinton or Obama or Kaine or someone is a Socialist or a Communist, remind them that they have their own candidates.

 

So that just about it for the third-parties. There is an Anti-Trump third party effort underway, and an interesting split in Utah, but i will write more fully on them in the future. For now, that is the state of the field as far as minor parties go.

Although they won’t win, if the margin of victory is only a few points, those 2-3% in a particular state can prove crucial. Both Trump and Clinton are hoping it will hurt the other more. Time will tell who is right, but i am inclined to think right now as the electoral math stands in a close election you would want to be Clinton.

 

One of the persistent oddities of the American political experiment is its binary structure. It is a democracy in which the high offices of state are almost universally filled by members of two old and entrenched parties. It is a two-party state. This is unsusual in the western world, especially in the modern era.

Although many people complain that that their country is dominanted by two austere monoliths carving up the national turkey between them, the reality is that most states in the developed world are in fact multi-party democracies. This fact can easily be disguised by majoritarian political systems that under-represent smaller parties and the viewpoints of their voters.

But Australia has its Greens, its Nationals and now apparently One Nation. The UK has the Lib-Dems, the SNP and a host of smaller factions. The continent of Europe is almost entirely habituated to multi-party coalition governments. Even Canada, America’s friendly neighbor to the north, has three significant national political parties, with the NDP forming the opposition in the last parliament (admittedly for the first time). It seems virtually everywhere in the OECD there are significant minor political parties that get a decent proportion of the votes and go on to influence the discourse, whether from government or not.

And yet the United states persists in its odd duopoly, everyone being represented by either a Republican or a Democrat.

So why is it so?

There are weighty tomes written by eminent political scientists on this, but i’m going to do the McDonalds version. There are three big factors that allow this to persist.

 

Personality

It is important to remember that the United States is a Republic. Thats not just to say they don’t have a royal family. Many of the Founding Fathers were concerned about what they called ‘Parliamentary Tyranny’. What they thus devised was a Republican, not a Parliamentary democracy. Soverignty is vested in the people, rather than in the institution of parliament or of the crown-in-parliament. They were worried not just about dictatorship as we would be today, but about a parliament encroaching further and further upon their new-won and much cherished liberties. And so the President, a direct representative of the vox populi was concieved, a sort of modern day Tribune of the Plebs to guard against this encroachment and act on issues where the deliberative style of the legislature was inefficient.

This ideology and system has made  American Politics very personality driven. To get the biggest prize, you need mass support rather than just elite support.  And early political parties in the U.S were almost entirely based around who you would support for the Presidency. That really defined which party you were in.

If you wan’t to be president you really can’t be too odd or strange. As with all popularity contests, the least offensive option to the majority has a much better time of it. And if you are a third party, unhappy with the two extant major parties, aren’t you probably just a little bit odd? Those dissatisfied with the consensus are almost by definition in a minority. When they are not is when you see parties break through. But usually the larger parties just co-opt your issues and eat away at your support. So its a hard-life for a minor party.

No prize for coming in third

Really. You don’t get anything. Its a very raw deal. And why would people keep gifting you with ther money and their time so you can run into a brick wall once every election cycle? Pretty soon it starts to look quixotic, and not in an romantic way. And then they accuse you of being a spoiler, of ‘stealing’ votes from other parties who would win without you in the race. Witness Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who is said by man to have lost Al Gore the Presidency. Its just not an edifying experience.

So who does it?

Generally people who are already famous, eccentric rich men, and people who are a little bit odd or care deeply about things that other people don’t care about much at all.   And remember what i said about being a little bit odd. Why would a high-quality candidate run for a minor party when he can run for a major party? Or at least, the seductive fiction goes, he could if he won the primary. Thats the route Bernie Sanders took, entering the primary of  a party with which he had been only informally associated. The primary system allowing this is another blow to third parties, as it opens up a more plausible alternative. Enter the primaries and win, and you and your ideas are suddenly much more mainstream.

America is Really, Realy big.

Seriously. Its huge. Look at the map, thats most of a pretty large continent. And there are lots of them, 318 million at last count. And they live all over the place with huge cities on both coasts. Running a truly national campaign in a nation like that is exhorbitantly expensive. If you want to play at the big-boys table, you are going to need friends with deep pockets. And people with deep pockets didn’t get them by backing losers. Some degree of plausibility is generally required.

America is Very, Very Diverse

Being such a large and populous country, people living in differen parts of the Union or from different communities have wildly divergent ideas of what constiutes good government or the good life. Its a big, loud, colourful and discordant mess. What someone in Massachusets and someone in Alabama might want the government to do are not necessarily the same thing. You can make political hay by representing the peculiarites of your region, but that is limiting in terms of national appeal. For instance, the Dixicrats (conservative Southern democrats who split with Truman) did well in the south, but didn’t even really bother with the rest of the country. Finiding an unrepresented national sentiment is difficult to do. They tend to be well staked out already by the extant parties. So minor parties often get trapped in geographical corners, unable to break through into regions that dont share the values of those whose support they already have.

Can one break through?

Yes. It does happen. But usually that coincides with one party disintegrating at some level, bleeding large chunks of support that make room in the landscape. That is why the troubles of the partis are worth watching. Because if the fault-lines keep growing a split is not inconcievable, particularly within the GOP. And that could change things entirely.

 

What was old is new again. As in 1992, the prospect of a Democratic presidential aspirant named Clinton sweeping some southern states into the Democratic fold is being discussed.

What is the New South? 

One day I will do a post about the re-alignment of the South towards the Republican party, which is in my opinion the most important development in American politics in the last century. But not today. Today, we discuss the group of states characterized as the ‘New South’. These are primarily Virginia, North Carolina and to a somewhat lesser degree Georgia. It’s important to note that the term is also used to describe a temperament and philosophy of government that has been the practice of politicians in many other Southern states, but it is these ones that have been most effectively transformed by economics, demography and policy into something approximating a distinct grouping when compared to the ‘old south’ (the other states that formed the Confederacy during the Civil War).

So what’s the difference?

Particularly after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the 1960’s, the South got a bad reputation in the wider American consciousness. Civil rights protests, segregation, the Klan and all the other signs and signifiers of the cultural pathologies and peculiarities of that region were on national display. It is unfair in historical terms to act as if the South was the only region in which racism existed at that time and since. But politics is comparative, so as the least racially tolerant and integrated region it inevitably became the poster child. Southern states were seen as intolerant, racialized, inward-looking and economically backwards. The term ‘New South’ came to be used to describe administrations, policies and (as we are concerned with here) states that seemed to subvert this identity.

How? Were they more racially tolerant?

Well, in some cases. But not always. Many simply shifted emphasis so as to talk about economics rather than segregation, while deliberately dragging their feet on integration. But let’s look at each of these states in turn, in descending order of democratic viability.

Virginia

The ‘Old Dominion’, site of the first British colony in the New World, has produced more presidents than any other state. This is largely because it was the most wealthy and populous colony at the foundation of the United States. Since the end of segregation and the exodus of working-class Southern voters from the Democratic party, Virginia had been pretty solidly Republican in presidential contests. But because of its heft in the early Republic, Virginia was chosen as the location out of which the District of Columbia would be carved. This has had unexpected consequences for us in the current day. As Washington has grown, its suburbs have spilled out into Virginia proper, injecting an increasingly large moderate element into the previously Conservative Virginian electorate. This, coupled with the states large and solidly-Democratic African-American population allowed Obama to win Virginia in both ’08 and ’12. The state has had a string of electorally sucessful Democratic governors in recent times, including Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine. The current Governor, Terry MCauliffe, is a long-time Clinton aide and member of their inner-circle and seems sure to pull out all the stops in trying to keep his state in the Democratic column for his former bosses. Winning the state against Trump seems highly plausible, if not likely. And doing so means Trump must look outside of the traditional Republican heartland and win swing-states elsewhere to counteract the loss of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.

North Carolina

The Tar Heel state is an interesting one. One of the first states to be hailed as showing a distinct character from the rest of the South, for a long time the ‘North Carolina Model’ was held up as a way forward for the whole region. This model included a progressive commitment to education funding and a pro-business economic strategy with comparatively high levels of public investment. This has led to several world-class universities and research institutions in the state and the development of a considerable financial center in Charlotte. This model was both helped by and reinforced lower levels of racial tension than in other parts of the South. All these factors allowed Obama to win the state in ’08, but in 2012 North Carolina went back to the Republicans. But in that same year the Democratic majority in the state legislature that had endured for decades and helped implement their much-lauded model was thrown out in a tidal wave of dissatisfaction. This may suggest that Clintons chances here are poor. But the current governor Pat McCrory has become one of the leaders in the current iteration of the incessant American culture wars, pushing what has become known as the ‘trans-gender bathroom bill’. This has fanned a growing sentiment that his administration has become too conservative for the state which it governs, and his loss could be Clinton’s gain. Current polling seems quite favorable to Clinton, but this far out from November such leads can be ephemeral and evaporate as polling day draws closer. Still, a victory for the Democrats here would net them 15 electoral votes. Add to this the fact that Clinton is unlikely to win North Carolina without also winning more moderate Virginia and a victory here begins to make a Trump victory mathematically problematic.

Georgia

The Peach State. No, really. That’s its moniker. The very name conjours the image in my mind of ice-tea being sipped on a sunlit porch as genteel men in linen suits fan themselves with their hats and discuss the weather. Which is appropriate, as Georgia is often seen as the heart of the South. But Georgia has a large African-American population and one of the fastest growing Hispanic populations in the United States. The Democrats have been talking about it becoming a ‘Purple’ or ‘Swing’ state for years, but it never seems to actually happen. As with Missouri, the Dems can never quite seem to seal the deal. Not since Clinton in 1992 has Georgia failed to fall in line behind the Republican nominee. But their margins have indeed been narrowing over recent years. Obama came comparatively close in ’08, but lost the state by about 8 points in 2012. Current polls show Clinton even with Trump in the state, or even with a slight edge. But there is a high level of undecideds, obviously un-enamoured of either candidate. With sufficient resources and careful positioning it is distinctly possible these could go for Clinton, especially if Trump fails to lift his numbers with suburban women, Hispanic voters and the state’s African-American community. What is more, putting money into competing in Georgia would force the under-resourced Trump campaign to put resources into securing its theoretical base rather than eating into the big industrial states Trump claims to be able to win over. Even having the state in play is a tactical victory for the Democrats. I would say a win here as unlikely but conceivable, and it is unlikely that it would be determinative in the electoral college. In other words, if Clinton is winning in Georgia she is probably enjoying such a good night she won’t require its 16 electoral votes.

What are the implications of Clinton being competitive in these states?

In the Presidential election, you want as many plausible paths to 270 electoral votes as possible. Taking what had been previously reliable Republican electoral votes in, say, Georgia would open up a lot of posibilities for getting to 270 for Clinton, and close several for Trump. It can reduce the necessity of winning states like Ohio and Florida who usually get the lion’s share of money and attention in Presidential races. But whether this polling is representative of actual voting intention remains to be seen. I will be more persuaded if the numbers continue in a consistent fashion over the next two weeks to ensure this is not simply a phenomenon associated with the publicity surrounding the recent Democratic convention. But Clinton’s competitiveness in the ‘New South’ is easily one of the more interesting stories in the current presidential election. A victory there could discredit Trump, his rehtoric and the entire basis of his campaign and the sentiments that underpin it by turning a simple loss into an electoral bloodbath.