No matter which party wins control of the House and Senate next month, the results are virtually certain to reinforce the paradox powering the nation’s steadily mounting political tension.
American politics today may be both more rigid and more unstable than at any other time since at least the Civil War. A politics that is rigid and unstable sounds like a contradiction in terms. But the system’s instability is a direct result of its rigidity. Because so many voters—and so many states—are reliably locked down for one side or the other, even the slightest shifts among the few voters and few states that are truly up for grabs can tilt the balance of power. The consequence is a politics in which neither party can sustain a durable advantage over the other, and political direction for a country of 330 million people is decided by a tiny sliver of voters in about half a dozen states—maybe a few hundred thousand people in all.
These twin forces largely explain why so many Americans now find politics so stressful. People across the country nervously parse the choices of distant voters in a handful of states to see which party will control the federal government. The balance always remains so wobbly that a momentary mood swing in just a few subdivisions outside Atlanta, Phoenix, or Philadelphia can determine whether Democrats are empowered to pass a new law codifying a national right to abortion, or Republicans are positioned to impose a national ban. Everything is always at stake—and nothing seems to break the deadlock.
Just how few states determine which side prevails? Probably no more than eight, and arguably as few as six. The list of genuine swing states extends no further than Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with New Hampshire and North Carolina plausibly added to that roster, though at the federal level the former measurably leans toward Democrats and the latter toward Republicans. The parties still dream of occasional statewide wins in other places—say, Colorado or Minnesota for Republicans and Ohio or Florida for Democrats—but they know that such victories will require unusual circumstances and candidates.
This small band of true swing states holds the balance of power between the massive red and blue blocks that are, as I’ve written, behaving as if they constitute different nations. Five states in this small group effectively decided the last presidential election by shifting from Donald Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Almost all of the highly competitive Senate races that will determine control of the chamber this year are unfolding in one of those eight most competitive states, too. Partisans who obsessively checked the poll results from those few states in 2020 have found themselves in a political Groundhog Day, scanning the FiveThirtyEight election-outcome probabilities on pretty much the same places two years later. Two years from now, in the 2024 presidential contest, they are almost guaranteed to be fixated on the same states again.
What’s more, the balance of power within those few swing states is also precarious; the outcome of elections teeters on microscopic shifts in turnout and/or voter preferences. Biden won the five states he flipped from 2016 by only a combined 279,265 votes, and more than half of that total came in Michigan alone. Few observers would be surprised if almost all of this year’s major Senate contests across the swing states come down to photo finishes.
In a new book on the 2020 election, The Bitter End, three prominent political scientists describe modern American politics as “calcified,” meaning that the majority of voters are firmly locked into support for one party based primarily on their views about cultural and demographic change. But the UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck, one of the co-authors, says that equating “calcification” with “stability” is a mistake. “Being stuck, or calcified, doesn’t mean we are stuck with one outcome,” she told me. “It means that because of that rough partisan parity, we are stuck on the knife’s edge. Anything is tipping these outcomes.”
The best evidence is that the modern Democratic electoral coalition is at least somewhat larger than the GOP’s. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. But the Democratic edge hasn’t been decisive enough to overcome the party’s inability to compete in large swaths of the country. Nor can Democrats overcome the structural advantages provided to the GOP by its dominance of smaller, preponderantly white and mostly Christian interior states, whose influence is magnified in the Electoral College and the Senate.
Barring a major surprise, next month’s election seems guaranteed to extend the longest period in American history when neither party has been able to establish a lasting advantage over the other.
If Democrats lose the House or Senate, or both, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president went into a midterm with unified control of Congress and the White House and then lost it. (That happened to Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010, and Trump in 2018.) No president since Jimmy Carter in 1978 has successfully defended unified control of government through a midterm election. Since 1968, in fact, either party has held unified control in Washington for just 16 of 54 years. In the 72 years before that (from 1896 to 1968), one party or the other held unified control for 58 years.
This isn’t the first extended period of political instability for the U.S. One party or the other managed just eight years of unified control in the tumultuous two decades before the Civil War. The era from 1877 to 1896 may have been the period most like today: The two sides managed just six years of unified control over those two decades, and never for more than two years at a time. Divided government was also the rule through the 1950s. But none of these earlier periods of instability persisted remotely as long as today’s.
All of the earlier periods without a dominant party were notable for the lack of clear differentiation between the sides. In the decades before the Civil War, for instance, the need to mollify northern and southern wings prevented either the Whigs or the Democrats from taking a clear position in opposition to the spread of slavery.
Now it’s the gulf between the parties that largely explains their standoff. In their current ideological configurations, neither side can consistently win enough states to sustain an advantage. Democrats dominate the coastal states most integrated into the 21st-century Information Age economy; the heartland states centered on the 20th-century powerhouse industries of manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture are a sea of Republican red. Neither side has managed more than idiosyncratic incursions into the other’s terrain (like Republican Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial win in Virginia and Democrat Joe Manchin’s three Senate wins in West Virginia).
Generational and demographic change may strengthen Democrats over time, but as long as attitudes about American identity remain the principal dividing line in our politics, Vavreck, like many others, doesn’t see either side breaking out of today’s trench warfare. And she expects that identity-centered division—what I’ve called the collision between the Republican “coalition of restoration” and the Democratic “coalition of transformation”—to remain the central focus of our politics for years. “This is the dimension of conflict we are fighting on for the foreseeable future,” she said. “COVID didn’t dislodge it; the murder of George Floyd didn’t dislodge it; the Capitol insurrection didn’t dislodge it.”
One way to measure how dug in we’ve become is to look at the consistency of presidential-election results over time. Forty states, or four-fifths of the total, have voted the same way in each of the four presidential elections since 2008: 20 for the Democratic nominees, 20 for the Republicans. That’s a modern peak for consistency. Thirty-four states voted the same way in the four presidential elections from 1992 through 2004. In the four elections from 1976 through 1988, only 25 did. Even in the four consecutive elections won by Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1932 through 1944, only about two-thirds of the states voted the same way each time.
What’s especially relevant for next month’s election is a corollary trend. Not only are more states reliably voting the same way for president; they are also, to a greater extent than earlier, aligning their votes in congressional elections with their preferences for the White House. Republicans hold just one of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states that have voted Democratic in at least the past four presidential elections (Susan Collins in Maine), and Democrats hold just two of 40 in the four-time Republican states (Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana). Republicans this year might capture a Senate seat in Nevada—a state on the Democratic list—and solidly Republican Utah, of all places, looks reasonably competitive, but otherwise the November results are unlikely to change those numbers.
With each side realistically contesting Senate seats in so few states, it’s no wonder, as I’ve written, that the parties are much less likely than in the past to accumulate comfortable Senate majorities—and thus much more likely to quickly lose control of the upper chamber after winning it. Neither side has held the Senate majority for more than eight consecutive years since 1980, a span unprecedented in American history.
The fact that control of Congress appears within reach for both sides in virtually every election, as it does again this year, heightens the sense of urgency and intensity around each campaign. So does the awareness that, because the parties have become so polarized in their goals, each shift in control can produce enormous changes in policy, no matter how wispy the change in voter attitudes that precipitated it. “The difference in policy now between the group that has 51 percent and the group that has 49 percent is so enormous because of the polarization and divergence of the two parties,” the longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. Such big change resting on such small shifts, Ayres added, “is not healthy for democracy.”
Trump’s emergence has further raised the stakes over control of Congress and the White House. Many independent students of democracy and authoritarianism believe that if restored to unified control over government, Trump—and the many Republicans embracing his discredited fraud claims—will seek to tilt the electoral rules in a way that makes it more difficult to again remove him from power. A similar dynamic is already evident in the 21 red states that responded to Trump’s 2020 defeat by passing laws making voting more difficult. “If the Republican Party manages to get control one way or another, including both legal and illegal things, and rig the system a little bit more, we could have a period of more continuity [in unified control of Washington] but it would be minority government,” the political scientist Thomas Mann, a co-author of a seminal 2012 book on congressional polarization, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, told me.
Which is to say that you can likely add the future of American democracy to the list of issues that will soon be decided by a relative handful of voters in the handful of states at the tipping point of our internal cold war.
NEW YORK (AP) — In a new video posted early Election Day, Beyoncé channels Pamela Anderson in the television program “Baywatch” – red one-piece swimsuit and all – and asks viewers to vote.
In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, set to most of “Bodyguard,” a four-minute cut from her 2024 country album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé cosplays as Anderson’s character before concluding with a simple message, written in white text: “Happy Beylloween,” followed by “Vote.”
At a rally for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh on Monday night, the former president spoke dismissively about Beyoncé’s appearance at a Kamala Harris rally in Houston in October, drawing boos for the megastar from his supporters.
“Beyoncé would come in. Everyone’s expecting a couple of songs. There were no songs. There was no happiness,” Trump said.
She did not perform — unlike in 2016, when she performed at a presidential campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland – but she endorsed Harris and gave a moving speech, initially joined onstage by her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland.
“I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said.
“A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided,” she said at the rally in Houston, her hometown.
“Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations,” she continued. “We must vote, and we need you.”
Harris used the song in July during her first official public appearance as a presidential candidate at her campaign headquarters in Delaware. That same month, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, publicly endorsed Harris for president.
Beyoncé gave permission to Harris to use the song, a campaign official who was granted anonymity to discuss private campaign operations confirmed to The Associated Press.
Outside of sports and a “Cold front coming down from Canada,” American news media only report on Canadian events that they believe are, or will be, influential to the US. Therefore, when Justin Trudeau’s announcement, having finally read the room, that Canada will be reducing the number of permanent residents admitted by more than 20 percent and temporary residents like skilled workers and college students will be cut by more than half made news south of the border, I knew the American media felt Trudeau’s about-face on immigration was newsworthy because many Americans would relate to Trudeau realizing Canada was accepting more immigrants than it could manage and are hoping their next POTUS will follow Trudeau’s playbook.
Canada, with lots of space and lacking convenient geographical ways for illegal immigrants to enter the country, though still many do, has a global reputation for being incredibly accepting of immigrants. On the surface, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver appear to be multicultural havens. However, as the saying goes, “Too much of a good thing is never good,” resulting in a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, which you can almost taste in the air. A growing number of Canadians, regardless of their political affiliation, are blaming recent immigrants for causing the housing affordability crises, inflation, rise in crime and unemployment/stagnant wages.
Throughout history, populations have engulfed themselves in a tribal frenzy, a psychological state where people identify strongly with their own group, often leading to a ‘us versus them’ mentality. This has led to quick shifts from complacency to panic and finger-pointing at groups outside their tribe, a phenomenon that is not unique to any particular culture or time period.
My take on why the American news media found Trudeau’s blatantly obvious attempt to save his political career, balancing appeasement between the pitchfork crowd, who want a halt to immigration until Canada gets its house in order, and immigrant voters, who traditionally vote Liberal, newsworthy; the American news media, as do I, believe immigration fatigue is why Kamala Harris is going to lose on November 5th.
Because they frequently get the outcome wrong, I don’t take polls seriously. According to polls in 2014, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were in a dead heat in Ontario, yet Wynne won with more than twice as many seats. In the 2018 Quebec election, most polls had the Coalition Avenir Québec with a 1-to-5-point lead over the governing Liberals. The result: The Coalition Avenir Québec enjoyed a landslide victory, winning 74 of 125 seats. Then there’s how the 2016 US election polls showing Donald Trump didn’t have a chance of winning against Hillary Clinton were ridiculously way off, highlighting the importance of the election day poll and, applicable in this election as it was in 2016, not to discount ‘shy Trump supporters;’ voters who support Trump but are hesitant to express their views publicly due to social or political pressure.
My distrust in polls aside, polls indicate Harris is leading by a few points. One would think that Trump’s many over-the-top shenanigans, which would be entertaining were he not the POTUS or again seeking the Oval Office, would have him far down in the polls. Trump is toe-to-toe with Harris in the polls because his approach to the economy—middle-class Americans are nostalgic for the relatively strong economic performance during Trump’s first three years in office—and immigration, which Americans are hyper-focused on right now, appeals to many Americans. In his quest to win votes, Trump is doing what anyone seeking political office needs to do: telling the people what they want to hear, strategically using populism—populism that serves your best interests is good populism—to evoke emotional responses. Harris isn’t doing herself any favours, nor moving voters, by going the “But, but… the orange man is bad!” route, while Trump cultivates support from “weird” marginal voting groups.
To Harris’s credit, things could have fallen apart when Biden abruptly stepped aside. Instead, Harris quickly clinched the nomination and had a strong first few weeks, erasing the deficit Biden had given her. The Democratic convention was a success, as was her acceptance speech. Her performance at the September 10th debate with Donald Trump was first-rate.
Harris’ Achilles heel is she’s now making promises she could have made and implemented while VP, making immigration and the economy Harris’ liabilities, especially since she’s been sitting next to Biden, watching the US turn into the circus it has become. These liabilities, basically her only liabilities, negate her stance on abortion, democracy, healthcare, a long-winning issue for Democrats, and Trump’s character. All Harris has offered voters is “feel-good vibes” over substance. In contrast, Trump offers the tangible political tornado (read: steamroll the problems Americans are facing) many Americans seek. With Trump, there’s no doubt that change, admittedly in a messy fashion, will happen. If enough Americans believe the changes he’ll implement will benefit them and their country…
The case against Harris on immigration, at a time when there’s a huge global backlash to immigration, even as the American news media are pointing out, in famously immigrant-friendly Canada, is relatively straightforward: During the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, illegal Southern border crossings increased significantly.
The words illegal immigration, to put it mildly, irks most Americans. On the legal immigration front, according to Forbes, most billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name three, have immigrants as CEOs. Immigrants, with tech skills and an entrepreneurial thirst, have kept America leading the world. I like to think that Americans and Canadians understand the best immigration policy is to strategically let enough of these immigrants in who’ll increase GDP and tax base and not rely on social programs. In other words, Americans and Canadians, and arguably citizens of European countries, expect their governments to be more strategic about immigration.
The days of the words on a bronze plaque mounted inside the Statue of Liberty pedestal’s lower level, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” are no longer tolerated. Americans only want immigrants who’ll benefit America.
Does Trump demagogue the immigration issue with xenophobic and racist tropes, many of which are outright lies, such as claiming Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets? Absolutely. However, such unhinged talk signals to Americans who are worried about the steady influx of illegal immigrants into their country that Trump can handle immigration so that it’s beneficial to the country as opposed to being an issue of economic stress.
In many ways, if polls are to be believed, Harris is paying the price for Biden and her lax policies early in their term. Yes, stimulus spending quickly rebuilt the job market, but at the cost of higher inflation. Loosen border policies at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was increasing was a gross miscalculation, much like Trudeau’s immigration quota increase, and Biden indulging himself in running for re-election should never have happened.
If Trump wins, Democrats will proclaim that everyone is sexist, racist and misogynous, not to mention a likely White Supremacist, and for good measure, they’ll beat the “voter suppression” button. If Harris wins, Trump supporters will repeat voter fraud—since July, Elon Musk has tweeted on Twitter at least 22 times about voters being “imported” from abroad—being widespread.
Regardless of who wins tomorrow, Americans need to cool down; and give the divisive rhetoric a long overdue break. The right to an opinion belongs to everyone. Someone whose opinion differs from yours is not by default sexist, racist, a fascist or anything else; they simply disagree with you. Americans adopting the respectful mindset to agree to disagree would be the best thing they could do for the United States of America.
PHOENIX (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent proponent of debunked public health claims whom Donald Trump has promised to put in charge of health initiatives, said Saturday that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected president.
Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.
Kennedy made the declaration Saturday on the social media platform X alongside a variety of claims about the heath effects of fluoride.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy wrote. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “want to Make America Healthy Again,” he added, repeating a phrase Trump often uses and links to Kennedy.
Trump told NBC News on Sunday that he had not spoken to Kennedy about fluoride yet, “but it sounds OK to me. You know it’s possible.”
The former president declined to say whether he would seek a Cabinet role for Kennedy, a job that would require Senate confirmation, but added, “He’s going to have a big role in the administration.”
Asked whether banning certain vaccines would be on the table, Trump said he would talk to Kennedy and others about that. Trump described Kennedy as “a very talented guy and has strong views.”
The sudden and unexpected weekend social media post evoked the chaotic policymaking that defined Trump’s White House tenure, when he would issue policy declarations on Twitter at virtually all hours. It also underscored the concerns many experts have about Kennedy, who has long promoted debunked theories about vaccine safety, having influence over U.S. public health.
In 1950, federal officials endorsed water fluoridation to prevent tooth decay, and continued to promote it even after fluoride toothpaste brands hit the market several years later. Though fluoride can come from a number of sources, drinking water is the main source for Americans, researchers say.
Officials lowered their recommendation for drinking water fluoride levels in 2015 to address a tooth condition called fluorosis, that can cause splotches on teeth and was becoming more common in U.S. kids.
In August, a federal agency determined “with moderate confidence” that there is a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids. The National Toxicology Program based its conclusion on studies involving fluoride levels at about twice the recommended limit for drinking water.
A federal judge later cited that study in ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen cautioned that it’s not certain that the amount of fluoride typically added to water is causing lower IQ in kids, but he concluded that mounting research points to an unreasonable risk that it could be. He ordered the EPA to take steps to lower that risk, but didn’t say what those measures should be.
In his X post Saturday, Kennedy tagged Michael Connett, the lead attorney representing the plaintiff in that lawsuit, the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization has a lawsuit pending against news organizations including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy is on leave from the group but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
What role Kennedy might hold if Trump wins on Tuesday remains unclear. Kennedy recently told NewsNation that Trump asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and some agencies under the Department of Agriculture.
But for now, the former independent presidential candidate has become one of Trump’s top surrogates. Trump frequently mentions having the support of Kennedy, a scion of a Democratic dynasty and the son of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy traveled with Trump Friday and spoke at his rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump said Saturday that he told Kennedy: “You can work on food, you can work on anything you want” except oil policy.
“He wants health, he wants women’s health, he wants men’s health, he wants kids, he wants everything,” Trump added.
