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The Trump Presidency and the Structureof Modern American PoliticsByron E. Shafer and Regina L. Wagner

How much of politics is specific to its actors and how much is the reflection of an established structure is a perennial concern ofpolitical analysts, one that becomes especially intense with the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. In order tohave a template for assigning the outcomes of politics to structure rather than idiosyncrasy, we begin with party balance,ideological polarization, substantive content, and a resulting process of policy-making drawn from the immediate postwar period.The analysis then jumps forward with that same template to the modern world, dropping first the Trump candidacy and then theTrump presidency into this framework. What emerges is a modern electoral world with increased prospects for what might becalled off-diagonal candidacies and a policy-making process that gathers Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, andDonald Trump together as the modern presidents.

O ne thing that political scientists reliably do istease out the underlying structure of a nation’spolitics and use it to interpret political events as

they unfold. One thing that Donald Trump reliably does isflummox political scientists with words and actions thatthey do not recognize as conventional behavior. Butshould this disjunction be laid at the doorstep of a cantan-kerous president, or is it more appropriately seen as simpleinterpretive failure by those (flummoxed) political scien-tists? Asked more politely, can the Trump presidency beseen generally as one among several logical results ofa political structure recognized consensually by a greatmany analysts, even as they ignore the inescapable linkbetween structure and outcome?

From one side, the first tweeting president, witha willingness to reach below the belt and a propensityto indulge (frequent) changes of his own mind, offers

substantial evidence—bait—for those who prefer theidiosyncratic side of this particular dialectic. But fromthe other side, the extent to which every presidency isidiosyncratic is precisely the sense in which politicalscientists have nothing distinctive to say. So perhaps weourselves should begin by saying what this interpretiveeffort is and is not. It is an attempt to isolate the broaderstructure of modern American politics, to ask about therole of that structure in shaping the electoral fortunes ofa Trump candidacy and the policy products of a Trumppresidency. As such, it cannot be a focus on the importantways in which Donald Trump is different, unique, or truly“Trumpian”.Rather, it is a focus on the equally important ways in

which his candidacy, election, and governance embodyfamiliar, almost predictable, patterns. So it certainlycannot be a projection of this particular president’simpact on societal (or even just political) norms—oftenmore a Rorschach for the anxieties of social scientists thana genuine piece of social science. Which is not to dismissthe specific game-changers that are vaguely visible on thecurrent horizon—perhaps Special Counsel RobertMuellerreally will confirm one or another of the alleged smokingguns from the annals of campaign behavior, financialconnection, or foreign involvement—but only to say thatthese cannot well be systematically projected.In that light, the first section of this particular in-

terpretive effort begins with the structure of Americanpolitics in the years following the Second World War,years treated in their time as a period cursed by partisangridlock and policy dithering, but now recalled nostalgi-cally as a time when politicians could build coalitions andmake policy—as well as being a golden age for American

Their current project is The Long War: Policy Respon-siveness and Democratic Representation in AmericanPolitics, 1952–2012.

Byron E. Shafer is Glenn B. & Cleone Orr Hawkins Chair ofPolitical Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Hismost recent book isThe American Political Pattern: Stabilityand Change, 1932–2016 (University Press of Kansas,2016). Regina L. Wagner is Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Political Science at the University of Alabama,Tuscaloosa, with a completed doctoral dissertation on “Patternsof Representation: Women’s Political Representation in theU.S. and the Conceptualization of Women’s Interests”.

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political science. Beginning with this period has two clearadvantages. On their own terms, these years provide thenecessary template for comparisons to a modern successorworld. In the process, they demonstrate how an ongoingpolitical structure shapes the electoral outcomes and policyprocesses of more than one individual president within itsera.The next section then leaps to the most recent quarter-

century, from 1992 to the present, asking again about the(changed) structure of American politics, along with itsassociated electoral pattern and its diagnostic policyprocess. A contemporary political structure is alwaysmore challenging to elicit than one which offers, say,the fifty years of historical perspective informing the firstsection. Yet the same critical elements—party balance,ideological polarization, and substantive conflict—shouldbe able to connect this modern structure to the electoralcontests of its period as well as to the policy-makingprocess that really contributes its diagnostic character.In the third section, the products of such a comparison

thus drop the Trump candidacy of 2016 into a more fullydeveloped framework. A fourth section permits droppingthe Trump presidency into this framework. Within it—to cut to the chase—the election of 2016 appears less ananomaly and more as one of a small set of recurrentlyavailable alternative outcomes, albeit not the most com-mon variant. Even more to the point, this frameworkconnects the policy-making process of the Trump Admin-istration to the three presidencies that preceded it—thoseof Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—again making it look even less like an anomaly and morelike a distinguishable part of an ongoing whole.Our interpretive effort closes with a brief fifth section

by asking what such an analysis would imply goingforward, especially regarding the 2018 elections.

The Old World of American PoliticalStructureThe first critical aspect of a continuing American politicsin the initial postwar years was the one that was moststrikingly different from the years before the GreatDepression and the New Deal—the appearance and thenthe institutionalization of a Democratic voting majoritynationwide. No serious analyst missed the initial, jarringshift between a solid Republican majority in the 1920s anda huge Democratic edge from 1930 onward.1 On the otherhand, observers at the time debated its lasting character,and recent research has suggested that this new Demo-cratic majority was not really institutionalized until theearly postwar years, beginning with the re-election ofPresident Harry Truman in 1948.2

Figure 1 offers the party balance from the NationalElection Study for this period in both canonical ways, firstas an answer to the single question, “Do you think ofyourself as a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent, or

what?”, then as an answer to the two-fold query probingthe strength of attachment among confessed partisans orthe partisan leanings of those who deny any such an initialidentification.3 What emerges for the late New Deal era isa solid Democratic majority, seen at its most basic in figure1A, where the aggregate edge over the Republicans isimpressive, and then with internal distinctions in figure1B, where the Democrats can nearly dispense not just withall of the Independents but with most of the LeaningDemocrats too. This suggests a world in which theseDemocrats were the default choice to gain nationalmajorities, and such a world was clearly in existence: theRepublicans succeeded exactly once between 1932 and1968 in wresting away the presidency, courtesy of DwightEisenhower, exactly twice in that same stretch—1947–1948 and 1953–1954—in wresting away control ofCongress.

On the other hand, these bedrock facts are true butextremely misleading when the task is unpacking thelarger structure of American politics in this period. Forwhere party identification suggested a huge break withthe partisan past, courtesy of the Great Depression andthe New Deal, the ideological balance within those partiessuggested that it was the New Deal years that had beendeviant, with the postwar world returning to an older,quintessentially factional patterning to American partypolitics.4 Congress was the institutional venue that allowedthis underlying pattern to surface in an easily measurablefashion, just as Congress was the venue that would confirmthe place of factional politics in the making of postwarpolicy. And there, the policy analyst needed four factions,

Figure 1Party Identification in the Nation as a Whole:The Late New Deal Era

Data: American National Election Studies, University of Michigan,

and Stanford University. ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File

(1948–2016). Ann Arbor, MI

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not two parties, in order to talk about this postwar processof policy-making.

While the number of potential factions was in somesense limitless if the analyst was willing to micro-analyzethe partisan clusters of the time, each party could in factbe characterized through one dominant and one second-ary faction.5 For the Democrats, Northern Democratswere the dominant faction and Southern Democratsthe main secondary alternative. For the Republicans—effectively missing in the South—a better distinction wasbetween Regular Republicans in the nation as a whole andNortheastern Republicans as the main secondary alterna-tive. Figure 2 offers these four factions for our chosenyears, in essence the late New Deal era, along with theirdistribution in the short high New Deal that preceded it.

The high New Deal era is helpful in underlining thescale of the partisan earthquake that arrived in theaftermath of the Great Depression. Yet today, its twolonely Congresses of 1935–1936 and 1937–1938 showmore clearly the change in factional alignments thatsucceeded it, since these two Congresses are still the onlyones in all of American history to be characterized byNorthern Democratic majorities. Beginning in 1938,a longer-lived world (re)emerged, one that would becentral to policy-making throughout the immediate post-war years. This new partisan world had two dominantcharacteristics. First, it featured a partial revival of Re-publican prospects nationwide. If the Republican Partynever recovered its pre-New Deal health during theseimmediate postwar years, it did reliably cut the aggregateDemocratic advantage. But second, this new political erawent on to emphasize the importance of the mainsecondary factions, the Southern Democrats and theNortheastern Republicans, inside their respective nationalparties.6

It was this second aspect of change that would becentral to policy-making for the long generation after theSecond World War. With social welfare continuing as thedominant policy realm in American national politics,Northern Democrats would continue to square offagainst Regular Republicans as the left and the right oneconomic and welfare policy.7 Yet victory or defeat for theNorthern Democratic faction, and indeed the specifics ofmost of the policy secured by either side, would bedetermined by the success of these Northern Democratsin holding their Southern brethren on side or in drawingNortheastern Republicans across the line—just as victoryor defeat for Regular Republicans would reside in holdingtheir Northeastern colleagues on side or in attractingSouthern Democrats.On the other hand, that still drastically understates the

increasing complexity of the policy bargaining thatcharacterized American politics during these years. Forwhere the high New Deal had centered overwhelminglyon issues of social welfare, these issues were now joinedby two other major substantive domains for policyconflict. Foreign affairs moved to the center of Americanpolitics during the Second World War and stayed there asthe United States became a moving force in the longCold War that followed.8 And civil rights welled upwithin American society rather than being imposed fromthe outside, but was likewise intrinsic to policy conflictduring the immediate postwar years.9

That might have been enough to make the policy-making process additionally complex in a major way. Yetthis still understates the complexity of that process, assynthesized in figure 3, because each of these three policydomains aligned the four main party factions in a differentfashion. We have already noted that social welfare pittedNorthern Democrats (the liberals) against Regular Repub-licans (the conservatives), with Southern Democrats andNortheastern Republicans as the swing factions. Yetforeign affairs arrayed these factions quite differently,pitting Southern Democrats (the internationalists) againstRegular Republicans (the isolationists), with NorthernDemocrats and Northeastern Republicans in play. Andcivil rights, famously, pitted Northern Democrats (theintegrationists) against Southern Democrats (the segrega-tionists), with Northeastern Republicans and RegularRepublicans as the crucial pivots.What resulted from this political structure was “in-

crementalism”, a process of constant building and re-building of political coalitions and constant adjustmentand readjustment of major public policies.10 The latterwere made and remade as the balance among the fourmajor factions shifted, of course. But it could actually bemade and remade without even much change in thatunderlying balance, because an initiative in one majorpolicy domain would possess inherent implications forcoalitions in the other two. One result was that all the

Figure 2Factional Composition of the Two Parties inCongress: The House in the High and the LateNew Deal Eras

Data: Leweis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam

Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet (2017). Voteview: Con-

gressional Roll-Call Votes Database. http://voteview.com

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major players needed to pursue coalition-building with aneye not just on four factions, but on the array of those fourfactions in three major policy domains—and on the waythat these arrays would interact in response to a majorpolicy gambit within any one.As complicated as this might seem to the modern eye,

the main players came quickly to understand the strategiclogic behind it. Norms of behavior that maximized thelimited but real gains that could be extracted from thislogic followed inexorably. And the resulting dynamiclasted for a very long time.11 In passing, this dynamicserved as a major demonstration of the power of a newlyself-conscious empirical political science, coming to fru-ition within this late New Deal environment.12 At oneextreme, its admirers came to view this diagnostic policyprocess as the genius of American politics, incremental butreliably adaptive.13 At the other extreme, its criticscomplained that too little policy was being made, andthat what was being made was wrong.14 Yet neitheradmirers nor critics differed much about the underlyingempirical reality of a complex factional politics funneledthrough an incremental policy-making process.Where did the presidential candidates who populated that

political world come from? The answer involves two quitedifferent places, as befits two very different types of politicalparty. Democratic nominees came directly out of the regularparty machinery, especially the old-fashioned organized

parties that still occupied the major (competitive but usuallyDemocratic) industrial states, in consultation with a newlymuscular labor movement and the burgeoning civil rightsorganizations.15 As such, these nominees were effectively pre-processed for the electoral and policy realms that they wouldencounter. Harry Truman in 1948 was archetypal, even if hearrived by way of the vice presidency. But so was AdlaiStevenson, who owed his nomination not to the intellectualswhom he charmed but to the Chicago machine, the Illinoisparty, and organized allies around the country.

Republican nominees were different. Their party toohad possessed organized branches in major places beforethe Great Depression. Afterward, however, theydepended on mobilizing issue activists for a world inwhich their national nominees were likely recurrentlosers.16 Why, then, did the result not look like theparticipatory parties of the modern world, which wouldproduce polarized nominees who catered explicitly to thissort of issue activist? Because the formal structure even ofthis minority party retained enough power over presiden-tial nominations to insist on a nominee who could hope tocrack the Democratic majority, as with Thomas Dewey, anapparent shoe-in in 1948, and Dwight Eisenhower, whoproved to be the real thing in 1952. Diagnostically, bothDewey and Eisenhower actually defeated the favorite ofRepublican activists, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the truehero of the true believers in that far-off time.

Figure 3Factional alignments in the later New Deal era

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A Parallel Vision of the Modern World?A parallel description of the modern American politicalstructure—the structure that either produced the Trumppresidency or was contradicted by it—must begin bydemarcating this modern world, ideally by way of the samegeneral measures used to accomplish this task in theimmediate postwar period. A simple and straightforwardway to do this is to outline all postwar periods, the oneswith a continuing structure that defines them in politicalterms, by the life of their diagnostic electoral outcomes.For the late New Deal era, this meant a blanketingDemocratic dominance of electoral outcomes in thenation as a whole, with only one Republican Presidencyand only two one-term congressional deviations. Unifiedpartisan control of the institutions of American nationalgovernment was the diagnostic and recurrent result.

That pattern was succeeded by one commonly recog-nized as an era of divided government.17 In these years,from 1968 through 1988 with the sole exception of theone-term Carter “accidency”, Republicans always con-trolled the presidency and Democrats always controlledCongress. Split—not unified—partisan control was thusits diagnostic result. By subtraction, that leaves the yearsfrom 1992 to 2018 (and counting), as the putative modernworld, if we can assign a partisan pattern that gives theseyears coherence as well. With hindsight, this too isremarkably easy. Though recall that the pivotal electionbetween the late New Deal era and the era of dividedgovernment looked like a simple deviation when it firstarrived.18 Only a further generation made it clear that1968 was instead a harbinger and not a deviation.

In the same way, the pivotal election of 1992,terminating the era of divided government and introduc-ing the modern world, looked every bit as anomalous itsfirst time out.19 Yet a further twenty-five years makes ittoo look like part of a similarly coherent era. Partisanvolatility with three marker characteristics provides theessence of this coherence: 1) a succession of two-termpresidencies that alternate between the parties; 2) unifiedpartisan control of government at the beginning of eachsuch presidency; and 3) a return to split partisan controlwithin each at the first plausible opportunity. A tourthrough the specific elections that constitute this periodmay help to make this coherence evident, while under-lining the partisan volatility at its electoral core.20

• At the start of Bill Clinton in 1992, there was unifiedpartisan control of the elective institutions of Amer-ican national government, in Democratic hands;

• Under Clinton, there was also split partisan control ofAmerican national government, with the presidencyDemocratic and Congress Republican;

• At the start of George W. Bush in 2000, there wasunified partisan control of those elective institutions,but in Republican hands this time;

• Under Bush, there was also split partisan control butin the opposite direction, with the presidency Re-publican and Congress Democratic;

• At the start of Barack Obama in 2008, there was againunified partisan control, back in Democratic hands;

• Under Barack Obama, there was then split control inthe direction opposite the Bush version, with thepresidency Democratic and Congress Republican;

• And at the start of Donald Trump in 2016, there wasonce more unified partisan control, of a durationunknown as this is written.

On the one hand, that is a remarkably kaleidoscopicset of electoral outcomes. Direct historical analogies haveto reach all the way back to the 1840s for a counterpart,a historical comparison that only emphasizes the chal-lenge in finding some ongoing structure that can makesuch a pattern appear logically coherent.21 On the otherhand, the elements of just such a political structure are intruth impressively (if implicitly) consensual among mod-ern political scientists. It is just that they resist treatingthose elements as a coherent whole, which leaves thesepolitical scientists free to concentrate on the idiosyncraticelements of the Clinton or the Bush or the Obama or—ofcourse—the Trump presidency, rather than on this latterpresidency as one of the small set of outcomes that areplausible within an ongoing political structure like that ofthe modern American world.Again, no one is likely to confuse Clinton, Bush,

Obama, or Trump as individuals, and for some purposes,it is their individual distinctions that matter. Yet a focuson the structural elements that made their presidenciespossible and that shaped policy-making during theirtimes in office is what remains central here. But whatare these elements of contemporary political structure, thecounterparts to those characterizing the immediate post-war years and—we think—the ones frequently saluted bycontemporary political scientists who simply do not go onto integrate them into a modern whole? They are, as in thefirst section of this paper:

• a party balance, one more competitive than in the lateNew Deal era;

• an ideological polarization, light years away from thedepolarized factionalism of that old world;

• a radically simplified substantive content to the policyconflicts of the modern period, as alternative policydomains collapse into one dominant dimension; and

• a process of policy-making frequently lamented as‘gridlock punctuated by omnibus legislation.’

It is this latter lament that actually helps unify the fourmodern presidencies to date.How are these key elements embodied specifically in

the modern political world? Under orthodox measures ofparty balance, the disproportionate Democratic edge of the





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old world has been reduced but hardly eliminated in themodern era. Figure 4A attests to a modest erosion,accompanied by even smaller gains for Republican iden-tifiers. Within it, figure 4B suggests that strong identifiershave been impressively stable across all these years, whileweak identifiers have declined and independent identifiersmultiplied, for both parties. Yet these differences, whileclear, are also truly modest.22 Moreover, the preceding eraof divided government had already offered the sternestkind of warning about reading too much into change ofthis sort. After all, the major point of this interveningperiod with regard to party identification was that (withthe one Carter exception), the lesser party in publicpreferment should always win the presidency, while thelosing (albeit majority) party could expect to see its hold onCongress marginally strengthened.This suggests that ideological polarization must tell

a much larger share of the changing structural story ofmodern American politics, as indeed it does, though itstraditional measure still highlights only one part of thechange while actually masking the other. The highlightedpart is the factional story, or rather, the shriveling of thedissident factions. Seen one way, those previously dissidentparty factions have indeed been in serious decline. Seen theother way, the two leading factions, Northern Democrats

and Regular Republicans, have become correspondinglyand increasingly dominant. Such shifts automaticallyincreased ideological polarization nationwide, by under-mining the depolarization that once followed froma sharply factionalized politics. Yet this still masks whathas happened to both the dominant and the secondaryfactions in both parties.

For in fact, as those parties have become moreideologically homogenous, they have simultaneouslypulled farther apart in their ideological centers, leftwardfor the Democrats and rightward for the Republicans.23

This is the classical meaning of “partisan polarization”, andhere, its canonical measure (reproduced in figure 6) isespecially good at telling the story. Focusing once more onCongress, that measure attends both to the cross-pressuredmembers, those who were closer to the mid-point of theother party than to their own, and to the stereotypicallymoderate, who were merely closer to the center of Congressthan to the center of their own party.24 Figure 6 attests tothe decimation of these incipiently bipartisan membersafter 1992, the beginning of our modern world. Thougheven that display risks understating the degree of change inideological polarization because this onward march ofpartisan separation was now being applied to the changingbalance of party factions analyzed at figure 5.

What the fortunes of these two cohorts imply, jointlyand inescapably, is that the mainstream of both parties isnow nearly bereft of cross-pressured or even moderatecongresspersons. Yet that is still not the whole structuralstory, for a further, major, knock-on implication of thisextensive partisan polarization is that it is stiff enough toannihilate the ideological complexity that characterizedthe old world, whereby different policy domains—socialwelfare versus foreign affairs versus civil rights—actuallyplaced the four main factions in differing ideologicalalignments. Now, in a modern world where there arefew cross-pressured or moderate congresspersons surviv-ing, the sitting members obviously stand in the samegeneral relationship to each other on all major policydimensions.25 Ideological polarization has in effect wipedout the differential effects from different substantivecontents. Instead, there is just one underlying (and over-whelming) ideological continuum among partisan office-holders: Democrats sharply to the left and Republicanssharply to the right.

Where did this highly—and intransigently—polarizedworld come from? Two major developments were centralto its appearance, central both to breaking up an estab-lished order and to producing the modern world ofAmerican politics. The first of these was the disappearanceof the one-party South, a development much-loved byanalysts on its own terms, but with a sting in the tail forthose concerned with the issue of ideological polarization.The second was the concentrated (and successful) assaulton old-fashioned party rules and party organizations in the

Figure 4Party Identification in the Nation as a Whole:The Coming of an Era of Partisan Volatility

Data: American National Election Studies, University of Michigan,

and Stanford University. ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File

(1948–2016). Ann Arbor, MI

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name of a much more open and participatory politics. Likethe first major contribution, this too came with widelysaluted justifications, coupled with the side-cost of greaterideological polarization. Needless to say, in the AmericanSouth, where these two key developments interacted, theireffects were at a maximum.

The disappearance of the “solid” one-party South, andwith it the disappearance of a long-established three-partysystem for the nation as a whole—Northern Democrats,Southern Democrats, and National Republicans—was byitself a sea change in the structure of American politics. Itwould be a rare scholar who dissented from that particulargeneralization, and the scholarly debate instead focused onwhat had driven this change: racial desegregation, economicdevelopment, or some specified mix of the two.26 Yet at30% of the nation as a whole, a one-party South had beena huge depolarizing influence on American politics. Sincenearly everyone in the region was once in the same party,30% of the nation was effectively unipolar.When Southernpolitics came into alignment with national politics, nowsplitting the South ideologically in the form alreadycharacterizing the other 70% of the nation, the country asa whole became invariably and substantially more polarized.

Inside the region, both main aspects of this develop-ment were more or less explicitly polarizing, thoughhindsight makes this look more inevitable than it did inits time. A huge new increment of black Democratshelped guarantee that Southern Democrats would there-after be national Democrats. Had national Democratsevolved differently, the preferences of this reconstitutedSouthern increment might have reinforced economic

liberalism coupled with cultural moderation, pushingagainst the tendency for partisan polarization to reduceideological heterogeneity. Instead, while there were to befewer Southern Democrats in Congress as a whole, thosewho surfaced or survived were largely indistinguishablefrom their Northern colleagues. Across the aisle, therewas an equally striking change, in the form of a newlyserious geographic faction, namely Southern Republicans.Yet these new Southern Republicans, rather than emerg-ing as a more moderate strand within their own party,entered politics in full—even exaggerated—conformitywith the polarized ideological alignment characterizing itsnon-Southern components.27

That was still a regional contribution, however por-tentous. Yet it occurred in tandem with a second, great,fully national phenomenon, the coming of participatorypolitics. Symbolized most strikingly by the implosion ofthe Democratic National Convention of 1968 over issuesof participation in internal party affairs, the resultingparty reforms were only the most focused part of a muchlarger movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.28 Thismovement for participatory reform swept away the oldinstitutional framework for delegate selection and presi-dential nominations. Yet it reached widely and deeply intothe conduct of party business more generally. Even then,party affairs were not the limit of its impact, for the reformdrive went on to reach the institutions of Americannational government themselves, most especially withregard to the internal operations of Congress and theinternal procedures of the federal bureaucracy.29

Analysts had long understood that different partystructures were underpinned by different incentivesystems—pitting material against purposive incentives, aswell as the social groups that could best be mobilized byone versus the other.30 But when the focus moves out fromparty reform to ideological polarization, the point isinstead that different incentives also pitted an olderpreference for compromising policy issues to secureprogrammatic outcomes against a newer preference foruncompromised policy preferences as a means of stimu-lating political participation. Said more concretely, differ-ent incentives plus different structures pitted the oldformal organizations of long-serving party officials againstthe new social networks of issue activists.31 And by the1990s, the participatory side of this equation—purposiveincentives, volunteer structures, and activist networks—was widely triumphant. So, in turn, was a set of new issuesand of more extreme ideological positions on them, sincethis was the combinationmost conducive to generating theautonomous activism necessary to make such a partysystem function.

How Does the Trump Candidacy Fit?So what does American politics look like in this light? Ata minimum, there is no reason to believe that the modern

Figure 5Factional Composition of the Two Parties inthe House: The Late New Deal Era and the Eraof Partisan Volatility

Data: Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam

Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet (2017). Voteview: Con-

gressional Roll-Call Votes Database. https://voteview.com/




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era is different from any of the preceding periods in thesense that political actors must seek public office and thenpublic policy within the structural constraints of theirown (and not some other) period. For the contemporaryperiod, despite a veritable kaleidoscope of partisan out-comes, these structural constraints are defined by foursimple propositions:

• The balance between the two parties within thegeneral public is closer than in the immediate postwaryears, or for that matter in the era of dividedgovernment. This is true even when party identifica-tion is the measure. It is truer—and more realistic—when voting behavior is instead the focus. Figure 7captures this succinctly.32

• The political parties as organizations are just as clearlyfarther apart than in the late New Deal or the era ofdivided government. It would have been theoreticallypossible for the two to move closer together as theybecame more closely balanced. That is not whathappened. Indeed, this effect was strong enough tospread downward to other levels of a federal systemand outward to other national institutions besides thelegislature.33

• The electoral result has been ironic. Voters have aneasier time than ever choosing between parties thatare ideologically distant. Yet this comes at the price of

recurrent public disappointment, as winners provemore committed to the programs of their (non-overlapping) political parties than to the preferencesof a voting public, the bulk of which is always to theright of a winning Democrat or the left of a winningRepublican.

• Though if this public is constantly disappointed, italso has a quick and easy means of revenge. Or atleast, it is easier than ever to respond to disappoint-ment by shifting partisan control of governmentalinstitutions, any or all of them. A close party balancerequires relatively little change among these voters—a small shift at the polls, just differential turnout—inorder to change partisan control and produce theelectoral kaleidoscope that characterizes the period.

Enter Donald Trump, descending the escalator atTrump Tower in New York and offering himself asa candidate for president of the United States.34 Butwhere does this anomalous politician—first in the form ofthe Trump candidacy, then in the form of a Trumppresidency—fit into the political structure of the modernUnited States? From the start, pundits had a terrible timewith the Trump candidacy, initially failing to treat itseriously, then doing a collective version of “this can’t behappening”.35 Perhaps that is why nearly no one treated

Figure 6Partisan Polarization among Public Officials

Fleisher & Bond 2004, The Shrinking Middle in the US Congress, p. 437

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the candidacy as one logical product of the continuingstructure of modern American politics—not the mostcommon product, to be sure, and one that offeredidiosyncrasies galore—but a fairly straightforward out-come if one reasoned back from the four propositions thatcollectively define the modern political era in the UnitedStates.

Consider. In a closely balanced but sharply polarizedworld, the expected outcomes of presidential nominatingpolitics are a Democratic nominee who is stiffly liberal inideological terms and programmatically consistent withthat ideological orientation, against a Republican nomi-nee who is stiffly conservative in ideological terms andprogrammatically consistent with that ideological orien-tation too. In truth, the modern world just gets betterand better at producing such candidacies and confirmingsuch nominees. But what if the majority of generalelection voters reliably resides to the right of one of thesenominees and to the left of the other?

In the abstract, such a world could generate an actualcentrist party. In practice, the barriers to this particularadaptation are huge.36 Institutionally, they includeballot access rules, fund-raising provisions, and existing

organizational infrastructure. Behaviorally, they featurethe existing ideological activists, who, if they are in somesense the proximate cause of the disjuncture, have provenremarkably adept at amalgamating extreme positions whilefreezing out incipient contenders who do not buy into theresult.37 So the obvious—dare we say logical?—alternativeto potential nominees who can please their active partiesbut not the general public comes down to some variant ofcentrist contender who secured the nomination of one orthe other major party.But centrist in what sense? Here, there are two

available options. The leading theoretical alternativewould be a partisan aspirant who fell between the twomajor-party nominees on the grand issues of modernpolitics, being more moderate than either on botheconomic and cultural concerns. This, too, simply hasnot happened, and if the remaining median-voter theo-rists puzzle abstractly over that cruel concrete fact,behavioral analysts have actually gone a long way towardexplaining it. A bit of this puzzle is artifactual. Opinionanalysts all too frequently assign those who answer “don’tknow”, “not sure”, or “decline to state” to the middle ofa distribution, rather than exiling them from the analysis

Figure 7Party Balance as Reflected in Voting Behavior: The Presidency, the Senate, and the HouseCombined

Black bars reflect Republican edge; white bars show Democratic edge; dotted gray bars show an edge of less than 1% either way.

Frances E. Lee, “AmericanPolitics isMoreCompetitive ThanEver, and That isMakingPartisanshipWorse”, Chapter 11 in Daniel J. Hopkins

and John Sides, eds., Political Polarization in American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), Figure 4–3





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and thereby losing precious N. Less easy to handle arethose individuals who offer a moderate answer as a sociallyacceptable means to say either “I don’t care” or “I hatepolitics”.Yet the larger explanation for this lack of an in-

stitutionalized centrist alternative is richly developed intheoretical terms and inherent to the actual distributionof policy opinions within the American public. Over andover, analysts find that the general public is not polarizedin its policy preferences, which do indeed constitute theclassic bell curve. In fact, many preferences have actuallybecome more consensual, not more polarized, overtime.38 What makes this picture nevertheless consistentwith increased partisan polarization is that the parties haveincreasingly drawn identifiers who lean liberal (for theDemocrats) or conservative (for the Republicans), so thatneither party is close to being a bell curve at the center ofAmerican society. In such a world, the theoreticallysimplest response to close partisan balance coupled withstrong ideological polarization—in the form of a uniformlymoderate centrist alternative—is actually very hard togenerate.On the other hand, a centrist option for such a world

could in principle be constructed quite differently. Towin—and here we begin to close in on the Trumpcandidacy—such candidates could appeal to those leaningDemocratic on one major policy domain, like economicvalues, while simultaneously leaning Republican on an-other major domain, say cultural values, or of course viceversa.39 This is in effect the main alternative way to speakto the vast American middle, a middle that is neitherstrongly and consistently liberal nor strongly and consis-tently conservative. Moreover, this route was underconsideration by other incipient candidates well beforeDonald Trump brought it to life in his own personallyidiosyncratic fashion.The longest-running of these self-consciously middle-

of-the-road proto-candidacies, and in that sense thelongest-running nomination tease, belongs to MichaelRubens Bloomberg.40 Bloomberg, entrepreneur and cen-tral figure in the eponymous Bloomberg LP, a finance,media, and software conglomerate, switched from Dem-ocrat to Republican when he first ran successfully formayor of New York City in 2001. Re-elected as a Re-publican in 2005, he changed his party registration toIndependent, campaigned for an amendment to termlimits, and then ran successfully for a third term in 2009as an Independent, albeit on the Republican line.In 2008, he resisted the entreaties of a “Draft Bloom-

berg” movement but announced that he would endorsea non-partisan alternative to the Democratic and Re-publican nominees for president, arguing, despite his ownobvious reticence, that neither party had the comprehen-sive answers necessary to solve American problems.41

No such independent option emerged. The “Draft

Bloomberg” movement surfaced again in 2012 but wasdenied once more by its chosen candidate, who this timeendorsed the incumbent president, Barack Obama. Finallyin 2016, the elusive candidate mounted a consciousexploratory operation of his own, ostensibly motivatedby the nightmare scenario of a fall campaign featuringDonald Trump versus Bernie Sanders. While he wasreported to be reinforced by the judgment that he himselfwas best able to appeal to moderate and centrist voters,Bloomberg ultimately disbanded the exploratory effortand endorsed Hillary Clinton.42

Without an actual nominating campaign, we cannotuse policy promises from this three-contest scenario toclassify the incipient candidate, though Bloomberg doesstand as one plausible incarnation of an aspiringly centristpolicy mix, being, in his case, an economic conservativebut a cultural liberal. The closest pre-Trump embodi-ment of the opposite mix, combining economic reformwith cultural conservatism, was probably Charles Elson“Buddy”Roemer III, Democratic member of the House ofRepresentatives from Louisiana from 1981–1988, Dem-ocratic Governor of Louisiana from 1988–1992, unsuc-cessful Republican candidate for re-election in 1992, andoccasional Republican candidate for various other officesthereafter—until a quixotic run for president in 2012, firstas a Republican and then as an Independent.43

Unlike Bloomberg, Roemer had an actual policyrecord, always featuring campaign finance reform andvigorous attacks on “the interests”, coupled with toughstands on street crime and welfare fraud, though thebalance differed with the office being sought and the stageof his own career. In 2012, he announced a run for theRepublican nomination for president, a gambit hamperedfrom the start by aggressive attacks on fellow Republicansas “bought and paid for” and by his own inability to raisefunds. He shifted briefly to an attempt at the presidentialnomination of the Reform Party, the skeletal remains ofthe Ross Perot campaigns. Roemer moved on quickly,however, to an effort to get the nomination of a newcitizen organization, “Americans Elect,” which promisedan open national primary where all members could run ornominate and where a sequence of three such roundswould settle the nomination. Among a huge array of initialpossibilities, Roemer actually came first in the membershipsurvey of favorability. Yet even his showing never roseabove derisory, and the organization eventually gave up onany actual primary.44

Roemer’s announcement in 2011, on his way to thisperipatetic effort, that he appreciated the values of both theOccupy Movement and the Tea Party45 is perhaps asextreme an example of mixing ideological positions as anycandidacy seeking to escape a polarized two-partypolitics—until President Trump put together a differentbut equally idiosyncratic mix in 2016. Donald JohnTrump was originally a real estate developer and hotel

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magnate who became a reality TV star in more recentyears. The combination gave him a ready public audiencefor occasional political utterances, and he expressed at leasta curiosity about running for president in 1988, 2000,2004, and 2012, as well as for governor of New York in2006 and 2014.46 While he never actively pursued any ofthese, he did file an exploratory committee to allow him torun for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party in2000. Along the way, he, like Bloomberg and Roemer,switched party affiliations intermittently, from Demo-cratic to Reform to Democratic and then to Republican in2009. 47

Trump did finally run for (and win) both the Re-publican nomination and the presidency in 2016, so thatunlike Bloomberg or Roemer, he had far more actualprogrammatic promises to locate him with regard to thetwo major parties. These offered a truly eclectic mix ofpolicy preferences.48 Trump ran to the right of his ownparty, the Republicans, on immigration and crime. Heconformed to its orthodox positions on abortion (where hehad once been pro-choice), on taxation, and on govern-mental spending. He veered well left of his party when hepromised sweeping infrastructure investment and broadhealthcare reform without cuts to the major insuranceprograms of Medicare and Social Security. And hetravelled all the way over to the labor part of theDemocratic coalition on foreign trade and protectionism.

How Does the Trump Presidency Fit?That combination was sufficient to disturb (and in somecases repel) party officials and public office-holders fromhis own party on the way to the nomination.49 Yet it wasobviously not sufficient to derail his drive for the presi-dency, and various individual pieces of his campaignprogram were afterward judged to have been effective inadding specific elements to his voting constituency.50 SoDonald John Trump differed from most other ideologi-cally unorthodox candidates, and indeed from all butforty-four other human beings, not just by standing forelection but by actually becoming President of the UnitedStates. As a result, a version of the same question that couldbe asked about his candidacy should be asked about hispresidency to date: how does the Trump presidency fitinto the ongoing structure of American politics?

Journalistic complaints to the contrary, the politicalstructure of the modern American world does possessa clear process of policy-making, with an equally clearpatterning to the result. So setting that out is the first taskof this analytic section. Within this composite process,President Trump has brought numerous personal idio-syncrasies to his conduct of the office, and these mayseem more striking than those of his three immediatepredecessors, not just in possessing a specific career inreality TV but also because he was generally much fartherfrom politics as a profession when he secured the office.

But does the combination—an ongoing structure, anidiosyncratic personality—suggest a nascent new era inAmerican politics, or does it instead embody patterns ofpolicy-making common to presidencies from 1992through 2018?The story of policy-making in an era of close party

balance and strong partisan polarization, one withkaleidoscopic shifts in partisan control of the majorinstitutions of American national government, can—despite its surface complexity—again be easily summa-rized. Though let us begin this time by considering theabsent elements in this process, the ones that definednational policy-making in the preceding postwar years.Among these, the major geographic regions that oncedemanded a constantly incremental process of policy-making are simply gone, with the result that any factionalsuccessors no longer line up in different ideologicalpositions on different major issues.So are the giant cross-partisan and cross-institutional

coalitions that followed inexorably from a static pattern ofsplit partisan control during the period of dividedgovernment. In this second postwar period, policy-making was different from the earlier postwar years,thanks to the absence of those great (and incremental)regional factions. Yet increasingly polarized parties had toface the fact that they might never be able to govern ontheir own, even if they increasingly disliked the opposi-tion. Democrats would always hold Congress. Republi-cans would always gain the Presidency. As a result,both parties still had powerful incentives to build thegiant coalitions characteristic of this second postwarperiod, thereby dealing themselves into all major policyoutcomes.In the modern period, however, in the absence of

factional building-blocks or facilitative election outcomes,there are just two great polarized parties facing each otherwithout mediating groups or mediating incentives. Whatfollows, logically and ineluctably, are long periods ofgridlock and stasis, broken by sharp spikes of policy-making. Despite some confusing statements and contra-dictory signals from the man himself, the actual legislativerecord of the Trump administration has served well atputting concrete policy examples into this abstract modelof the policy-making process in our time.Normal legislative politicking of the modern sort

cannot generate the constant policy increments of theearliest postwar years. There are no sizable blocs leftwithin either party that can regularly be attracted to theother on an ad hoc basis. Normal electoral politicking ofthe modern sort will likewise not generate the consistentrecord of grand coalitions that occurred during the era ofdivided government. Electoral incentives now run in theopposite direction, where the most attractive strategy isoften to prevent the other party from legislating until thenext turn in the electoral kaleidoscope. Accordingly,





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gridlock can indeed be used to describe the “steady state”for modern American politics.Yet the term should be used with care. For despite

generalized laments about its blanketing character, policycontinues to get made. Moreover, it may not even bemade on a more limited scale than it was in the past.After all, George W. Bush did rebuild the nationalsecurity apparatus of the United States in its entirety,surely the biggest such rebuilding since creation of theinstitutional machinery for pursuing the Cold War in theimmediate postwar years.51 And Barack Obama recon-structed an entire healthcare regime—one-sixth of theU.S. economy—surely the biggest such reconstructionsince Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Johnson.52

To cap off these particular examples, an aggregate analysisof major policy initiatives across the entire postwar periodlikewise does not make the modern world look compar-atively laggard.53

On the other hand, this policy does get madedifferently, through a recurrent process of policy-makingunlike those characterizing the immediate postwar years orthe successor period of divided government. Its dominantpattern and signature product was actually isolated early inthe modern period, even before the larger politicalstructure of the period had itself been recognized. Thissignature product was “omnibus legislation”, wherebyextended gridlock is unpredictably but unfailingly inter-rupted by major spikes of policy-making, driven by thebuild-up of pressures for governmental action.54 The factthat this modern form of legislative production tends to beboth large and temporally compressed discourages analystsfrom thinking about it as an integral part of an overallprocess, but so it is.There are three recurrent drivers to this. Sometimes

these spikes are the result of a consensual crisis, as with 9/11 for George W. Bush or the Great Recession for BarackObama. Other times spikes can instead be the result of anunavoidable reauthorization, as with raising the debtceiling or producing a new budget to fund an inevitablychanging government. Still other times they can be thesimple product of a collective build-up of policy wishes sointense as to precipitate what is politely recognized asomnibus legislation—really a giant log-roll pulling allthese pent-up demands into one legislative spasm. Thoughnote that the appearance of any one of these inescapablestimuli ordinarily provides what is known among themajor players as a legislative “Christmas tree”, the oppor-tunity to link other ongoing policy demands to theunderlying deadline.The three major policy initiatives of the Trump

administration to date are in this sense archetypalexamples of these policy spikes. For the moment,however, in a world with the underlying politicalstructure of our time, the prior point is that this overallstory of policy-making has been essentially the same for

every one of the four modern presidents. A few leadingexamples may help to underline the commonality to thisdiagnostic pattern:

• For Bill Clinton, the new pattern was introducedwith the first major bill of the Clinton presidency, hisOmnibus Deficit Reduction Act of 1993, passing theHouse by a vote of 218-216, which masked a partisansplit of 218-41 among Democrats and a theretoforeremarkable division of 0-175 among Republicans.

• For George W. Bush, the pattern arrived with hisopening tax cuts of 2001, to be confirmed in his taxcuts of 2003, passing the House by a vote of 231-200,but with Republicans going 224-1 and Democratssplitting opposite at 7-199.

• For Barack Obama, his opening stimulus program of2009 absolutely lit up this diagnostic background,with a final House tally of 244-188, broken downas 244-11 among Democrats but 0-177 amongRepublicans.

In any case, in less than the full run of a singleCongress, Donald Trump has actually managed togenerate a major example of each of the generic forms ofpolicy spike that respond to this ongoing background inthe modern era, though only two of them were a successwhile the third was a dramatic failure. The first majorpolicy win came on tax reform.55 Once more, the Housepassed legislation, 224-201, covering a Republican split of224-12 and a Democratic split of 0-189. And this time,the Senate passed legislation as well, however narrowly,with a tally of 51-48, covering a perfect Republican split of51-0 and a perfect Democratic counterpart of 0-48. Thatwas an obvious continuity stretching all the way back tothe first major legislative win of the first-term Clintonpresidency.

While most commentators failed even to connect thepure partisan vote that passed this tax reform package toan ongoing pattern inaugurated by Bill Clinton andreinforced by George Bush and Barack Obama, they didat least acknowledge its party-line character. A student ofomnibus legislation should also have noticed, however,that Congress, working on tax reform almost up toChristmas itself, once again converted a major policyinitiative into the true national Christmas tree:

• The tax proposals themselves were comprehensiveand diverse, including provisions affecting individualtax rates, state and local tax deductions, and the childtax credit.

• Yet these served additionally as a framework on whichCongress could hang such further, disparate, butmajor “ornaments” as educational incentives, repealof the individual insurance mandate under Obama-care, and permission to drill for gas and oil in the theArctic National Wildlife Refuge.56

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• Moreover, it was these ornamental provisions, not thecentral substance of the legislation, that held a con-gressional Republican majority together behind thetotal package.

That still left an array of pending items with thepotential to create a further policy spike in the new year:an extended operating budget to prevent governmentalshut-down, reauthorization of the Children’s HealthInsurance Program (CHIP), a substitute for the DeferredAction for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, disasteraid for the victims of recent hurricanes and wildfires, alongwith funding for an announced attack on the opioidepidemic.57 One or another item on this list might still fallby the wayside, despite practical (and sometimes statutory)deadlines plus real constituency support; DACA would bethe one that met this fate. Yet all were obvious grist foranother major policy spike, being powerfully unlikely to bepursued in a vacuum, that is, in disregard of the otheritems on the list. And this one would exemplify a secondgeneric type of spike in the modern world, the one impelledby a giant log-roll.

The centerpiece was to be a new, two-year operatingbudget for the federal government, a project previouslyleft for dead in the face of the Trumpian incarnation ofthe modern pattern of American policy-making. Yet 2018instead brought one largely shared bipartisan drivertoward a new budget, in the form of a succession ofgovernmental shutdowns, risks of governmental shut-downs, and threats of governmental shutdowns, wherethe major players could no longer be sure who the publicwould blame for the next such (mis)adventure.58 Themain further driver was then actually—and ironically—the complete polarization of policy preferences for any newbudget. Republicans overwhelmingly wanted to escape thespending strictures that they themselves had extractedfrom then-President Obama in 2011, so that they coulddo a major increase in military spending. While Demo-crats, never enthusiastic about fiscal constraints, were evenmore desirous of escaping their strictures, in the name ofa major increase in domestic spending.

The resulting one-point-three-trillion-dollar spendingbill was excoriated from both ends of the ideologicalspectrum. Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, heldthe floor for an entire day to condemn it for failing toinclude reform or at least reauthorization of DACA. TheHouse Freedom Caucus, the last organized support forthe Obama-era concern with the fiscal impact of federalbudgets, denounced the agreement and provided thelargest single bloc of opposing votes.59 Still, the bill passedeven the House comfortably, 256-167, losing the mostliberal Democrats on the left and the most conservativeRepublicans on the right while securing majorities of bothparties. With the same general profile, the Senate wasanticlimactic, raising only the question of whether one or

another Senator would exercise their personal prerogativeto delay it for a few further days.In the process, yet unsurprisingly in the modern policy

world—imagine tacking solar panels onto the Civil RightsAct of 1964 or opioid addiction onto the EnvironmentalPolicy Act of 1969—a set of major policy concerns werevariously addressed, managed, or driven off into the future.The federal debt ceiling was raised, exiling that always-contentious matter until well after the November elec-tions; the two-year scope of this budgetary log-roll went onto guarantee that no one would have to endure suchcontentious budgetary politics until comfortably into thesuccessor Congress; the possibility of a governmentalshutdown (or even the realistic threat of same) was likewiseshipped off into the future; a second substantial contribu-tion to CHIP, a program quite popular at the state level,was thrown in for good measure; and funding for thoserecent hurricane and tornado disasters was at last providedon a major scale.Modern presidents often try consciously to manipulate

this modern pattern of legislative production in onefurther way, by capitalizing on the sudden appearanceof unified partisan control at the beginnings of theiradministration. Polarized partisan divisions remain assharp as ever, but for a brief stretch they appear as ifthey might allow legislating anyway. For PresidentsClinton and Obama, these stretches were very brief,a single term of unified government, followed by therecapture of at least one house of Congress by the otherparty for the next six years. For President Bush, the policyearthquake that was 9/11 stalled off the prospect ofa first-term crash, though it did forcibly redirect policy-making (toward national security) in the process. And forPresident Trump, their lineal successor, the same per-ceived need to capitalize on this opportunity was a drivingforce behind his opening healthcare initiative.This time, however, the initiative was a failure; in the

end the necessary generalized pressures for changewere simply not there.60 Too much of the congressionalRepublican Party was committed to the complete repeal ofthe Affordable Care Act (ACA, commonly called Obama-care). Too much of the congressional Democratic Party sawno need to adjust anything. The handful of Republicanswho preferred reform but not repeal, most especially inthe Senate, found few allies in their own party. And far toofew Democrats were inclined to invest in the minutiae ofreform.The House still managed to pass legislation in the

conventional modern form, 217-213, covering a Republi-can split of 217-20 and a Democratic split of 0-193. Yetthe Senate fell just short, with a vote of 48-51 coveringa Republican split of 48-3 and a Democratic split of 0-48.An aroused general public might have made a difference—it might have given this initiative a chance to be the openingpolicy spike of the new administration—but if that public





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had not been powerfully aroused by the original need for theACA, it was even less aroused by the alleged need to undo it.

How Far Should These Analogies Go?Donald Trump did not create the contemporary structureof American politics. Indeed, with a prior career outsideconventional politics, he did not even shape what heencountered, though nothing in that history guaranteesthat he will not make just such a contribution goingforward. In the meantime, he was one product of anestablished electoral structure, while he inherited anestablished process of policy-making, one on characteris-tic display in his three diagnostic struggles over health-care, tax reform, and budgeting. In the aftermath of thosestruggles, there is little reason to expect domestic politicsto generate another major policy spike—external shocksare always quite another matter—until after the midtermelections in November of 2018. So we can in principleclose, for good or ill, with the next sure structural elementin the fortunes of his administration, namely his firstmid-term.Non-stop prognostication in the coverage of modern

American politics means that various professional analystshave been attempting to divine the 2018 outcome foralmost as long as this president has been in office. Soa closing interpretive effort should confine itself tolooking backward at the pattern of election outcomes inthis modern world, applying any such pattern to theongoing structure of modern politics. In effect, this isa search for analogies and their limits, specifying possi-bilities but eschewing pointed predictions. In that light,and to repeat, the electoral outcomes accompanyinga modern American political structure can be simplysummarized.Each of the modern presidencies to date has been

a two-term affair, though their operations have beenheavily colored by the loss of at least one house ofCongress in subsequent elections. For the two Demo-crats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, this loss was rapid:one congressional term of unified partisan control was allthey got, so the institutionalized public discontent of ourcurrent political world caught them at its first opportu-nity. For the first of two Republicans, George W. Bush,that loss was pushed into the second term, though it ishard to escape the hypothesis that electoral delay wasgreatly facilitated by 9/11 and thus by a perceived needon the part of the general public to rally behind a nationalresponse.A straightforward extrapolation from this modern

world to 2018 would be discouraging for the TrumpWhite House. Or at least, there does not appear to beanything on the scale of 9/11 to provide respite from theinexorable implication of a relentless modern analogy: theloss of partisan majorities in one, the other, or bothcongressional houses. The specifics required to realize this

analogy remain demanding. While a small net partisanloss would be sufficient to shift control of the Senate,even this small loss would have to be realized in a contestwhere there are 24 Democratic seats (plus two Independ-ents who caucus with them) up for election but onlyeight Republican counterparts. Conversely, while a muchlarger shift would be required to change control of theHouse, currently 247 Republicans over 188 Democrats,a shift on that scale was in fact accomplished in all threecounterpart elections, 1994, 2006, and 2010.

Though in the end, this analogical outcome may havea silver lining for the President himself. Or at least, theearly loss of unified partisan control had no serious effecton the re-election of Clinton and Obama. And theirsuccessor, Donald Trump, is in some ways the bestprepared of the four modern presidents to deal with ananalogous outcome, in that his mix of policy promises onthe way to the White House contained enough contrarypropositions to allow him to resurrect some while jet-tisoning others. What will remain true of a Trumppresidency after 2018, regardless of the electionoutcome, is an underlying picture of modern Americanpolitical structure: close party balance, gallopingpartisan polarization, an easy public facility for registeringa change of mind, yet reliable disappointment withthe resulting partisan shifts. These are not the detailsof legislative politicking. But they are its recurrent—shaping—influences.

To summarize, increasing partisan polarization createdboth programmatic space and a potential constituency foroff-diagonal candidates, those who do not neatly fit intothe issue alignments characterizing activsts in the modernAmerican party system. Donald Trump is not the first,nor will he likely be the last, to attempt to pick andchoose from the normal arsenals of both parties in orderto appeal to voters who are neither doctrinaire liberals nordoctrinaire conservatives. For Trump as for all three of hisimmediate predecessors, however, once he had securedthe nomination, a different but equally powerful set ofmacro-patterns kicked in: close party balance, reliablepublic disappointment with any result, ease of changingpartisan control in response. The resulting process ofpolicy-making, first recognized in the 1990s and in-creasingly familiar since then, brought imperatives all itsown, and the Trump presidency—as exemplified inhealthcare, taxation, and budgeting—could not escapeits version of the same continuing strictures from thatprocess.

Put differently and to return to the dominant analogyof our time, if one had asked the authors before the 2014mid-term about who would win the presidency in 2016,the answer would have been the Republican nominee.The modern electoral pattern and its structural under-pinnings would have pointed toward that general out-come. Donald Trump, as unusual a candidate as he was

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and as much as the Repbulican establishment appearedto dislike him, did not break the pattern. Russianmeddling, Democratic infighting, FBI decisions, popu-list rhetoric, the ubiquity of the twitter-sphere—and onand on—put idiosyncratic details into an overarchingresult. One of these, or many other details of the time,might yet prove important in historical hindsight. Yet inthe end macro-patterns and macro-structures put DonaldTrump within reach of the presidency and then con-strained him as president, despite his best idiosyncaticintentions.

Notes1 Andersen 1979, Erikson and Tedin 1981.2 Norpoth, Sidman, and Suong 2013.3 Campbell et al. 1960, as elaborated in Miller and

Shanks 1996.4 Reichley 1992, McCormick 1986, Burner 1968.5 Ladd 1975, Mason 2012, Rubin 1976.6 Rae 1989, 1994.7 Sundquist 1968, Browning 1986.8 Hamby 1976, Gaddis 2007.9 Graham 1990, Valelly 2004.10 The great student of incrementalism as a process was

Aaron Wildavsky, introduced in Wildavsky 1964 andthen more fully theorized in Davis, Dempster, andWildavsky 1966.

11 The most comprehensive portrait is Fenno 1966. Animportant precursor is Truman 1959.

12 Hotson 2017.13 Boorstin 1958.14 Burns 1963.15 Ware 1985, Mayhew 1986.16 For the Republicans in an older world, see McCaffery

1993. For postwar Republicans as an incipient activistparty, see Critchlow 2008.

17 Jacobson 1990, Cox and Kernell 1991, Thurber 1991.18 Chester, Hodgson, and Page 1969, White 1969.19 Ceaser and Busch 1993, Nelson 1993, Pomper 1993.20 This list was originally published in Shafer and

Wagner, 2016, 410.21 Silbey 1991, Holt 1999.22 Becoming even more so in the argument that

independent identifiers were merely closet partisans;Keith et al. 1992.

23 A thorough exposition of the theoretical meaning andpractical requirements of partisan polarization can befound in the opening pages of DiMaggio, Evans, andBryson 1996.

24 Fleisher and Bond 2004.25 This modern unidimensionalism is almost universally

recognized, but somehow not called by its dimensionalname. One comprehensive investigation is Theriault2008.

26 Black and Black 2002, Shafer and Johnston 2006.27 Black 1998.28 Ranney 1975, Crotty 1977, Polsby 1983.29 Rohde 1991, Gormley 1989.30 The theoretical argument comes most pointedly from

Clark andWilson 1961. Its full exposition is inWilson1973, most especially at ch. 6, “Party Organizations.”

31 Ware 1985, Mayhew 1986.32 Originally figure 4-3 in Lee 2015.33 Bulman-Pozen 2014, Bassinger and Mak 2012.34 DeReal 2015, Burns 2015.35 Patterson 2016.36 Most comprehensive and convincing is Epstein1986,

with his metaphor of the two major parties as “publicutilities.” A view from outside those parties is Bibbyand Maisel 1998.

37 Carsey and Layman 2006, Layman et al. 2010, andespecially Masket 2011.

38 DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson 1996, updated inBaldassari and Gelman 2008.

39 Shafer and Claggett 1995, Carmines, Ensley, andWagner n.d.

40 Pumick 2010, McNickle, 2017.41 Bloomberg 2008.42 Economist 2016.43 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

2018.44 Shear 2011, Douthat 2012.45 Giridharadas 2011.46 In the familiar way of more orthodox multi-year efforts

to secure the presidency, the non-effort by DonaldTrump in 2012 did bring his first public connectionwith the “birthers,” who alleged/believed that BarackObama was not born an American citizen; Marr 2011.This allegation would become one more plank in his2016 self-presentation as “the un-Obama”.

Table 1Policy productivity by political era

Major Legislation Historic Legislation

Late New Deal era, 1947–968 123 14Era of divided government, 1969–1991 149 9Era of partisan volatility, 1992–2012 118 19

Source: Mayhew 2005, 51-73 and 207-213, as updated on the author’s website





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47 Nagourney 199948 While Hillary Clinton constantly referred audiences

to her website for programmatic specifics, DonaldTrump largely expressed his policy preferencesby way of campaign ads. These are gatheredcomprehensively at https://newrepublic.com/political-ad-database in the 2016 Campaign AdArchive of The New Republic.

49 Kaplan 2016, Burns and Barbaro 2016.50 Trump’s far-right positions were widely argued to

attract a hard-right constituency, often described as the“alt right”, but because members did not describethemselves this way in opinion surveys, it is hard todemonstrate this policy effect. Easier is the focus oneconomic growth generally and infrastructure inparticular, the part of the policy package mostcommonly described as appealing to the working-class,which did indeed contribute crucial increments instates like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

51 George and Richikof 2010.52 Sinclair 2012.53 Table 1 was created by aggregating the rosters of

“major legislation” and “historic legislation” providedin Mayhew 2005, as supplemented by continuedrankings on Mayhew’s personal website.

54 The first person to focus on this modern character tothe policy-making process was probably BarbaraSinclair in Sinclair 1997. She was certainly the onewho coined the term omnibus legislation: lawmakingthat addresses numerous and not necessarily relatedsubjects, issues, and programs in one highly complexproduct; Sinclair 1997, 64.

55 Kaplan and Rappeport 2017.56 H.R.1—congress.gov 2017.57 Baer 2017.58 Kaplan 2018a.59 Kaplan 2018b.60 CQ Weekly Report, May 1, 2017.

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