Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important chart in all of national politics. Read it carefully. Absorb it. Only then can you begin your journey toward lasting insight.
47 thoughts on “Chart of the Day: Politics in a Nutshell”
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Also, none of the other presidents faced an intractable, block-everything opposition party. LBJ had the rump of the Dixiecrats to deal with, but in the mid-Sixties those clowns were still in our circus.
And yet the Democrats are legislating like they have FDR's situation and nobody told them they should be intimidated. Good for them.
...the Democrats are legislating like they have FDR's situation...
I think the use of the present continuous is a bit premature. They've enacted one major bill. FDR signed FIFTEEN bills into law in his first 100 days in office.
Mind you I'm pleasantly surprised Biden/Dems got such a big bill passed into law. Fool me once, as they say...
I'm cautiously optimistic they'll be able to get an infrastructure bill to Joe's desk. Key word being "cautiously." But it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that's it for a while.
(I'd love to be proven wrong. Who knows? Maybe the assault on voting rights will be the proverbial straw, and Manchin will finally grow a pair and agree to take down the filibuster. But not gonna hold my breath).
True, and not true? Would you look at that chart and predict the team Biden has assembled, the agenda he's pushed? Or would you predict something much more like the Obama team and agenda?
I suspect a more useful graph would be one of racial attitudes over that period. It's really race that drives our politics (and I mean race more broadly to include the idea that we penalize minorities economically; it's not just about civil rights). Republicans want to avoid the issue. Democrats take it on, for better or worse.
"It's really race that drives our politics"
aka "It's my theories of politics that drive politics"?
Saying it a thousand times, because it gives you a frisson to know that the Republicans are evil incarnate, doesn't make it true. People can disagree on policies without every fscking thing being racial. There are black Republicans, you know, just like there are East Asian Republicans and Indian Republicans and Latino Republicans.
And yet Republicans have decided to double down on the racism.
So sure, it's possible to disagree. But that's not what's happening. Racism is the simpler cause.
Hey, I have a black friend, so I can't be racist! And what's more, there can't be systemic racism! Or any impact to economic and social policy driven by a history of racism! No siree, the legacy of American racism is clearly over! Thanks Obama!
I'd be interested to see the graphical view of O'Bama's majorities when he got the ACA.
Yes, I know it's disappointing that ACA is less than it should have been. But contrast that to what else got passed for health care in the last fifty years.
Obama had a quite solid House majority and a tenuous, filibuster-proof (60 seats) majority in Senate (first two years only, of course).
Actually, Obama enjoyed a 60-seat senate super-majority for about seven months.
In 2008, Al Franken won a close race, the results were contested, and he wasn't sworn in until July 2009. That gave Democrats 60 seats.
In August, Ted Kennedy died. Democrat Paul Kirk temporarily filled Kennedy’s seat in September. Then, Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory in the special election, he was sworn into the Senate in February 2010 and Democrats lost their super-majority.
The Fauxgressive, Temporarily Slumming It with the Proles & Trolls & Mole People Left of Brand New Congress & Justice Democrats & #OurRevolution has never been good with math.
Or maths, as they would likely say it.
That 60 seat majority was actually just from September 24 to January 4 in reality. Just 4 months.
When Obama entered office Democrats only had 59 seats, and that is including Joe F'ing Lieberman who actually campaigned against Obama and his proposals.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/article/20120909/NEWS/309099447
Say what you will about Johnny WALNUTS! people skills, he had a lot of friends. On both sides of the aisle.
I'm going to keep saying this every time Kevin brings up the supermajorities that were, indeed, necessary for prior eras of rapid progressive advance:
Barring the complete disintegration of the GOP, Democratic majorities of that size *will never come again.*
The reason is simple: It was a historical accident of the US party system that the modern, center-left, more-or-less pro-labor party also provided the institutional home for a one-party sectional interest dedicated, above all, to maintaining a racial caste system.
Kevin's supermajorities were only possible because of this historical accident. This also explains why they were so short-lived, but that's another story.
The important point is that those supermajorities are never coming back. The Democratic party is never going to go back to housing a sectional one-party state that would, except for its alignment on one issue, naturally constitute the geographic core of a center-right party.
So, if that is what rapid/deep progressive changes requires, you can forget about such change right now.
Note: I don't believe that is what rapid/deep progressive change requires. I believe, in fact, that this is a deeply flawed historical analogy, and that the impossibility of such oddball supermajorities ever coming again means that the US political system will have to become more majoritarian than it has been in the past, or risk a terrible deligitimization.
But that, too, is a topic for another day. For now the main point is this: If you are waiting for a Wilson/FDR/LBJ supermajority to bring on another era of liberal/progressive advance, you will be waiting until kingdom come.
You're right when you call our two-party system an accident. There's nothing written into law that makes our system this way. It's still not impossible that a viable third party could emerge, and if it does, conditions would be favorable for a fourth one right behind it.
Then we could have a sane (?) system like they have in Europe or Israel.
The two party system is no accident. When you have district-based representation with one rep per district, first past the post voting rules, the mathematics favors two major parties, with other parties being unable to break in or being squeezed out. (Or serving only as spoilers.)
Well argued. We in the US are long overdue for reforms to further democratize the system. First priority is the Electoral College, which has given us minority Presidents twice in this century. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could fix this without a Constitutional amendment. About the best we can hope for in the Senate is filibuster reform, but probably not abolition.
Expanding the House is a hugely under-talked about necessity, too. I don't know why it doesn't get more attention. It's both eminently constitutional, and used to happen regularly. And then we stopped. For reasons.
Currently about 19% of the Electoral College derives from the jaw-dropping undemocratic apportionment of the Senate. Increasing the size of the House to, say, 735 members, would drop that number down to 12%. It would also, I believe, decrease the undemocratic flavor of House apportionment, too.
It's long overdue.
For any data geeks out there, this dude (Time Magazine's data director) makes a mathematically elegant case for a House size in the 930 range. And, as he points out, there'd be lots of desirable effects besides that on the Electoral College (greater diversity and deeper talent pool for House members, makes gerrymandering much more difficult, etc).
https://time.com/5423623/house-representatives-number-seats/
There is no evidence that would be harder to gerrymander.
There is no evidence that would create a deeper talent pool.
And while we'd have a chance are more diversity, it's not really likely, either.
Expanding the House is useless.
This requires a major news market to watch these representatives. We have fewer such markets. And the smaller the districts, the cheaper it is to bribe these officials.
There is no use to this expansion. I do not understand the fascination.
The point of the chart is well taken, Kevin. However, one can give the point too much weight if we fail to recognize that Wilson, FDR and LBJ operated in different times, when politics and governance interacted differently in this country. I'm not suggesting that the current administration has as much governing power as those others, but:
Biden is going over the heads of the Senators, directly to the voters (ordinary people), as he should and as he must. Our federal government has become broken over the past 40 years, in the sense that congress has steadily declined in its ability to function for the people. The Senate is, in particular, broken in that it now provides a legal mechanism for permanent minority rule. This is because we now have 50 states instead of 13; and due to the march of civilization, urbanization reached a level over 50% in 1920. Neither of those eventualities was fully gamed out, I suspect, by the founders, when they established the tow-senators-per-state rule regardless of population.
Further exacerbating the problem for governance has been the ever increasing concentration of political power in the national parties. The days are gone when a Dem or Rep Senator represented the interested of his or her state's constituents over the goals of the national party. In those by-gone days, legislating in the Senate included "horse trading" to get cross-party support for bills. Not any longer. And yes it is one of the 2 parties that has brought that about.
So: Going directly to the voters is the only way forward, and the best way forward. Non-extremists on both sides of the political spectrum are sick of decades of congress dysfunction. Step 1 is to make the obstructionist Senate irrelevant for long enough to fix the problems with the Senate. If we luck out, then eventually when the people of the country line up more like the FDR column on your graph then the congress will also look like that too.
Further exacerbating the problem for governance has been the ever increasing concentration of political power in the national parties.
This is 110% wrong. The party organizations exert (vastly) too little control, not too much. The classic evidence of this is Trump's capture of the GOP nomination -- an outcome very clearly opposed by the RNC and the GOP donor class. Or look at, say, Joe Manchin and the Democratic Party. There's precious little leverage the national Democratic Party infrastructure or the White House have over this Senator. (Another example would be Bernie Sanders's long, tortuous fight for the nomination in 2016, a process many Democrats quite reasonably feared might cost them the White House that cycle; DNC was powerless to shut it down).
It's true our politics have become nationalized. But that's a very different animal from your claim.
Jasper: Interesting. I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure you really addressed my central point, which was that the Repub party seems to view state level elections and political activity as merely a means toward realizing ultimate national minority rule... evidenced by the lockstep adherence to party line in the senate. They don't view the election of Senators as something involving the interests of the citizens of the state. Instead, for them, it's all about using the arcane rules of the Senate to distort the legislative process in order to exercise party power. I might be wrong... can you address that part?
Let's see what happens with infrastructure. If the Senate Repu caucus is monolithically opposed then I think that supports my point. And by monolithic I mean not including the little 3: Utah, Maine, Alaska. They're not enough to stop a filibuster.
You give Susan Cornpop too much credit.
Rmoney & Murk likely given too much, as well.
It's complicated. And you both make valid points. I see it this way: Party discipline used to be exercised by Congressional leadership over their members, and by the officeholders and party leadership over nominating conventions. Congressional leaders had the carrots and sticks of committee assignments, office space and other perks. Neither party has much of that power left. Democrats are diverse; knowing how to appeal to the particular district or state is important, national-party support means less than it used to. Republicans' situation is different; they have corralled a lot of single-issue voters, so the discipline is exercised by interest groups -- candidates must pass all the litmus tests to have a hope of winning nomination: 'gun rights', anti-abortion, 'religious freedom' (for evangelical/fundamentalist white people), and other culture-war touchpoints. Trump checked all the boxes and upped the ante on bigotry, so the party leadership was powerless to stop him.,
When I see charts like this I see (a) inequity in representation in the Senate (California = Wyoming), (b) gerrymandering, and that is not even considering the filibuster and the Electoral College which add another layer of undemocratic politics. Thank you, Founding Fathers.
Well, you can blame the Founders for the EC, but not for the filibuster; that is simply a rule of the Senate, first adopted a generation after the Constitution.
Two senators per state has evolved into an open invitation to minority rule. It's a compromise born over two hundred years ago and will strangle the government into the indefinite future, barring an alien invasion or some other miracle.
Hey, the FFs weren't completely pleased with their heavily-compromised, Rube-Goldbergesque first-draft Constitution, so don't lay it on them. That's why they put in a section on "amending". The times that produced arcane nonsense like the 3/5 rule could be repealed by amendment, when society decided it was time.
The US have a chance, with HB1, to take on gerrymandering this very year. Abolishing the electoral college and going to direct popular vote has been a no-brainer for a couple of centries now. (Guess which anti-democratic, minority-rule party is rabidly supporting it?) And I can visualize getting rid of the Senate altogether. The United States is no longer a confederation of independent nations ("states" in 18th century parlace.) No reason each one gets an equal seat at the table.
"a couple of centries"
(sigh) Clearly, that should have been "a couple of centuries."
Absorb it. Only then can you begin your journey toward lasting insight.
It is the Mandala of Kevin. Eight simple bars. Yet are they indeed so simple?
Look beyond the obvious meaning, for it means nothing, but realize too that the obvious meaning IS the meaning, and it is all the meaning that there is.
IOW, replace the cloture 60-vote and replace it with the simple majority cloture vote.
Frankly, the real problem is that, often, Democrats fail to dedicate the necessary time and money towards selling policies. Send more people to speak on Fox and make it a regular habit. You can't break that information bubble by complaining about it; you have to pierce the bubble and enter it.
You can't just send more people to speak on Fox, they have to be invited. Do you think Fox and Friends, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanne Pirro, or Lara Trump(!) are going to have a serious discussion with someone from the Biden administration or a Democrat in Congress?
They had Buttigieg on... And he did alright.
But yes, Democrats cannot just force media to carry their message.
Frankly, the real problem is that, often, Democrats fail to dedicate the necessary time and money towards selling policies.
I see this claim made all the time and I think it's risibly false. It's tempting to think better or more effective political communication would work wonders, but there's very little evidence that's the case. Very, very large numbers of Americans prioritize cultural issues over economics. Until that changes (maybe after several more decades of demographic drift?) we're in for hard sledding.
The real problem is our clusterfuck of a constitution.
How is changing the Constitution going to get voters to care about policy, about using our collective power through government to achieve want we can’t on our own, instead of trying to use government to immiserate people whose skin color, or ethnicity, or lifestyle, or choice of partner they disapprove?
want -> what
How is changing the Constitution going to get voters to care about policy, about using our collective power through government to achieve want we can’t on our own...
It won't. I don't claim it would. But we don't have to get "voters to care about policy." Plenty already do. Everything I've read suggests healthy majorities of Americans want the same things citizens of other high income democracies want: guaranteed healthcare coverage, affordable college, sensible firearms regulations, strong environmental protections, large-scale infrastructure investments, etc. The problem is these healthy majorities (in the main) can't get the kind of society they want because the profoundly minoritarian nature of America's Madisonian polity allows the white ethnonationalist block to stop progress (or dramatically slow it down).
America's problem definitely isn't lack of interest in policy. Plenty of Americans exercise common sense and vote to further a decent society. But "plenty" isn't enough when you're dealing with a constitution designed by long dead slave-owning planters who were highly suspicious of democracy.
Yes, in opinion polls, people will say they support those progressive policies. But the candidate for whom they could vote, who supports those policies, is the candidate who wants to take away their guns, or keep kids from praying in school, or let boys who think they are girls use the girls' bathroom -- and those are all dealbreakers. So they vote for the Republican. Who just happens to oppose every progressive policy.
I don't think anyone denies there are plenty of right-leaning voters who are either ignorant about many of the policies their party (GOP) advocates, or actually favor those policies. (Or else they simply prioritize white supremacy over economic populism).
But such voters appear to be a minority: the plain evidence (based on both polling and much of recent electoral history) strongly suggests right-leaning voters are significantly outnumbered by moderates and liberals. And yet we consistently see either A) the latter fail to gain political power because of the constitution's sundry minoritarian features or B) very little progress even when they do win because of the constitution's sundry vetocratic features.
The enemy of #OurRevolution, Mayo Pete Buttigieg, Heteronormative Soul in a Homosexual Vessel, had the distinction as El Tio Pepe's most frequent & strongest surrogate to FOXnews, at least during its daytime, newsieish programming, so I can see why you missed that.
The alt-left, like the alt-right, isn't keen on Mr. Mc Kinsey's Neoliberal Neoconservative crypto Marxist fascism propelling the American state to apocalypse.
It isn't just the margin in Congress, it's how the members got there. The GOP is no longer a party of policies, which can be negotiated over. It's a cult, a crusade against the infidel Democrats; compromise isn't an option. Having public opinion solidly behind Democratic policies isn't enough, because when Republican voters go into the voting booth, they aren't thinking about policy.
After 9/11, Karl Rove found his Permanent Republican Majority's genie in a bottle. What he didn't know was genies are quite so impish.
You are confusing the odds and the stakes.
There is so much to absorb... That is not in the chart.
Polarization is way up so majorities are smaller. That is in the chart.
Polarization is way up so way more party line votes. That is not in the chart.
The New Deal Democratic coalition dominated Congress for decades. Not exactly in the chart.
Does that mean Biden is situated more like Wilson than FDR or LBJ? Seems strained.
Biden is passing big bills despite such a narrow majority on party line votes. The chart alone would not tell you that.
Southern Democrats of the LBJ era are not Democrats in our era but hold the same policy positions. So, what's your point?