My favorite sort of social phenomenon is something that seems normal to modern eyes that is actually incredibly unusual. We take it for granted that every presidential election is a nail-biter these days. But this era of close elections is deeply strange. We used to have blowouts all the time. In 1964, 1972, and 1984, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, respectively, won by more than 15 points. This never happens anymore. Since the hanging-ballot mess of 2000, we’ve had historically close contests again and again: in 2004, 2012, 2016, and 2020. This year seems almost certain to continue the trend. National polls have almost never been this tight in the closing days of a presidential contest.
In an era of shifting coalitions and weak parties, why is every modern presidential election so close? Today’s guest is Matt Yglesias, the author of the Slow Boring newsletter, and a return guest on this show. We talk about how the era of close elections has, importantly, coincided with an era of racial realignment. We propose several theories for why every election is a nail-biter in the 21st century. And we explain why “it’s the internet, stupid” doesn’t work to explain this particular trend.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
In the following excerpt, Derek Thompson and Matthew Yglesias examine the incredible churn within the American electorate.
Derek Thompson: So in the open, I just briefly traced why I think the age of closed presidential elections is such an interesting mystery. It is really uncommon to have a 24-year period with so many elections hanging on a razor’s edge like this.
But the first thing that I want to do is to help listeners feel the mystery as I feel it. So this would not be an interesting puzzle to solve if the electorate was frozen in place, 48/48. If everybody was locked into their partisan positions, and voting for the same party, over and over and over and over again, there’d be no mystery to solve.
But that’s not true. Barack Obama won Ohio by four points in 2008. And then eight years later, Donald Trump won Ohio by eight points. There are huge changes to the electorate happening during this period of close elections. And one of those things that’s happening that I think is under-recognized, is a very serious racial realignment.
This old assumption that white people will vote for the same share, the same white people will vote for the Republican Party, and the same non-white people will always vote for the Democratic Party, that has become complicated by some of the changes of the last few cycles. You just wrote about this. So tell me what you’re seeing in the racial realignment of the electorate that I think deepens this mystery of the era of closed elections.
Matt Yglesias: Yeah. We’ve seen since 2012, we’ve seen Republicans steadily gain vote share with Latino and African American voters, especially with Hispanic voters, but with African Americans too. It’s happened cycle across cycle across cycle, quite consistently. And Democrats have started doing better with white voters.
Some of that is because the share of the white population that has a college degree has risen, but some of it is Democrats’ vote performance with white college graduates. It’s gotten a lot better. And with working-class whites has gotten a little bit better than it had been, at least in 2016.
One simple example I like to give is, if Stacey Abrams had done as well in 2018 as Hillary Clinton did with African-American voters, she would’ve won that race. But she did worse, right? And that’s how dramatic and notable the falling away has been, that African-American Democrats have done worse than white Democrats used to in the past with African-Americans.
Florida, in 2016, was a swing state. Clinton lost it, but she lost it very narrowly. There’s a world in which she won that election by doing slightly better—in the state of Florida, would’ve been enough to tip it.
In 2024, it’s not on the map at all. It’s not part of Kamala’s narrow path to victory. It’s also not even really part of her landslide scenario. The very large Latino population in that state has become a lot more conservative. In Texas, Democrats used to think, well, if we do better in the suburbs of these growing cities, we’ll win the state.
Democrats are doing much better in the suburbs of the large Texas cities, but they’re doing much worse in the Rio Grande Valley. And so the state has been in a stasis essentially, but the internal dynamics are very dramatic. Just as within the U.S., we’ve stayed evenly divided, but not because the same groups of people keep voting each four years.
Thompson: This is not like asking a group of 100 people every four years, how many of you have a Y chromosome, how many of you have naturally red hair, where you’re going to get the same answer over and over again, no matter who’s standing at the front of the room asking the question.
Instead, we are asking an incredibly dynamic electorate about a heads-or-tails choice, Republican or a Democrat. And even while we’re getting a shifting electorate, the answer is still roughly coming up 48-48 almost every time. And I want to do one more point on how interesting these shifts are. Even though every election is close, a lot of the underlying questions are changing dramatically.
So we live in a world where Mitt Romney, in 2012, loses with 47 percent of the vote. And then Donald Trump runs as the Republican presidential nominee four years later, as a totally different Republican—incredibly different views on trade and Social Security, and certainly on temperament.
But he basically wins the same share of the vote, 46 percent, and wins. Can you, to help dramatize this, talk a little bit about how different Trump offered a view of the Republican Party, despite the fact that we all know how this situation ended? He ended up winning almost the exact same percent of the electorate.
Yglesias: Yeah, it’s interesting. Trump performs much worse than Romney did with people in the suburbs of large cities, but he makes the Republican Party seen as a champion of economic nationalism in the Midwest, and he does a lot better in the Great Lakes states. He also does better in some weird pockets of the country. He does much better in Staten Island, in New York City, right? And you see a realignment of police officers in general, and you see some of this continuing.
There was a good political article about how a lot of blue-collar labor union members are voting for Trump now, and putting union leaders in an awkward position. But he has been alienating upscale women who used to be loyal Republican voters, the kind of people who believe in hard work and low taxes and classic Republican values.
So Trump found a much more geographically optimal set of people to vote for him, and he turned what was a big electoral college loss for Romney into a narrow electoral college win for himself without really getting more votes in the aggregate.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Matthew Yglesias
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
