- Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion
- Campaigns & Elections
Hoover Institution senior fellow Morris Fiorina, the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, has studied American politics—with a special emphasis on elections, public opinion, and representation—for more than fifty years. His latest Hoover Press book, Unstable Majorities Continue: The Trump Era, involves a data-driven discussion of the state of American politics. It examines party sorting and the current era of electoral instability. He spoke with Chris Herhalt about his findings.
Chris Herhalt: I’d like to start with your focus in the book on the self-identified moderates in America today and how this speaks to your thesis. You find that the number of self-identified moderates has not really declined since 1976—but then if you listen to political news coverage, the conduct of the parties, the conduct of the president, even previous presidents, you’d think there were basically no moderates left in America. Is that a fair assessment?
Morris Fiorina: Sure. You read popular commentary and even well-informed, high-level commentary about how the country is just more polarized than it has been since the Civil War. And if you actually look at the data, you just can’t find evidence of that. You might think, for example, that the whole country is divided into liberals and conservatives and middle-of-the-road people are gone. In fact, we have data from the Seventies onward, and the country today looks about the same as it did in Jimmy Carter’s era; the moderates are still the plurality category, with liberals and conservatives being the minorities on each side. And if you look at specific issues like abortion, you might think from commentary that basically everybody is pro-choice and wants abortion on demand or are pro-life and wants to eliminate all abortions. In fact, Americans are in the middle. There have very nuanced views. They have views about when abortion should be legal and under what circumstances. The two extremes, I would estimate from public opinion data, are less than 10 percent on each side. Everybody else is in between and has various kinds of qualifications on their beliefs.
And that’s true of all the issues you look at. That the electorate has divided into two pools is not true.
Now, what has happened is, I think the focus on voters is wrong. The focus should be on the parties. The focus should be on the activist base that the two parties have, and I make this argument in a series of books: that the parties have sorted. What I mean is that thirty years ago, if you were conservative, you could vote for Ronald Reagan for president and also vote for a Democratic member of Congress who was conservative. And if you were a liberal, you could vote for Walter Mondale or Mike Dukakis for president and also vote for a Republican who was a liberal. There were Republican senators in New England, in New York and Massachusetts. Now, basically, all of the minority wings of each party have gone. If you’re a Democrat official, you’re a liberal. If you’re a Republican official, you hold conservative positions. And what that means is that things can’t get done any more than would’ve gotten done before.
I try to bring some qualitative evidence to that. If you look back in the 1960s, things are pretty polarized. They’re polarized over Vietnam. They’re polarized over civil rights, riots, and so forth. And yet what happens? Is it a party conflict? Democrats and Republicans? No. The Southern Democrats are on the conservative side. Northern Democrats are on the liberal side. Republicans are sort of in between and spread all over.
For any policy, you could have a Democratic president get some support from liberal Republicans, or you could have a Republican president—there weren’t many in those days—get support from conservative Democrats. Things could still get done. But now it’s just liberal or conservative from top to bottom. This is contrary to a century of political science research. That is, in two-party systems, the parties are big, heterogeneous coalitions. And in multiparty systems, they are ideologically distinct; nobody ever is going to win a majority. Each party has a clear base, and then they get together after the election and form a coalition. What’s happened in the United States is we somehow evolved two parties that look like the parties of multiparty systems.
But the big problem is we only have two of them. In multiparty systems, you know you’re not going to win the majority, so you know you’re going to have to compromise. But in the United States now, each party has the hope that “I can win everything. And when I win everything, I can jam it down the throats of the entire population.” The population doesn’t accept that.
So, the whole phrase “unstable majority” reflects this continual ping pong-ing of popular majorities in the national institutions, where basically the Democrats get in and try to do too much. I call it overreach. And the Republicans get in, and they try to do too much. And the marginal members who voted for you in the last election say, “I didn’t vote for that,” so they vote against you in the next election. And you lose your majority.
Chris Herhalt: The “I didn’t vote for that” attitude was going to make up my next question. That it seems like the best expression of this sentiment from the moderates and the average or median voter. Under President Biden, the impetus might have been student loan forgiveness or concerns about the size of the post-COVID recovery spending. Now it’s Caribbean boat strikes or ICE being sent to blue cities. Constant overreach.
Morris Fiorina: The current immigration dilemma reflects this exactly. I mean, the population definitely said, “We want illegal immigration stopped.” And there’s even a majority who said, “We want illegals deported.” And I think what they’re referring to was all the people who came in unvetted under the Biden administration. But when Stephen Miller says that we’re going to eliminate the person who’s been serving you coffee at Starbucks for twenty years or the person who’s been taking care of your child for ten years, people said, “No! I didn’t vote for that. I didn’t mean them.” So, the vote is a rough signal, but I think that’s why the Republicans have lost so much support in this area, so much popular feeling. They simply went way too far where median voters were concerned.
Chris Herhalt: In your new book you have a chart focusing on the Democrats and the GOP, the “very strong” supporters of both, and where they have moved ideologically over time. You show how the Democrats have shifted dramatically leftward, whereas the “I’m always going to be a Republican” voter has moved only slightly right over the years. Does this explain anything about recent electoral cycles?
Morris Fiorina: I think it explains why the Democrats can’t take advantage of the obvious problems the Republicans have. And as bad as things are now for the Republicans, I think most political scientists aren’t confident the Democrats will still manage to take account of that. The Democratic activist base holds positions, especially on cultural issues, that are far more liberal than not only just the country but a whole part of the Democratic coalition, the working-class space. And they keep talking—they keep stressing economics and affordability and billionaires—but you could talk about that till the cows come home. If you don’t address the issues like trans rights and so forth, and extreme views on abortion or other things, then the country’s not going to be with you. So, until the Democratic elites get back somewhere near the center of the country, it’s going to be hard for them to take advantage of what the Republicans have done.
Chris Herhalt: You wrote about what Senator Ruben Gallego is telling everybody in Arizona. That they have to be where the voters are. That they have to talk a different way. It doesn’t mean abandoning your principles, it just means you don’t sound like you’re like an alien from outer space.
Morris Fiorina: He forbade anybody in his office from using the term “Latinx” and said: “Nobody in the Hispanic community uses that.” He said, “That’s what they do in faculty lounges. That’s what they do in the ethnic studies programs in elite universities.” He’s been beating that drum for a long time, and I think he is where his constituents are.
Chris Herhalt: You also wrote, “Today, I am even more convinced that some people voted for Trump in part to relish the pain his victory inflicted on Democratic elites.” That could be the greatest motivating factor in most of his second-term agenda. But what do you think of that as a long-term strategy?
Morris Fiorina: Well, if the Democrats continue to talk and act like cultural elites, it’s going to persist for the long term. You might hope that after some number of elections in which this doesn’t seem to work, that they’d make a change.
Some Democrats still don’t get this because their view of elites is money elite. People have a lot of money, people have a lot of power, but there are also cultural elites. I come from the Western Pennsylvania coal fields. And I can tell you that there’s just a resentment of people who look down on the beer you drink, who look down on the foods you eat. There’s such a thing as snobbishness on the part of a lot of Democratic elites who increasingly come from the elite universities, who occupy the staff positions and are within the nonprofits, and they have power and influence in the Democratic Party far out of proportion to their actual voting power or their power in the electorate. And that’s the problem the Democrats are facing.
Chris Herhalt: When you talked partisan sorting in the book, you mentioned that the number of pro-gun Democrats is declining while the number of liberal, pro-choice Republicans is falling. Is there something here that accelerates and reinforces the sorting in the primary system?
Morris Fiorina: To the extent that the primary electorate is out of step with a larger electorate, it’s true of both parties that they will often choose the “pure” candidate rather than the one who has the best chance to win the election. And I think the professionals in each party realize this, and they have started to say, “How do we stop this?” But these are your strongest supporters. These are the people who give you money. These are people who knock on doors and so forth, and they’re the people who turn out. People don’t realize the average turnout in a House primary is in single digits. And so people ask, “Why don’t the Republicans grow a spine?” Well, I’m just afraid that if I cross Trump, the 10 percent or so of the people in my district who really love Trump are going to be the only ones who come out to vote in the primary. And I’m going to lose.
Chris Herhalt: Toward the end of the book—and I don’t want to spoil anything for readers—you make a bit of a suggestion that maybe this era of unstable majorities could be coming to a close. But then you say that even if it is, there won’t be some grand, noticeable sign of it. What’s happening here?
Morris Fiorina: Well, it’s just that the population is so clearly tired of it. We have now only less than 60 percent of the country willing to say, I’m either a Democrat or a Republican. Basically, it’s a situation I regard as ripe for change. But as I point out, we have no ability to predict when these changes will occur. They occur for different reasons. And when you look through history, they typically occur when somebody wins an election and does better than people have been experiencing for some time, and they re-elect that person.
And whether it’s a Roosevelt, a McKinley, a Margaret Thatcher, a Mitterrand, or a Ronald Reagan who brings it to this, they never bring it permanently. I make the argument that people have high expectations of politics, and that in the United States in particular, we have always been a violent, conflictual society. I think we went through a period of relative calm in the 1990s and early 2000s, and people have an idealized version of what politics can be. You can have relative stability and satisfaction for part of a generation, and then something else happens. I sort of think this too shall end somehow, someday.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
