Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the program on political reform at New America. He is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying.

There are many things we still don’t know about this year’s presidential election. But here’s one thing we do, despite the flaws in the polls: Even though the campaign seemed to go on forever, it now seems clear that throughout almost 90 percent of the campaign, almost no voters switched candidates. The polling results for both candidates occupied a remarkably narrow band for the entire cycle. By the count of political scientist Corwin Smidt, the share of true swing voters has declined from 15 percent of the electorate to less than 5 percent over the past four decades.

In other words, in politics today, there are very few swing voters. To the extent that there were undecided voters in 2016, many of them appear to have been Republicans who waited until the last minute to reaffirm their partisanship.


Political parties and candidates have adapted to this shift by changing how they campaign: The goal is now to mobilize the most loyal voters rather than lure in the undecided or persuade the other party’s voters to change sides. For the Trump campaign, this mobilization strategy meant trying hard to inspire disenchanted working-class whites in heavily Republican areas, giving them something to get excited about in Donald Trump’s anti-establishment white identity politics. For Democrats, this meant investing in large-scale get-out-the-vote operation on the premise that the “Obama coalition” of black and Hispanic voters and young educated whites could be sustained by enough field offices and data analytics.

The problem is that what works for the parties—getting the base excited to show up—is increasingly doing harm to our national politics. As mobilization-only politics becomes the dominant form of campaign for both parties, it’s pushing them to double down on the things that excite their bases rather trying to talk to the other side. And in a multi-ethnic democracy, in which one party is the party of white identity and one is the party of diversity, this is becoming a toxic fight. If you’re wondering why 2016 felt so ugly, right down to that last-minute polling surprise, this is why. The much harder question is how to fix it.



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Let’s envision two ideal types of politics: a politics of persuasion and a politics of turnout. In a politics of persuasion, both parties invest their resources in making the most convincing arguments to all voters, and voters weigh arguments from both sides equally. In the end, the side with the more convincing argument wins. In a politics of turnout, both parties focus on making sure they get their core voters energized and to the polls, running campaigns on emotional appeals.

Not so long ago, many voters still made up their mind over the course of the election, depending on what the candidates said and did. In 1988, Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush 54 percent to 38 percent in mid-May, only to lose overwhelmingly in the end. By 2004, John Kerry and George W. Bush’s polling numbers hardly shifted for an entire long campaign. Campaigning became a game of inches.

What changed in between? It’s no coincidence that 2004 was the first campaign in which one side had a truly sophisticated data and voter turnout operation: the Republicans. In 2008, Democrats showed them up by building an even more sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation, relying on much-improved data analytics and cutting edge political science mobilization research specifically targeted at core groups likely motivated by the possibility of electing first black president. It worked: Black voter turnout surged, by 8 percentage points in the 18-to-24-year-old demographic. Hispanic voter turnout was higher than usual, too, by a couple of points, all of which delivered a big win for Obama that year. In 2012, nonwhite voters showed up big for Obama again, sealing the importance that data analytics and turnout operations would have for the Democratic Party.

In the mid-2000s, Republicans also discovered that turnout could also work in the negative. Republican-controlled states started enacting tougher voter ID laws that were designed to make it difficult for poor minorities and young people most likely to lack such ID to vote. In other words, Republicans went from thinking that maybe they could win these voters on substance to giving up on them, and deciding that the best solution was to make sure that they just didn’t vote at all.

This shift has had important consequences—and throughout 2016 we saw them.

Throughout the campaign, polls showed that approval numbers for Trump among black voters hovered low—at times as low as 1 percent. At the same time, Hillary Clinton’s numbers among black voters ran from 80 percent to 90 percent, and Trump led her by asizeable margin among whites over her. And while all exit polls should be taken with a grain of salt right now, they largely reflected those divides, with 88 percent of black people and 37 percent of white people voting for Hillary Clinton. The best analysis of the Hispanic vote shows Hispanics also supported Hillary Clinton at 79 percent, and with increased turnout, but in the Rust Belt states she lost, there simply weren’t enough of them.

If the electorate is that divided along lines of identity, political strategy further entrenches the historic level of polarization that has come to define national politics. Donald Trump has to worry far more about losing white support if he disavows white supremacist leader David Duke than he does about losing black support if he doesn’t, knowing that blacks won’t vote for him anyway.

This gives us a politics where Donald Trump can spread lies that Democrats are attempting to rig the election through voter fraud in urban party strongholds. It’s a politics where the Clinton campaign can convince itself that it’s a waste of time to campaign in potentially hostile working-class white areas, and it’s a better use of time to hold private fundraisers and use that money to buy a ground game. “If you run a campaign trying to appeal to 60 to 70 percent of the electorate,” David Plouffe, an Obama strategist, told the New York Times in 2015, “you’re not going to run a very compelling campaign for the voters you need.”

And when one party is the party for white people, and the other party is the party for people of color, it’s a campaign where there is little argument over substance. Trump’s first campaign ad was of illegal immigrants committing crimes and collecting Social Security. This was not designed to win over moderate swing voters. Trump, despite his pet issues of trade and the Mexican border, spent very little time going into the specifics of how we would bring back manufacturing jobs or how he would deport such large numbers of people. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, despite having a website full of policy papers and programs, spent little time offering a broad policy vision. Her campaign strategy focused mostly on trying to disqualify Trump as anathema to core Democratic groups: women should hate him because he’s a sexist; minorities should hate him because he’s a racist.

The result was the most identity-fueled, policy-deficient election we’ve ever seen.

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All this puts our politics in a very stuck place. To change, one of two things will have to happen. Either we will need the crack-up of one or both of our two major political parties, or we need to change our electoral system. Both are long shots.

A crack-up of either or both parties would have the potential to generate a large enough block of otherwise homeless but consistent voters who don’t need to be mobilized. This would mean more swing voters, and more politics of persuasion.

Changes to our electoral system are harder, but worth working toward. The key here would be reforms that change our political campaigns from being zero-sum trench warfare between two parties, and instead move toward multiple parties and/or encourage more ideological diversity within the parties, and create more civility. We could explore returning to multi-member districts (ideally, drawing House districts five times larger than they are now and letting voters collectively select five representatives) and adding instant-runoff ranked-choice voting (allowing voters to assign second, third, fourth and fifth choices, so if their preferred candidates were not among the top finishers, their support could be transferred to remaining candidates) This would reduce polarization and probably increase the number of viable parties.

It’s possible that a crack-up of at least one party, the Republicans, began to happen with the rise of Trump, who ran against his party’s establishment and rescrambled partisan lines. That may continue under a Trump administration as fault lines over infrastructure and free trade and maybe even respect for constitutional norms continue to fracture the party. On the other side, Democrats especially should have every reason to back electoral reforms, since they would help them out with their current geography problem—Democratic voters are inefficiently concentrated in a limited number of urban areas, which means they have to over-perform in the popular vote to win the House, Senate and now, the presidency.

Certainly, there are voices in both parties trying to broaden their coalitions. “We can’t be totally coastal and totally minority-driven regardless of how the demographics are trending,” Rep. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, told the New York Times after the election. Republicans, too, are thinking about how to widen their appeal to nonwhites, which could include focusing on “issues that manifest themselves in different but similar ways in different communities,” as Mike Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, said in a recent Politico Magazine discussion. For now, that kind of party soul-searching might be the most immediate way to reverse course from a turnout-only, identity-focused and increasingly divisive era of American politics. But in the long term, thinking long and hard about structural changes that can make democracy more inclusive and responsive might be our only way out.