The Cathy Newman Election

The tectonic plates are moving in American politics, and American political journalists don’t see it at all. Like Cathy Newman talking to Jordan Peterson, they keep tilting their heads and saying, “What you mean is…”, and like Jordan Peterson, the world keeps saying that no, that’s not what I mean at all. Political journalists keep picking up the block of ideological realignments focused on class conflict and economic grievances and trying to shove them into the racism hole. “What you’re saying is white nationalism?”

I’m suddenly confident that they just don’t see what’s happening, and can’t. They’re hopelessly trapped by old categories in a moment of radical reinvention. To make this argument in a single remarkably plain example: the New York Times vs. the New York Times.

In an Oct. 17 column we recently discussed in a comment thread here, Times columnist David Brooks argued that the single defining feature of American politics in 2024 is that everything is locked down tightly, with no movement in political loyalties, and especially don’t miss the last sentence of this quoted passage:

As the American Enterprise Institute scholars Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin note in a new study, “Politics Without Winners,” we have two parties playing the role of minority party: “Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach.”

Teixeira and Levin observe that both parties are content to live with deadlock. The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.” Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again.

So the one thing we for sure have in 2024 is the politics of deadlock, with no one — especially not Trump — trying to expand their base. Trump is just pounding away on the same old tired MAGA grievances, the angry white people stuff, and he’s not even trying to pick up any new support from anywhere, so we’re not going to have any movement. We’re locked down in trench warfare, tired messaging to the locked down base versus tired messaging to the locked down base, and no political movement is even trying to have a big tent. No party can possibly break out of the deadlock.

So. Here’s the New York Times yesterday: “Early Results Show a Red Shift Across the U.S.” They illustrate this analysis with an astonishing map marked up with red and blue arrows to show partisan shifts — but note which color prevails, and how dramatically:

In a podcast discussion on Nov. 7, top New York Times political reporters boggled over the massive shifts Trump achieved among different demographic groups, and in different counties: “Donald Trump gained with many, in fact most, demographic groups.” Places that Hillary Clinton won by something like 30+ points in 2016 voted for Trump in 2024 by a 10-point margin. He achieved enormous swings. Trump won border counties that are almost entirely Latino.

See also: “According to exit polls, Trump’s support among Latino men surged to 55%, 19-point increase from 2020, while narrowing the gap among Hispanic women by 17 points.”

See also, on the 2024 Trump shift:

Women: +2

Men: +3

Non-college: +6

Hispanic: +6

Black: +7

Young: +10

Again, three weeks before the election, quoting important academic experts, one of the top voices on the opinion pages of the supposed newspaper of record explained this election this way: “Teixeira and Levin observe that both parties are content to live with deadlock… Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again.”

That wasn’t merely wrong — it was a 180-degree inversion of reality, the complete opposite of what happened.

They. Have. No. Idea.