Scattered across the United States, your faithful Mischiefs crew watched the last two days of presidential debates and formed some opinions. We offer those here.

Julia Azari

Identity politics was the winner of the debates.

This is a loaded phrase and I use it deliberately and advisedly. One big question in a field of 20+ candidates — perhaps half of whom are qualified and potentially viable — is which kinds of fault lines will arise. Tension between economic populism and (for example) racial justice has been part of the party’s move to the left.

No one really explicitly addressed that tension in the debates, but it’s notable that the two standard-bearers for left positions on economic issues did not shine on the more identity-related questions. Elizabeth Warren was basically left out of the immigration discussion in the first debate, with Julián Castro setting the agenda and forcing others to respond to him. Bernie Sanders was also tangential to the heated exchange of the second night, in which Kamala Harris took Joe Biden to task for both recent comments and past actions on racial issues. Buttigieg’s answer to questions about his record as mayor of South Bend and a recent incident of police violence is another standout moment of the second night.

Candidates also positioned themselves on gender and LGBT issues. Booker and Castro both mentioned the needs of transgender Americans on the first night. The discussion on Wednesday night also featured the candidates jockeying for who could most forcefully come out in favor of abortion rights and against the Hyde Amendment. On the second night, candidates pushed the envelope less but embraced liberal positions in clear terms. Kirsten Gillibrand highlighted women’s issues (using fairly traditional, gender binary language, in a stark but probably unintentional contrast with Castro). Buttigieg talked about his marriage in his closing statement.

Each night, the candidates answered questions about health care, the overall orientation of the economy (phrased in the second night in terms of socialism), and the need to address the needs of middle class and working American — whatever those terms may mean. The debate structure probably shaped this. If Warren had been on the second night with the other major players, she might have pushed them to address more economic questions and the populist framework in which she (and Sanders) present them. Similarly, if Warren and Sanders had been on the same stage, we might have seen an exchange between them about how exactly the rich and the corporations are messing everything up, and what to do about it.

It’s also worth noting that identity and economics don’t operate in parallel in real life. Marginalization and underrepresentation have economic consequences. But for right now, the discourse in the Democratic primary still kind of treats these as separate tracks, and this week’s debates brought the identity questions into the spotlight. 

Jonathan Ladd

In a crowded presidential field (and this is an extremely crowded field), the first task for most of the candidates is to be considered one of the top three or four contenders. You need to get voters to see you as a serious candidate so you are worth investing attention in learning about, and supporters will not be wasting their votes. 

So the big task for all of the candidates except Joe Biden is getting noticed by viewers and getting attention in post-debate news coverage. No matter how much people like your position or your ability to defeat Trump, you can’t ask people to throw their vote away. In that regard, in the first debate, Warren, Castro, and Booker did what they needed to do, and in the second debate so did Harris, Buttigieg, and Sanders. Add Biden to these six and it’s hard to see how the remaining 13 candidates can get attention going forward.

Kamala Harris’s performance stood out from all 20 candidates over these two nights. That is very hard to do in such a big field. But her ability to clearly press her points, which she has shown as a prosecutor and in Senate hearings, was on display here. Harris, Warren, Castro, and Booker were all able to clearly explain their plans in very limited time. But only Harris showed that she could also effectively go on the attack. Her attack on Biden’s record working with segregationists in the Senate and opposing busing worked both to hit Biden on a weak point and build up her own appeal to the African American community, given that some on the left have criticized her previously as being too aggressive as California Attorney General.

Finally, this was a bad night for Joe Biden. It was completely predictable that he would be attacked. Yet when he was attacked on his most obvious weaknesses — his age, his record on race, and his 2002 vote for the Iraq War — he had no good response to any of them. Compared to the others onstage, especially Harris, his answers were unfocused and his tone was tentative. These weaknesses have the danger of playing into concerns about his age.

Will this hurt Biden in the polls? It’s hard to say. It seems like his African American support is particularly vulnerable to the kind of attacks Harris laid on him. Time will tell. Debates often don’t lead to any movement in the polls, but Biden’s campaign can’t be happy with his performance last night.

Seth Masket

Overall, I didn’t see a lot from these two debates to shake up the larger presidential field. The real action was centered on a handful of candidates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Sanders, Warren, maybe Klobuchar, and maybe O’Rourke. These candidates, for the most part, are the ones who have some party support behind them, in terms of endorsements, money, staff, etc. 

I’ll note that the candidates who stand to benefit the most from these debates — especially Booker, Harris, and Warren — are the ones who have been standing out in my surveys of early-state activists but not necessarily dominating public opinion surveys. The strong public performances we saw onstage this week are similar to what those activists have seen in the candidates; they’re just now being made available to the rest of us.

The other candidates got in a few good moments and few did anything to actually embarrass themselves, but they didn’t really do anything to destabilize the rankings, either. Swalwell got in an effective dig at Biden’s age, but that is likely to hurt Biden more than it helps Swalwell. My guess is that this bottom tier of candidates will have a harder time qualifying for later debates as more donors and backers concentrate their support on the upper tier.

It was hard not to be impressed by the exchange between Harris and Biden. Biden’s greatest strength so far in this contest has been his perceived electability; even those who do not necessarily prefer him as a nominee have been willing to support him because they believe he’s the most likely to defeat Trump. Harris, by sharply critiquing him on his recent comments regarding his collegiality with his segregationist colleagues, not only attacked him on an issue of great importance to a vast segment of the Party, but also made him look vulnerable and defensive about his record. His nomination may well still happen, but its aura of inevitability was punctured.

Hans Noel

The last two nights have revealed a new model for debates, building on the foundation that the Republicans began last cycle. Two debates, without even a hint of a top tier and an “undercard,” is the way to go. Even with a field as small as eight or 10 people, I think it makes sense.  

Some worried that spreading the debates over two nights, without an obvious top tier, would be trouble. Would it matter who you were drawn against? I don’t think it was a problem at all. 

Presidential nomination debates have never really been debates, in the sense of conflict over a proposition. They’re definitely not like high school or college competitive debates, or even a legislative debate, where different sides of an issue clash against each other. They have always been more like side-by-side press conferences, especially when there are more than two candidates.

So why not just have a series of press conferences? The “debate’’ format allows for accountability. While journalists can ask follow up questions in a town hall meeting, they often don’t. There is nothing like the incentive of an opponent to make sure a candidate doesn’t get away with anything. When Beto O’Rourke touted his plan for immigration reform, Julián Castro called him out over the details, notably Castro’s call for repealing Section 1325. If the moderators won’t ask Joe Biden about his record on race, Kamala Harris can do it.

None of this requires that all of the candidates be present. At this stage, all we want is to sort out the candidates who deserve more attention from those who do not. If Tim Ryan can’t stand up to criticism from Tulsi Gabbard, he should probably drop out. 

If everyone were on the stage at the same time, or if the “top’’ candidates were together, I don’t think my conclusions would change about who deserves more attention (Harris, Castro, Klobuchar, Gillibrand) and who does not (O’Rourke, Ryan, Yang, Williamson, and, yes, Biden).

We’re going to have a lot more debates, both this cycle and — probably even with reforms to the system — into the future. The split format is a great way to handle a field of eight or more. 

Richard Skinner

These were two bad nights for two old men. Biden and Sanders both looked and acted their age and then some. Biden began well by seeming above some of the squabbling among the other candidates and continually tying himself to Obama. But as the debate went on, he just seemed older and more sluggish. We’ll see how people react to the substance of the Biden-Harris exchange (I’d be pretty surprised if Harris talks about bringing back busing), but their optics were obvious: Harris seemed young, energetic, and unintimidated, while Biden appeared old, defensive, and caught off guard.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders kept shouting about the same handful of topics that have always obsessed him. Red-faced and surly, he was probably the most unpleasant presence onstage. Biden seemed like an out-of-touch grandfather whose time has passed, while Sanders was more like an ill-tempered neighbor yelling on his front porch. Everyone will probably forget Wednesday night’s debate, but the candidates who did best were generally the most liberal — Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — and perhaps will compete with Sanders for support.

Kamala Harris put on one of the best debate performances I have ever seen. Sharp, energetic, well-informed, immaculately prepared, she seemed ready to take on Donald Trump. (Her experience as a prosecutor clearly has its advantages). Her attack on Biden’s record on race was expertly choreographed and beautifully delivered. (Smart move making it more about empathy than policy).

Before this debate, most Democratic voters liked Harris but relatively few supported her. This debate could change that. She’s already received an impressive number of endorsements; will her performance garner more? Two potential problems for her: Her call for ending private health insurance could be a real liability in the general election (will she flip-flop again?) and older voters may react differently to her exchange with Biden than did the throngs on Twitter. This could mean that her appeal will be less to the older moderates who currently back Biden and more to the younger liberals who like some of the other candidates.

Oh, there were other candidates? Pete Buttigieg seemed polished and well-informed, but the racial tensions in South Bend are clearly a lingering problem for him. Michael Bennet knew his stuff and made pointed criticisms of the two old men. But I doubt many will remember him. Andrew Yang mercifully said little, while Marianne Williamson not-so-mercifully did not. Eric Swalwell kept trying to make “pass the torch” happen. (Harris could have told him about exploiting the generation gap: “Show, don’t tell.”) Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hickenlooper performed well enough but were dwarfed by the bigger egos onstage.   

Debates rarely have a huge impact, but these may end up boosting Harris and perhaps some of the other mid-range candidates (Warren, Booker, Castro, Buttigieg), while dinging the support of Biden and Sanders. (Does Biden have anyone on his staff who can talk frankly with him about his performance?) I don’t think any of the candidates in the bottom half of the field got much out of these debates, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many not qualify for the third round in September.

Jennifer Nicoll Victor

The Democratic Party’s first debates are a peek inside the sausage factory of American electoral politics. The process now playing out in public view is one that Democrats have done mostly behind closed doors for the last several generations. Winnowing a wide field of candidates to a single nominee is a complex process involving political connections, experience, policy knowledge, fundraising, and, of course, charisma. Democrats came under fire for following an elite-driven, somewhat closed process in 2016, and as a result they are airing their laundry now to settle on a candidate to oppose Trump. 

On Wednesday night, candidates concentrated on introducing themselves and displaying their qualifications. On Thursday, we saw more candidates position themselves vis-à-vis one another and Trump. The most meaningful exchange of the night was between Harris and Biden on the topic of civil rights. Harris directly challenged the frontrunner using a personal anecdote laced with experience and knowledge. Her example both dated him and exposed a fissure in the Democratic Party that she is trying to use to her advantage: How far are Democrats willing to go to correct civil rights injustices? Importantly, race is also the issue Donald Trump uses to appeal to supporters. In this way, Harris challenged the frontrunner in her party and previewed how she might confront the president.

The last two candidates Democrats have nominated are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: big-city, over-educated, policy-wonkish, non-white-men. Of the current field, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, and Elizabeth Warren look most like the party’s most recent choices.

But prior to the debates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were clear frontrunners. While they performed fine in Thursday’s debate, they did not shine. Candidates like Harris and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg were notable breakouts. Biden is already well known, and so is Sanders to some extent, so the early debates cannot help them that much. But for lesser-known candidates like Harris, Warren, and Booker, the debates can move their needles.

Debates are not likely to shake up the rankings in the field too much because the debate audience is primarily made up of people like those who write for and read Mischiefs of Faction. But, if Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, everyone will point to Thursday’s debate as a key moment on her road to success. 

Here at Mischiefs of Faction, we are running a series of articles debating which parts of the US Constitution have aged the least well. Two parts in the original Constitution, written in 1787, that are often criticized by pundits and political scientists are the Senate and the Electoral College. It is easy to conflate the two, but here I want to point out they have important differences and thus pose distinct challenges in adapting to the modern world.

The Electoral College is a strange, patched-together constitutional contraption. But it poses a smaller long-term threat to American democracy than the Senate, because the problems is causes are less serious and there are plausible ways to address them. In contrast, the Senate undermines principles of equal democratic representation and we have no viable way to address most of these problems within our constitutional framework.

On the surface, these institutions seem to have similarities. They are both state-based institutions, reflecting the larger political importance of the states, less mobile population, and lower level of interstate economic integration in the 1780s. They both also allow states to use their political power on a winner-take-all basis, unlike the House of Representatives.

As the Electoral College operates now — except in Maine and Nebraska where some electoral votes are allocated by House district — the candidate who wins the plurality of a state’s popular votes receives all of its electoral votes. A state’s Senate representation is determined by two winner-take-all elections, now by popular vote, but before 1913 by state legislatures.

But that’s where the similarities end. They do not advantage the same states. They are not equally serious threats to democratic representation in the future. And they are not equally challenging to reform.

The Electoral College

The first thing to know about the Electoral College is that, as originally designed, it was a disaster. It very quickly stopped working at all. The Electoral College as written in 1787 assumed presidential and vice presidential candidates would not run together on party tickets. Under the original rules, there is only one Electoral College vote, in which each elector gets two ballots, and the second-place winner becomes vice president.

In America’s first contested election in 1796, to succeed George Washington, the problems became apparent. Long story short, the Democratic-Republican Party nominated Thomas Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president and the Federalist Party nominated John Adams for president and Thomas Pinckney for vice president. In this system, if all the winning party’s electors voted for both candidates on its ticket, those candidates would tie, sending the decision to the House of Representatives.

In 1796, a substantial number of Jefferson’s and Adams’s electors voted for various other candidates with their second ballot. As a result, Jefferson got the second-most votes behind Adams. Neither running mate was elected to office.

In 1800, Jefferson ran with Burr again, opposing Adams’s bid for reelection. This time, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party had more supporters in the Electoral College, but the Democratic-Republican electors all voted for Burr with their second ballot, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives. The House, which, as specified in the Constitution, votes by state, fell one state short of giving Jefferson a majority, with the other states voting for Burr or casting blank ballots because their representatives were evenly divided. Only on the 36^th ballot did several Federalist representatives in Maryland and Vermont change their votes, throwing their states to Jefferson, leading to his election.

This system simply did not work. The original Electoral College wasn’t just a poor method of selecting a president and vice president. It was considerably worse than that. It couldn’t make any selection at all.

The system that we have now is not what was planned by the authors of the 1787 Constitution. It is that failed system after being patched up by the 12^th Amendment, which in 1804 established separate ballots for president and vice president, and also after the winner-take-all method of assigning a state’s electoral votes spread to almost all states by the mid-1800s after initially being used by only Pennsylvania and Maryland.

For most of American history, the Electoral College has rarely mattered. Presidential candidates are more likely to campaign in, and cater to, close states (more on that later), but most of the time this strategizing ends up being unnecessary because the Electoral College selects the same winner as the popular vote would have. The exceptions are 1824 (where third parties threw the election to the House of Representatives), 1877 (where President Hayes might have won a majority of the popular vote if not for rampant suppression of the black vote in the former Confederacy), 1888, 2000, and 2016. Obviously, these last two examples loom large in our thinking.

The Senate

The Senate has also gone through various iterations. Its members were chosen for six-year terms by state legislatures under the 1787 Constitution and, since the 17^th Amendment took effect in 1913, by direct election. However, the way Senators vote in the chamber has evolved over the years not according to any coherent plan.

The biggest aberration is the filibuster. The authors of the original Constitution intended both Houses of Congress to vote by majority rule. James Madison specifically mentions this in Federalist #22 and #52. A previous question motion was removed from the Senate’s rules in 1806 in a move to clean up unnecessary and unused portions of the rules.

Despite the Senate’s rule for forcing an end to debate being removed in 1806 in a move to clean up various unused portions of its rules, the chamber still proceeded on a majoritarian basis in the 1800s, with minorities occasionally able to delay things but not permanently block bills. In 1917, the Senate adopted a “cloture rule” under which two-thirds of senators present could end debate. Only a few bills were blocked by a minority of Senators in the mid-decades of the twentieth century, although those were mostly crucial civil rights and anti-lynching legislation.

In 1975, the cloture threshold was lowered to three-fifths of all senators. In the decades following this, the prevalence of bills and nominations blocked by filibusters greatly increased. At the same time, Congress has created several exceptions to the filibuster rules, most notably the increasingly used “reconciliation” rules, which allow bills affecting the budget to be passed by majority vote, and, in the past decade, the abolition of supermajority requirements for all presidential nominations.

The Senate and the Electoral College give advantages to different parts of the country

Because of their similarities — they are both unusual, state-based, winner-take-all constitutional features — it is easy to assume that the Senate and Electoral College both distort democratic representation in similar ways. But this is not the case. The Senate gives a big advantage to voters in small states, because every state gets an equal number of Senators.

Thus, California’s 39 million people get two senators in Washington, while two Senators also represent states like Wyoming (578,000 people), Vermont (626,000 people), and Alaska (737,000 people). In 2013, the New York Times pointed out that the six senators from California, Texas, and New York represented the same number of people as the 62 senators from the smallest 31 states. (Florida has since passed New York to be the third-biggest state, but the pattern persists.)

People in overrepresented states are not the same as the people in underrepresented states. While there are a few small states on the coasts (hello, Rhode Island and Delaware!), many more small states are inland and rural. The coasts and their large cities tend to be in larger states. This means that the economic and infrastructure needs of cities get less representation in the Senate.

America’s nonwhite population tends to be overwhelmingly in large or medium-sized states. To illustrate, the 10 biggest states (by 2018 Census estimates) all have nontrivial percentages of nonwhite voters, while the 10 smallest states mostly consist of rural, overwhelmingly white states.

10 largest states:

1. California      
2. Texas 
3. Florida           
4. New York      
5. Pennsylvania
6. Illinois
7. Ohio  
8. Georgia          
9. North Carolina
10. Michigan

10 smallest states:

1. Wyoming
2. Vermont
3. Alaska
4. North Dakota
5. South Dakota
6. Delaware
7. Rhode Island
8. Montana
9. Maine
10. New Hampshire

While the Electoral College is also winner-take-all at the state level, each state’s representation is much more proportional to population. State are given electoral votes equal to their number of House members plus two senators. House seats are allocated to the states proportional to population. Only the extra two votes contribute to disproportionality.

When states have lots of House seats, the two extra electoral votes don’t have much effect on their overall share. But for small states, the two extra votes do give some boost, the biggest being in the states that have only three electoral votes (the minimum number), when in a strictly proportional allocation they would have less. Yet overall, this boost to small states over strict proportionality is much smaller than the complete equality small states get in the Senate.

Rather than small state voters, the Electoral College gives really disproportionate influence to voters on the winning side in close states, and less influence to voters on the losing side in close states and those in states where one party dominates. Evaluating which voters have an advantage in the Electoral College is similar to evaluating a gerrymander. In both, you are looking at the outcome of a series of winner-take-all “districts.” In a gerrymander, voters have more influence (and fewer wasted votes) if they win a lot of districts by a small amount, while their opponents are packed into a small number of districts where they win overwhelmingly. In the Electoral College, voters get more influence if they win states with a lot of Electoral Votes by small margins, while their opponents are packed into states where many votes are wasted because they win by huge margins.

The Republican Party won the Electoral College in 2000 and 2016, despite losing the popular vote. In these cases, the Republican candidates won narrow victories in states holding a lot of electoral votes. In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Nevada all by less than four points — Florida famously by only a few hundred votes. In 2016, Donald Trump won Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin all by less than two points, while Hillary Clinton ran up massive majorities in big states like California and New York (30- and 22-point wins, respectively). The Democrats’ Electoral College disadvantage was caused by narrowly losing states with a lot of electoral votes and running up large margins in states they won.

But these circumstances came about because of the very specific electoral patterns in these elections. They are not signs of a permanent disadvantage for coastal, urban, nonwhite voters, or liberal voters generally, in the Electoral College. There will probably be a lot of votes from these groups wasted in California for the foreseeable future. However, if Democrats could flip Florida, the Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin trio, or Arizona into to narrow wins, the efficiency of their vote distribution improves substantially. In 2012, for example, very narrow wins in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia led Barack Obama to win a much larger percentage of the electoral vote than the popular vote. And, of course, if there is a bit more of a regional realignment and Democrats ever narrowly win Texas, they could potentially have a big Electoral College advantage.

Because relatively small shifts in the location of the voting strength of the two parties can lead one party or the other to perform better in the Electoral College than the popular vote, it makes more sense to think of the Electoral College as introducing unpredictable random changes to election outcomes, rather than consistently favoring certain types of voters. This is not a good system. I certainly wouldn’t advise any country designing their constitution to adopt a system like this. But, with the distribution of voters and the trends we have now, it is not likely to consistently advantage some types of voters over others in the future.

Our Senate problem is harder to fix

Both the Senate and the Electoral College are strange constitutional relics, whose problems would be hard to fix. But the difference is that, for the Electoral College, there is a viable plan for curing its pathologies. Currently, 15 states with 189 electoral votes have passed the National Popular Vote Compact (NPV), under which states set in state law a policy that they will give all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. The NPV’s text says it will go into effect if enough states join to constitute a majority of Electoral College votes. The Compact is only 81 electoral votes short of a majority.

This plan seems constitutionally and legally viable. States have the legal power to set the rules for allocating their electoral votes, which is why Maine and Nebraska now don’t use the winner-take-all methods and allocate their votes partially based on congressional districts. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution says, “No state shall without the consent of Congress … enter into any agreement or compact with another state.” The National Popular Vote Compact needs to be approved by a majority vote in Congress to be constitutional, but this is much easier than trying to pass a constitutional amendment.

Seth Masket worries that state legislatures would pull out of the NPV when their electoral votes have to be given to a candidate who received less than a majority of their state’s popular votes. For instance, would Colorado’s legislature allow its votes to go to Donald Trump if he won its popular vote in 2020, or would they vote to pull out of the NPV? It is always hard to make predictions like this. Yet I think it is very possible that states would allow the NPV to govern their electoral votes even in this circumstance.

The key is changing expectations. Most ordinary voters don’t think about the Electoral College. Hopefully, they will think about it less and less the longer the NPV is in effect. The NPV will be the legal status quo in the states. Once the national popular vote system becomes the new norm among elites and the mass public, the national popular vote winner will have much more legitimacy than the losing candidate among the mass public and elites. I think it is plausible to expect state legislators to leave that status quo alone.

Compared to this, the challenges to fixing or abolishing the Senate are much bigger. There is no plausible fix like the NPV without a constitutional amendment. Furthermore, Article 5 of the Constitution states that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” This appears to imply that even an ordinary constitutional amendment couldn’t change the way Senate seats are allocated or abolish the body.

One reading of this is that, rather than the three-fourths of states that must approve regular constitutional amendments, every state would need to approve a change to Senate seat allocation. Given these limitations, we are left to nibble at the edges of the main problem. Here is a list of what could be done to improve the Senate and what would be required to implement the reform.

First, you could abolish the filibuster super-majority requirement in the last realm where it still exists: regular legislation not eligible for reconciliation. This could be done by a majority vote of the Senate in the same way that the filibuster on presidential nominations was ended in recent years.

Second, you could reduce the bias in Senate representation toward rural and white voters by admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states. Both could be admitted by majority votes in both houses of Congress.

(There is some constitutional challenge with admitting DC, in that the admitting legislation would have to allocate a very small portion of DC as the remaining seat of government, because Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says there is space set aside for the seat of government, although it doesn’t set a minimum size. Legislation could leave just the footprint of the Capitol Building as the seat of government. The legislation would also have to state that the District that is referenced in the 23rd Amendment, which gives DC electoral votes, refers to what is now the new state, not to the new smaller seat of government. A more detailed discussion of how this might work is too long for this article. Needless to say, there could be some challenges.)

After these first two reforms, the level of difficulty jumps considerably.

Third, even though changing Senate representation requires the unanimous consent of the states, you could pass an ordinary constitutional amendment that leaves the allocation of Senators the same but strips the entire Senate of some (or most) of its authority. The amendment could say that responsibility for judicial confirmations would switch to the House and some bills would no longer require Senate approval. However, an Amendment like this would require approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress (including the Senate itself) and three-fourths of the states.

The fourth and ultimate way to solve the problem of the Senate would be to abolish it altogether or turn it into a body that, while smaller than the House, also allocates seats according to state population size. But as mentioned above, this is impossible. According to Article 5, this would require the approval of every single state.

The bottom line

The Electoral College is a constitutional nuisance that created big problems in 2000 and 2016 but poses fewer problems in the long run, even as it is now. We have plausible ways to reform it out of existence. In contrast, the Senate is a massive democratic problem with no plausible solution within our constitutional framework.

The Senate’s representational biases make it harder to do many things, including continuing to reduce systematic unequal treatment of nonwhite people in American society and trying to mitigate climate change. The most plausible reforms — ending the filibuster and admitting DC and Puerto Rico — only begin to reduce the problem. Anyone working to improve American public policy needs to think hard about the vexing problem of Senate reform, because without such reform, adequately addressing the most serious problems facing the United States is impossible.

Is American democracy currently under threat? President Donald Trump has broken from many norms followed by past presidents. This includes everything from personal tweets at all hours attacking his enemies; to keeping personal ownership of a large business empire, which allows domestic and foreign actors to financially reward him; to small things like not providing unifying messages after hurricanes and domestic shootings.

Some of these are stylistic changes. Others might be classified as constitutional hardball, violating traditions that aren’t written into law or the constitution.

For these reasons, the Trump presidency has caused some scholars and reporters to look more closely at whether an outsider like Trump is a symptom, a cause, or both of a decline in the health of American democracy. We share this concern. Is the public also losing its faith in American democracy as it has been traditionally practiced? In a new poll, we investigated this.

A new poll measuring the health of American democracy

To better understand the health of American democracy, we conducted the 2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Georgetown University’s Baker Center for Leadership & Governance and conducted in June and July 2018. This is a large sample poll (5,400 respondents), which asked a series of questions about support for American national institutions and for democratic norms and principles. (See here and here for more details on the survey.)

We were especially interested in two types of questions because we believe both are key to monitoring the health of democracy. First, we looked at whether people were satisfied overall with democracy in the United States. Second, we looked more specifically at whether people thought democracy was the best form of government and whether it was responsive to people like them.

Satisfaction with American democracy

Overall, we found that only 40 percent of Americans were satisfied with American democracy right now. (10 percent were “very satisfied” and 30 percent were “somewhat satisfied.”)

While overall levels of satisfaction were low, there was a major partisan divide, with 76 percent of Republicans satisfied with American democracy but only 44 percent of Democrats. This division is almost surely a response to the Trump presidency. It seems that during the Trump presidency, Democrats are not just dissatisfied with Trump, but with the entire direction of American democracy.

Perhaps surprisingly, as we show in our report, we find very few demographic differences in satisfaction with American democracy besides party identification. Asians, men, and those with no higher than a high school-level education are a bit more satisfied than others, but the latter two might be just further reflections of attitudes toward Trump. 

We were especially interested in looking at differences by age. Perhaps younger voters were more disillusioned with how American democracy is going because the Trump presidency and the extreme polarization of recent years loom large in their minds. However, as shown in the figure below from our report, we find very small differences across age groups in satisfaction with democracy.

Support for Democratic Principles

What about support for democracy in principle, not just satisfaction with American democracy right now? To examine this question, we also included several items on the survey measuring different aspects of support for the concept of democracy in the abstract, which we also broke down by age. 

This data tells a different story about the relationship between age and support for democracy than the question about satisfaction with American democracy. In some ways, the young appear to be less attached to democracy as a concept than older Americans are.

The young are less likely to say that democracy is “always preferable” to any other type of government, and less likely to agree that “democracy serves the people.” The young are more likely to say that “non-democracies can be preferable” in some circumstances and to believe that “democracy serves the elite.”

These questions were previously asked in international surveys to evaluate the health of democracy in countries where researchers feared it was fragile. Thus, it is worrisome that support for democracy in these measures is substantially less than universal, and that the lack of support is concentrated among the young.

However, in questions that are more specific to US government performance (and which have previously been asked in the United States), we do not see any worrying trends among the young.

The young are not substantially more likely to think that “public officials don’t care what [they] think” or to “never” “trust Washington to do what is right.” In fact, the young are about 10 percentage points less likely than those over 40 to think that public officials don’t care what they think, and between 7 and 12 percentage points less likely to say they never trust Washington (depending on which comparison group is used).

This is consistent with the results from the satisfaction with American democracy question. When people are asked specifically about American democracy and its performance, support is worryingly low, but the situation is not worse among the young.

However, when we asked about democracy in general, we saw overall high levels of support, but the dissent from this consensus was worryingly concentrated among the young.

A reason for alarm?

Overall, we found two reasons for concern with American attitudes toward democracy. First, satisfaction with democracy in the United States is not very high — overall, only about half of the country is satisfied with American democracy — and the variation here is largely driven by whether one’s own party is in power.

If this is simply the case that “satisfaction with democracy” is being read as “satisfaction with the Trump presidency” by respondents, then perhaps this finding is neither surprising nor worrisome. However, if it is instead the case that Americans no longer have confidence in democracy when their party is in opposition, this would be a worrisome development indeed.

Second, while a large majority of Americans think democracy is the best form of government, nontrivial portions of Americans disagree. They believe that democracy as a form of government tends to serve the elite, and there are times when nondemocratic systems are preferable.

But perhaps even more concerning is that the young are less supportive than older Americans of democracy as a concept. They are not less satisfied with American democracy right now, nor are they less likely to think it is responsive to their needs, but they are less likely to believe that democracy is superior to other forms of government and more likely to believe that it serves the elite.

Why is satisfaction with the American political system so low? And why is support for democracy lower among the young? We have a lot of hypotheses, but we can’t be certain based on these results.

Is it economic inequality and slow median income growth over decades? Is it political polarization? Is it immigration? Something else, or some combination of these? More people should direct their attention to answering these questions. Because if there is one thing history tells us, it is that when people are so dissatisfied with their political system that they look to extreme outsiders for rescue, it can end badly. 

Sean Kates is a PhD candidate in the department of politics at New York University.

Jonathan M. Ladd is an associate professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy and the department of government at Georgetown University.

Joshua A. Tucker is a professor in the department of politics and an affiliated professor of Russian and Slavic studies and data science at New York University.

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. See more Mischiefs of Faction posts here.

This week, we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Mischiefs of Faction political science blog, which I was incredibly lucky to join in the spring of 2014. I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on how my views on party polarization have changed over the past year.

Gradually since the 1970s, and accelerating since the ’90s, the American party system has become more polarized in several ways. First, it has become much more ideologically sorted. Among politicians, activists, and the mass public, liberals are much more likely to be Democrats and conservatives to be Republicans than they were decades ago.

Second, Democrats and Republicans simply like each other much less. You can see this in the mass public, where people are more likely to say they feel “cold” toward members of the other party and to hope a family member doesn’t marry someone from the other party. And it is evident among politicians, who have more trouble making compromises to pass bipartisan bills, as well as interact, and simply like each other less. A recent extreme example of this was the physical threats exchanged last weekend between members of the Texas state legislature.

It is less clear whether the politicians and members of the public are actually taking more extreme policy positions than they did in the mid-20th century. Comparing the extremism of issue positions in very different political eras is complicated and can involve debates over advanced statistical methods. Also, the answer almost certainly varies by issue area. But even setting this question aside, it is clear that the American party system has become better ideologically sorted and that there is more animosity between the parties than in the Cold War era.

Is this a problem? The typical political science answer five years ago was that a democracy could accommodate extremely polarized parties as long as it had the right institutions. Polarization may be causing problems in the US, but that is only because we have a Madisonian system that only works when politicians are willing to work together. Power is divided between Congress, the presidency, and the courts, which are often controlled by different parties. Supermajority rules in the Senate increase the need for the parties to work together if they hope to get anything done.

By this logic, our problems are caused by presidentialism, the Senate’s rules, and perhaps too strong judicial review. We could accommodate more polarized parties if we had a unicameral parliamentary system, in which the parliament elected a prime minister and Cabinet to rule until the next election. (This would presumably solve our problems, whether legislators continued to be selected in single-member districts, as in the UK, Canada and Australia, or by voters choosing among party lists, as in Italy or Israel.)

While coalition governments are necessary in this system when no party wins a majority of seats, evidence from around the world seemed to suggest that these negotiations before governments are formed were less likely to lead to the entire political system collapsing than systems where different branches are in constant conflict. This was roughly my view before 2016.

My views have changed. I still think that presidential systems produce their own “perils,” but I no longer think a system with fewer veto points can solve our problems. Specifically, the election of Donald Trump has led me to conclude that, regardless of our political rules, negative partisanship among politicians and the mass public is a serious danger.

How did the Republican Party and the United States end up saddled with a president like Donald Trump? He reflects some existing trends in the Republican Party but in many ways breaks with them. Prior to Trump, there was an internal party fight about immigration, with one faction supporting moderate reforms of the immigration system and a more friendly tone toward Hispanic and Islamic immigrants. No less than the Republicans’ last president, George W. Bush, supported this approach.

Trump has decisively endorsed the anti-immigration and anti-Islamic wing if the party. Yet in areas like civil rights, voting rights, health care policy, reproductive rights, etc., he has allied himself with the conservative wing of the party, but his positions reflect the dominant thinking in the party. One could imagine a nominee like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio putting forth similar policies.

However, Trump brings a host of politically toxic behaviors that are unique to him. He appears to plan to use his office to accept bribes from domestic and foreign sources through his global business empire. He endangers American alliances and leadership in Europe and Asia. He insults allies often for no strategic purpose whatsoever. And he has such limited cognitive capacity that he can only absorb one-page foreign policy memos, without any nuance, and needs briefers to constantly mention his name to keep him interested. There is a substantial probability that his presidency will continue to be consumed by scandal, most likely bribery, obstruction of justice, or whatever else is going on with Russia.

None of these types of behaviors were part of Republican or conservative ideology prior to Trump. These things distract politicians in Washington and depress the president’s approval rating, making it harder for Republicans to enact conservative policy change that the Trump administration ostensibly supports. It is likely that if Cruz or Rubio were president, he would be able to move policy further to the right.

This is why hardly any Republican politicians endorsed Trump in the primaries. He is a poor vessel for their ideas. Why didn’t his weakness as a Republican standard-bearer hurt him more in the general election?

Very few Republicans, and essentially no Republican national politicians, endorsed Hillary Clinton because of their reservations about Trump. As comparison, when their party nominated George McGovern in 1972, prominent Democrats such as former Texas Gov. John Connally, Virginia Gov. Mills E. Godwin, Jr., and Boston Mayor John F. Collins endorsed Nixon. As core a Democratic interest group as the AFL-CIO refused to endorse McGovern and remained neutral. In this year’s French presidential runoff between pro-EU globalist Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, the major center-right party, the Republicans, and their presidential nominee, François Fillon, endorsed Macron.

The major reason the 2016 US presidential election didn’t go that way was negative partisanship. This is the tendency to vote for a party not mainly because you like it, but because you are repulsed by the other major party. Democrats vote for their party more because they want to prevent Republicans from winning than because of affection for their party’s candidates, and vice versa. The logic of negative partisanship is unaffected when your party nominates a weak candidate.

Trump was a very unusual Republican candidate. He tacked on a lot of unconventional positions and scandals on top of some standard conservative positions. And his history of wildly inconsistent positions made it uncertain if he would even stick through his whole term with the conservative positions he did support.

But on the other side, the Democrats nominated a person who was tightly associated with the party and liberalism. Clinton has been a national figure since her husband ran for president in 1992. Even beyond that, she has been practically a Zelig of modern liberal politics. She was a staff member on the congressional Watergate committee. She originally kept her maiden name (as many feminists did in the 1970s), but changed it after Bill Clinton lost his gubernatorial reelection race in 1980, which some in Arkansas blamed on Hillary’s feminism.

She was controversial for her liberalism and feminism in the 1992 presidential campaign. The presidential first lady cookie-baking contest, which we now see as a staple of presidential campaign, actually began in 1992 when Family Circle magazine wanted to put Clinton in her place after she was quoted saying, “I could have just stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decide to do was to fulfill my profession. …” She was first lady with a Democratic president, a prominent Democratic senator, and secretary of state in a Democratic administration. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which has a significant issue in 2016, was a case about campaign spending attacking her.

The big question in the 2016 election was whether Trump would underperform a traditional Republican. Historically, it is hard for an American party to win a third presidential term. It has only happened once (1988) since World War II. Had the Republicans thrown away a great opportunity by nominating Trump? It turns out the answer was no.

The election turned out approximately as one would expect based on moderate economic growth in 2016 and a party running for its third term in the White House. Republicans didn’t suffer an electoral penalty for nominating Trump. The biggest reason is that voters who usually support Republicans almost all “came home” to favoring Trump on Election Day. A similar phenomenon happened at the elite level. Most national Republican politicians (Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, Mitch McConnell, most senators and House members) endorsed Trump. Those few Republicans who didn’t endorse Trump (John Kasich, Jeb and George W. Bush) didn’t endorse Clinton.

Negative partisanship swayed Republicans at the mass and elite level. Many Republicans voted for their party’s nominee primarily in order to avoid a Clinton presidency. Clinton, with her high visibility and close connection with liberalism, is almost ideally suited to activating Republicans’ traditional partisan and ideological loyalties.

The country would be substantially better off if the electorate penalized parties for nominating inexperienced, uniformed, impulsive, corrupt candidates for president. Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, you would be better off if the Republicans in 2016 had nominated and elected Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or even Mike Pence. One of them would implement many of the same policies, but without the massive corruption, the degradation of American political institutions, the danger of starting a major military conflict by accident or incompetence rather than ideology, or the many other Trump specific pathologies.

It could be that Clinton was unusual in her ability to spark negative partisanship in Republicans. A 2016 Democratic nominee who was newer to the national stage might not have triggered so much negative partisanship. But the pattern is troubling. We would all be better off, regardless of our ideology, if parties had the incentive to nominate high-quality candidates for president. If they were punished, they would work hard to stop these candidates from winning their nominations, even possibly reforming nomination systems to try to make it less likely. That might have happened on the Republican side if Trump had lost. But as things stand now, parties have less incentive to block low-quality candidates. 

Changing the electoral system (or supermajority rules) won’t stop this problem. Many parliamentary parties already have rules that prevent outsiders from leading the party. (For an exception, see the new rules the British Labour Party instituted that allowed Jeremy Corbyn to become leader.) Regardless of the system, those with influence in parties have less incentive to choose smart, temperamentally fit leaders when they know it won’t affect their vote total. Their voters are primarily motivated by the opposing candidate. To address the pathologies of polarization, we need to think harder about developing cures for negative polarization.

It’s easy to get pulled into the daily excitement of campaigns, especially this campaign. But there are some stories that transcend the latest from the campaign trail or the debate podium. Here are a few things we’re thinking about this week that aren’t Alicia Machado, the vice presidential debate, or Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Democrats eke out a funding win for Flint

Jennifer N. Victor

While everyone was talking about the first presidential debate and its strange aftermath last week, Congress was doing remarkable stuff that flew under the radar. In addition to overriding a presidential veto for the first time in eight years, Congress successfully passed a continuing resolution (CR) that keeps the government open for business when its new fiscal year starts October 1, despite not having passed any of the regular spending bills this year. Given Congress’s productivity on conducting regular business over the past few years, averting a government shutdown is reason to celebrate.

Moreover, the politics that accompanied this accomplishment were classic. Typically, the minority party (now Democrats) has little power in legislative negotiations, but Democrats were able to effectively leverage significant policy and political gains out of the negotiations over the CR. The CR is a “must pass” bill, in that if Congress did not pass it before Saturday, the government would shut down. This made it an attractive legislative vehicle. Moreover, Democrats knew that Republicans seeking to maintain their majority in both chambers would likely take a public hit if the government shut down.

Knowing this, the Democrats rejected a CR earlier in the week because it did not include money for water resources in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. Effectively, Democrats held the spending bill that would keep the government open hostage in order to extract their preferred policy for Flint. The Democrats insisted on these resources, and Republicans eventually agreed to vote on separate legislation on this topic after the election.

A rare bit of political leverage for the minority party, brought about by election pressures, resulted in a happy outcome for both parties, and for America.

Racial tensions could provide a tipping point in swing states

Julia Azari

This is kind of cheating, since it’s about the election, but as election watchers fall over themselves to get a read on swing states, I want to remind our readers about the importance of race politics in some of these places.

I’m writing this from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where we seem to have converged on the term “unrest” to describe a brief and violent episode that occurred in part of the city over the summer. The August Marquette University law school poll reveals some important dynamics: 90 percent of white respondents report that the police made them feel safe rather than anxious, while 57 percent of Hispanic and African-American respondents reported that the police made them feel safe. Statewide, the balance of public opinion (48 percent to 37 percent) attributed the “unrest” to “lack of respect for law and order,” rather than to systemic problems.

Last week, Milwaukee County’s controversial sheriff, David Clarke — an outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement who spoke at the Republican convention over the summer — flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, the most recent site of intense protests.

Wisconsin isn’t strictly considered a highly competitive state in the presidential race — it’s pretty reliably Democratic in presidential elections, in part because of the strong African-American voting bloc in Milwaukee. And it’s not identical to, say, Ohio, that nail-biting bellwether state, although there are some similarities between Milwaukee and Cleveland.

What strikes me as relevant here is the intersection between national race politics and political geography — that is, the handful of states that might determine the election result. The 2016 campaign has brought race and politics, along with Trump’s oft-repeated phrase “law and order,” to the forefront, unlike in recent history. But that doesn’t mean the issue is new — race and racial attitudes have determined voting habits and partisanship for a long time.

One question that comes to mind for me is how thoroughly the white electorate is sorted into the two parties based on race issues. Are there voters in that demographic who are weak Democrats but who respond negatively to protests and unrest? There might be a small number of these voters, but in competitive states, this might matter. I think it’s a hypothesis worth exploring.

Climate change is an oft-forgotten, ever-present threat

Jonathan M. Ladd

The two most important threats to human civilization as we know it are nuclear weapons and climate change. Given the United States’ essential role in dealing with both of these threats, it is disappointing that neither got too much coverage in the first presidential debate. Both topics were mentioned briefly, but neither was the subject of an entire segment. I hope that in future debates both could get more time, forcing the candidates to explain more thoroughly their strategies to deal with them. Let me today focus especially on climate change.

Climate change came up in the debate segment on jobs, when Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of “think[ing] that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump then denied that was his position, even though he wrote a tweet espousing the Chinese conspiracy theory in 2012. Clinton went on to tout her support for clean energy, while Trump attacked the Obama administration for investing in a solar energy company that went bankrupt.

Given that the commitments candidates make during the campaign tend to predict fairly well the policies that they will pursue in office, it would have been nice if moderator Lester Holt had asked the candidates to explain a wider variety of their climate change policies. Specifically, it would have been nice if Clinton had during the debate reiterated her support for continuing the Environmental Protection Agency’s policy under the Obama administration of aggressively regulating carbon as a pollutant. This is an essential policy for ensuring that the US lives up to its commitments under the 2016 Paris climate agreement.

It is already clear that a Clinton administration is committed to continuing these policies and a Trump administration would likely reverse them. But the more a candidate talks about a policy during the campaign, the more likely he or she is to follow through with it when in office.

This is not even an issue where Clinton faces a choice between public opinion and doing the right thing. She is already likely to lose states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, and a host of very conservative states where the median voter is likely opposed to carbon restrictions. Yet in the country overall, efforts to control carbon are fairly popular.

This has been asked in polls in different ways over the years, but the results usually reflect majority support for Obama and Clinton’s position. A 2014 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 53 percent of respondents supported the Obama administration’s carbon restrictions even if they raised the cost of electricity. Only 39 percent were opposed. A 2013 Duke University poll found that 63 percent of respondents either “somewhat” or “strongly” supported “requiring electric utilities to produce a large amount of energy from low carbon sources such as wind, solar, natural gas and nuclear power.” Only 14 percent were “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed.

Furthermore, Americans tend to trust Democrats more than Republicans on this issue. A July 2016 Fox News poll asked people which of the two nominees they trusted to do a “better job” on climate change. Fifty-nine percent said Hillary Clinton, while only 28 percent said Donald Trump.

There are undoubtedly some ways to word survey questions that would produce more opposition to carbon restrictions. But these polls indicate that there are ways to talk about this in which the more aggressive position against climate change is popular.

I hope that in future debates, Trump and Clinton are forced to reiterate in more detail, in this very prominent setting, what their climate policies would be — not because an intelligent observer can’t already determine what their positions are, but because going on the record over and over in public increases the pressure on Clinton to follow through fully on her plans once in office.

Donald Trump lacks most campaign skills. He knows almost nothing about foreign or domestic policy and isn’t even very good at pretending he does. When he is asked a question requiring any level of detailed policy knowledge, he visibly makes it up as he goes along. As Chris Hayes has pointed out, it appears that everything he knows about politics and American public policy he has learned from obsessively watching cable news channels.

He shows no skill or motivation for fundraising. He can’t run a functional campaign organization at the national, state, or local level. In many ways, his campaign barely exists at all. He is mostly unable to change his message or style when he needs to appeal to a general election, rather than a primary, electorate. He doesn’t have the discipline to resist being baited by his political opponents, as when Gold Star parents Ghazala and Khizr Khan criticized him at the Democratic National Convention.

Yet Trump does have one major political skill: He is very good at manipulating the news media.

This should not be surprising. It’s a throughline in all the varying business ventures he has been involved with. He was not an especially successful real estate developer or casino mogul, but he was the best at getting publicity for his ventures.

Licensing his name to sell ties, steaks, or a fraudulent university or drumming up ratings for a reality television show all involve getting publicity. Essentially, his whole life he has been working the press to build up his Trump brand, increasing its prominence and associating it in the public’s mind with wealth and success, even though the evidence that he is actually a billionaire is, to be polite, mixed.

In his most successful book, 1987’s The Art of the Deal, he mentions that he thinks a lot about strategies for managing the press. He describes publicizing his new development projects: “I like to be accommodating. As long as they want to shoot, I’ll shovel.” He previews much of his campaign strategy when he says, “Most reporters, I find, have very little interest in exploring the substance of a detailed proposal for a development. They look instead for the sensational angle.”

Essentially, his whole life he has been working the press to build up his Trump brand

Elsewhere in the book, he writes, “One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. … The point is that if you are a little different, a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.” At another point, he says, “I’m not saying they necessarily like me. Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively. But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks.”

The book was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, who now loudly opposes Trump’s presidential candidacy. But nothing Schwartz has said, nor any of Trumps behavior, suggests that that these words don’t reflect Trump’s own sentiments.

I don’t know how often Trump does this by instinct versus conscious effort. But he is very good at exploiting the press’s weaknesses. He senses the seams in the conventions of ordinary political journalism and pushes right at those weak points. There are three basic strategies he follows. The first was more effective in the primaries than in the general election. But he is still using the second and third methods to put reporters in awkward positions.

1) Using shock to dominate the news

Violating political and social taboos is part of his political brand. So almost anything outrageous he says doesn’t surprise his core supporters. All year, open-ended interviews with Trump supporters have indicated that they know all about his erratic tendencies and hope he will calm down once in office, think it is a positive because it is evidence that he isn’t controlled by the establishment, or see it as proof that he will shake up a distrusted political system. Unlike other candidates, he won’t alienate his supporters by acting this way because they already know this about him.

As the quote from The Art of the Deal points out, Trump sees shocking behavior as a way to dominate press coverage. In the primary season, whenever news coverage would shift toward other Republican candidates for a few days, Trump would say or tweet something controversial. This strategy can be effective in presidential primaries because simply getting more coverage than other candidates often helps, even if the coverage often doesn’t depict you positively.

In contrast to the general election, there are fewer ideological (and no party) differences between the candidates. So voters have much less to go on when choosing, and so might use how much news coverage a candidate gets as a rough measure of a candidate’s campaign skills, and thus how formidable the would be in the general election.

Even if voters were choosing based just on ideological differences, it might be most rational to choose only among the two or three candidates who are getting the most press attention because they are the only ones with a chance to win the nomination. For all these reasons, getting more press attention can help, even if it alienates some Republicans.

This tactic is much less effective in the fall campaign. Unlike the crowded primary field, in the general election the two major party nominees aren’t struggling to get new coverage. They are pretty much guaranteed to have high name recognition by Election Day.

Trump’s indifference during the primaries to whether his media coverage made him appealing to most of the electorate left him very well-known but also the most unpopular major party nominee in the modern history of polling when he wrapped up the nomination. Trump has struggled to leave behind his style of being deliberately shocking. It seems too instinctual for him at this point.

2) Creating false balance

On the other hand, one of his media tactics that works better than ever in the general election is creating false equivalence. The easiest way for journalists to avoid accusations of bias is to organize their prose so that they spend a similar amount of space on the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates. Unless they have always been opinion writers or bloggers, most journalists are socialized to use a balanced structure when possible. They will sometimes deviate if the facts warrant it, but balance has a gravitational pull that Trump is good at exploiting.

One of Trump’s main rhetorical strategies on the campaign trail is to take his own weaknesses and simply hurl those same accusations back at Clinton. This is why Slate’s Jamelle Bouie calls much of Trump’s rhetoric “an exercise in projection.” Trump says of Clinton, “Well, look, she’s a liar … the whole thing is a scam with [Bill and Hillary]. Everything is a scam, like grifters.” On Clinton’s racial views, Trump says, “She’s totally bigoted, there’s no question about that.” Bouie points out an astonishing stump speech where Trump says:

Hillary Clinton has been running a hate-filled and negative campaign, with no policy, no solutions and no new ideas. By contrast, I’ve been going around the country offering very detailed plans for reform and change. All of these reform plans are available on our website, and they’re extensive, but we have no choice.

All these things would be much more accurate if Clinton said them about Trump (as she often does) rather than the reverse.

The epitome of Trump’s use of this strategy was probably in August, when Clinton gave a long a detailed speech outlining Trump’s affiliation (and bringing into the mainstream) of the so called “alt-right” movement, which includes websites like Breitbart that are much more racist and sexist than conventional conservative pundits and politicians. Trump responded by saying simply and without much elaboration, “She is a bigot. … Her policies are bigoted because she knows they’re not going to work.”

This puts nonpartisan journalists in a tough position. The easiest thing is to say that both sides accuse each other of being racists, serial liars, or scam artists. To try to adjudicate which of the dueling claims is more accurate (or to ignore Trump’s ridiculous accusations altogether) opens one up to accusations of bias. Trump makes it much easier for reporters to just report both sides’ accusations as equivalent.

The August exchange is described in CNN.com as “Trump and Clinton are each portraying the other as discriminatory toward African-Americans.” Politico’s headline was “Trump and Clinton throw more blows in bigotry fight.” The lead paragraph of the Washington Post’s article on the exchange said:

A series of racially charged accusations dominated the presidential campaign Thursday, with Democrat Hillary Clinton accusing Donald Trump of “taking hate groups mainstream,” while the Republican nominee repeatedly claimed that Clinton is a “bigot” toward African Americans.

And on and on. See Ed Kilgore for a summary. It doesn’t much matter whose accusations are backed up by more evidence. As long as Trump is making essentially the exact same claim that Clinton is, it is almost impossible for nonpartisan reporters to avoid treating them equally.

3) Lying too brazenly for journalists to correct

Journalists who want to preserve a reputation for being nonpartisan also have trouble when a politician lies so brazenly that there is no way to correct him without appearing to directly criticize or get in a confrontation with that politician. Most normal politicians shade the truth or spin reality. Yet almost all avoid blatant lying and will act defensive if called out for an inaccuracy.

However, when Trump states something that is clearly false, and insists on it even when confronted by a reporter, it is tough to proceed without the reporter calling Trump a liar. If the reporter is worried that pressing this issue this way would make her seem partisan, she might just let the issue drop — better to leave it to the Clinton campaign or other journalists who are designated fact-checkers than to press the issue.

An example of this was in NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum, when Trump told Matt Lauer that he had opposed the war in Iraq, despite there being audio of him supporting it at the time. The fact that Trump supported the Iraq War yet often lies about it now had been widely reported before Lauer’s interview. Still, when someone repeats an established falsehood so directly and shamelessly, it is hard to point it out without appearing so critical of the candidate as to be partisan.

When Trump states something that is clearly false, and insists on it even when confronted by a reporter, it is tough to proceed without the reporter calling Trump a liar

Reporting norms work better when a candidate shades the truth in smaller ways and will not simply ignore major contradictory evidence once it has been pointed out in the media. When a candidate continues to insist that up is down, week after week of the campaign, you can either drop the subject or appear confrontational and risk losing your nonpartisan reputation.

One flag factory too many

All three of these tactics work very well at getting Trump better press coverage than would otherwise be enjoyed by an inexperienced, ill-informed candidate whom most conservative foreign policy and economic experts and both living Republican former presidents refuse to endorse. But there is a limit. Political journalists sometimes turn against campaigns that they feel are too manipulative. In John Zaller‘s terminology, journalists don’t just want to appear nonpartisan; they also want to appear to have an independent “voice.”

A classic example of this (mentioned by Zaller) is 1988, when the George H.W. Bush campaign made American flags a major focus. As Paul F. Boller tells it in his book Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush, the Bush campaign emphasized flags in order to portray itself as more patriotic than the Dukakis campaign.

Bush’s was “the most flag-bedecked campaign in U.S. history.” Bush always spoke in front of numerous flags and handed out small flags to the audience. He boasted that flag sales were higher under President Reagan than President Carter. He visited Findlay, Ohio, known as “flag city” because so many flags are made there. But after a subsequent visit to a flag factory in New Jersey, reporters started writing about (and discussing on the news) that this was a cynical, manipulative strategy. Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater later said that the New Jersey visit “was one flag factory too many.”

Political journalists sometimes turn against campaigns that they feel are too manipulative

Some of Trump’s tactics have started to provoke a backlash. There are many examples of mainstream news organizations getting so fed up with the brazen lying that they directly discuss it in major news stories. The New York Times has at least once put a “news analysis” story about Trump’s dishonesty on the front page, above the fold, a location usually reserved for straight news stories, not “analysis.”

Yet perhaps Trump’s biggest “one flag factory too many” moment was when he told news organizations that he would renounce his previous claims that President Obama wasn’t born in this country. Trump’s campaign event was covered live on all the major cable news channels. But instead of simply renouncing birtherism, most of the event involved Trump publicizing his newly completed hotel in Washington, DC, and various supporters touting his candidacy.

Only at the very end did Trump give a brief statement on birtherism, rejecting it while introducing the new false claim that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement and that Trump somehow put it to rest: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”

The coverage was not positive. Cable television journalists appeared very annoyed at Trump right after the event was over. While some coverage simply reported that he had denounced birtherism, a substantial portion of news stories mentioned that Trump had talked about birtherism fairly little at the event and that his short statement contained new factual errors.

I don’t know what the future holds. Yet I do think a crucial question for the rest of the campaign is whether Trump’s very astute tactics for dealing with the press continue to work. If political journalists feel more and more manipulated and it prompts a backlash of more negative coverage, things could get harder for the Trump campaign.

CLEVELAND — We’ve just spent four days in Cleveland, and we know the question everyone is asking: Just how divided is the Republican Party?

We think the answer is: More than you can see on television.

There is not one convention happening here in Cleveland. There are at least two: one pro-Trump and the other at best ambivalent about him.

The first is the one everyone mostly sees on television. It’s the one Donald Trump is running. It’s the official business of the party. That convention has revealed some signs of internal conflict, but those are relatively limited.

Yet there is the rest of the Republican Party. Some of those people never came to Cleveland. But a lot of them did. These partisans are largely absent from the stage, but their presence and lack of enthusiasm is palpable.

During the primetime speeches Tuesday and Wednesday night, there were many empty seats, some presumably vacated by people who are in Cleveland but not interested in Trump’s message. We’ve spoken with several partisans here who quietly disavow what is going on up on the stage. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who doesn’t have that option, just avoided talking about Trump much at all in his speech on Tuesday.

There have been some direct public displays of disunity. The Ohio delegation (all John Kasich delegates) has cheered every time Kasich’s name is voiced, and Alaska insisted that its original votes for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio be at least observed, if not counted. And, of course, Cruz provoked boos by pointedly not endorsing Trump. The pro-Cruz movement is the largest and the most organized. But much of the opposition to Trump is coming through simply as a lack of enthusiasm.

The Trump faction, which is well-represented on the primetime stage and is enthusiastic, is not exactly a well-defined one. It’s not the Tea Party, and it’s not the establishment. It’s not libertarian Republicans or country club Republicans. There’s long been a splinter of the party that prioritizes law and order, nationalism and authority. Trump’s core faction is roughly that splinter, plus those elements of the rest of the party whose dislike of Hillary Clinton is strong enough to bring them along.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party is going through a slow-motion unofficial walkout that started months ago. They are not marching across the street to form their own party, the way Theodore Roosevelt’s followers did in 1912. They are not making a big display the way Southern Democrats did in 1948 and 1964. They are instead simply not cheering enthusiastically, sometimes not even attending the evening program, and instead already thinking about 2020.

This other convention is also internally divided, of course, but there is little reason for conflict. They have accepted that they have lost their nomination this year and are girding themselves to fight in other arenas. Those worried about the party’s white male image are still working to recruit women and minority candidates. Movement conservatives are still thinking about how to nominate “true conservatives.” Everyone is still thinking about mobilization strategies. They are looking to weather this storm.

Taken together, the Republican Party is actually very potent. In every level but the presidential, its electoral record is impressive. The party holds 56 percent of US House seats and 54 US Senate seats. In state government, it holds complete control of government (the governorship and majorities in all legislative chambers) in 24 states, compared with only six for the Democrats. Little of that strength is on display here in Cleveland, but a lot of it is being built at delegate breakfasts and in gatherings outside the arena.

Political scientist V.O. Key once said, “In a fairly real sense, the national convention is the national party. When the means develop for uniting people in support of a nominee, the essence of party comes into being.” In 2016, the many pieces of the party are here, but they have not come into being.

CLEVELAND — One of the things we’re learning this week at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland is that things that occurred at conventions many decades ago are much more damaging now.

Before 1972 (when the McGovern-Frasier reforms shifted nominee selection away from the conventions to primaries and caucuses), losing candidates often spoke during the convention (usually before the roll call), and supporters of other candidates often did not cheer and even sometimes booed them. In a fairly extreme example, Nelson Rockefeller was strongly booed by Goldwater supporters when he spoke at the 1964 Republican convention.

There is also precedent after 1972 for the losing candidate (after knowing he or she has lost) to decline to explicitly endorse the nominee. Losing candidates Ronald Reagan in 1976 and Ted Kennedy in 1980 gave major speeches at their conventions without clearly endorsing their nominee. So, when Ted Cruz gave a primetime speech on Wednesday in which he didn’t endorse nominee Donald Trump and was booed loudly by Trump supporters, it was not unprecedented.

Another throwback to earlier eras of political conventions was the Ohio delegation. Gov. John Kasich won the winner-take-all primary in his home state. What is unusual is that the Ohio delegation is still very committed to Kasich and much less enthusiastic about other candidates, including Trump. Beyond casting all their votes for Trump in the roll call, the whole convention they have cheered loudly whenever Kasich’s name has been mentioned.

This sort of thing used to be common. Before 1972, state delegations would often start the convention supporting “favorite sons,” i.e., politicians from their state whom they cheered for and voted for at least on the first ballot. The Ohio delegation is essentially reviving this long-dormant practice.

And yet, while fascinating for those of us who love convention history, these practices are a poor fit for the modern political era. Instead of normal practice, they are a symptom of the nominee’s weakness.

For many years, presumptive nominees have made clear in advance that only rivals endorsing the nominee will be allowed to give speeches at the convention. For instance, when Jerry Brown refused to endorse Bill Clinton in 1992, he was denied a primetime speech, and spoke to the delegates only briefly when he seconded his own nomination before the roll call. His delegates held signs reading, “Let Jerry Speak,” but to no avail.

The reason this isn’t allowed to happen is because a dissenting speech will dominate the news, crowding out the nominee’s message, as Cruz’s speech has this time.

A state cheering on a favorite son used to be partially a way to raise that politician’s profile but was mainly used as a negotiating tactic. The state would be signaling that it was not committed to any of the major candidates, and state party leaders were willing to make a deal with one of those candidates to win their support.

But Ohio has no chance of making a deal this year, because Trump came into the convention with enough votes to win. This time, Ohio is mainly protesting a nominee it doesn’t like. The only effect of this protest is to weaken Trump as the nominee.

It has been exciting to see these phenomena reappear after so many years. But their reappearance doesn’t portend their return as common practices. Rather, they are symptoms of an unusually disorganized campaign and an unusually divided convention.

CLEVELAND — Over his many decades as a public figure, Donald Trump has proven very good at manipulating the press. He became America’s most famous real estate developer and one of its most famous rich people, period, despite being far from the nation’s most successful developer or richest person. In the past 15 years, he was quite successful at getting ratings for his reality show, The Apprentice. But the skills that were so effective in those settings have proven a poor fit for a national nominating convention.

The big problem is that the main thing nominating conventions accomplish in the post McGovern-Fraser era (the reforms implemented in 1972 that required delegates to be picked in primaries and caucuses) is to unite the party behind the nominee. The convention sends messages that the party is fairly unified behind the ticket, reminding those who usually vote for the party why they like it and dislike the opposing party.

When building your personal business brand, it helps to have opponents and conflict, because journalists love to write about conflict. In reality television, the need for conflict is more intense. What makes a reality show compelling is conflict among the major players and dramatic surprising twists in those conflicts.

Because the goal of a nominating convention is to unite party sympathizers who are watching at home, the aim is essentially the opposite of reality TV’s. It is in the nominee’s interest to minimize and deescalate conflict.

What we saw Wednesday night was a very good reality show but a bad convention. Trump and his supporters escalated and publicized conflict, when they should have done the reverse. Trump walked out to the family box and stared angrily at Ted Cruz in the middle of Cruz’s speech. Multiple press reports are saying that Trump staffers told his delegates to boo Cruz. In the elevator leaving the arena last night, I heard a Cruz delegate say that pro-Trump seat fillers in the delegate sections were booing and encouraging others to boo.

After Cruz’s speech, Trump supporter Newt Gingrich didn’t simply move on but mentioned Cruz’s speech and tried to explain it. Then, of course, Trump took to Twitter with several tweets criticizing Cruz. In every instance, instead of shifting attention away from Cruz and deescalating the conflict, the Trump campaign did the reverse.

And, of course, however others responded, the fact the Cruz failed to endorse Trump so brazenly was itself a dramatic twist that made for great viewing. Trump could have denied Cruz attention by refusing to let him speak, which nominees typically do when rivals refuse to endorse. Yet that would have made the convention more effective and more boring, and Trump didn’t do it.

All this made for a great television show. I suspect the ratings were good. But it is a poor convention.