The Retrenchment Election

One of the pleasures and challenges of this job is you do a lot of traveling. I’ve been in 23 states over the last three months. The general impression I get is that I’m not covering a midterm election campaign. I’m covering two separate electorates.

The biggest difference is atmospheric. In urban and suburban America, Donald Trump’s outrage du jour is on everybody’s lips: Did you see what he tweeted now? Did you see his racist ad? Where will the Mueller investigation go?

In rural America, by contrast, all that stuff is like a thunderstorm in Inner Mongolia. It’s something happening very far away with no particular relevance here, and so no one’s paying much attention.

In urban America people talk about Trump constantly. In rural America people generally avoid the subject. Even if 80 percent of the locals support Trump, you never know how somebody will react if you mention his name — they might call you a racist — so it’s not a safe topic of conversation.

The other big impression I get is that grand canyons now separate different sectors of American society and these canyons are harder and harder to cross.

On the one hand, as Amy Walter of Cook Political Report has pointed out, very little has changed over the past two years. In 2016, 54 percent of white voters supported Trump, and the exact same percentage of those voters support him today. In 2016, 38 percent of college-educated white voters supported Trump and 38 percent support him today.

A lot has been said, but few minds have been changed.

I’m with Ron Brownstein of CNN and former Republican Rep. Tom Davis: This is not a wave election; it’s a realignment election. The results Tuesday will not be shaped by some crest of momentum behind the Democrats. They are going to be shaped by the fact that people are hardening into their categories, and those categories tend to produce a Democratic House and a Republican Senate.

The Republicans were saddled with an unpopular president, and the normal thing to do would have been to try to get House races to turn on local issues. But Trump makes everything about himself, and so has nationalized all the races.

Congressional elections are now mostly just mini-versions of presidential elections. The quality of any individual candidate matters a lot less, and there’s much less variation in how different candidates are conducting their campaigns.

In Missouri, for example, the Republicans are running Josh Hawley for Senate. Hawley could have run an interesting campaign that would have crossed a lot of boundaries. He went to Stanford and Yale Law School. He wrote a fine book on Theodore Roosevelt, and several excellent essays for the journal National Affairs, including an erudite one on epicurean liberalism. But he’s embraced Trump and run as a pretty standard Trumpkin Republican.

Nationalized politics forces local candidates to act mostly like Trump or Pelosi stand-ins and less like themselves.

The one word that the two electorates have in common is “unraveling.” Both groups have a sense that America is unraveling. If you ask them what “issues” matter most, they’ll say health care or immigration. But that’s not the right question to ask, because it doesn’t get at the sense of existential anger and angst that is really driving things.

Of course, the two electorates tell entirely different unraveling stories. In rural America, the sources of unraveling are the immigrants (symbolized by the caravan) and the radicalized mobs of educated elites (symbolized by the media). In rural America basic values like hard work, clear gender roles and the social fabric are dissolving before people’s eyes.

Timothy Carney had a very fine piece in the Times on Thursday that captured the sense of social despair. “I got a loaded .22 right by my door,” one man in rural Pennsylvania told Carney, “I don’t trust nobody in my apartment complex.”

Urban Americans see the unraveling coming from the rising tide of nativism, the way Trump eviscerates social norms, the underground army of alt-right extremists with guns. If anything, the blue sense of unraveling is more comprehensive.

Democratic ideology is increasingly dominated by the educated upper-middle class. As polls show, those Democrats are losing faith in capitalism itself, in the American dream itself. White liberals describe racism as a bigger problem precluding black advancement than do African-Americans.

As Emma Green noted in The Atlantic, for many, progressivism isn’t just a set of political beliefs; it’s a set of liturgies, rituals and moral doctrines for the secular unchurched.

Politics is no longer mainly about disagreeing on issues. It’s about being in entirely separate conversations.

The Venn diagram is dead. There’s no overlapping area.