Calcification and the future of American politics
Ezra Klein interviews two political scientists about their book on the 2020 election
I’m taking a break from writing Uneasy Citizenship to share some thoughts on a podcast I listened to yesterday. On a recent episode of his show, Ezra Klein interviewed John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, political scientists at Vanderbilt and UCLA and the authors of The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2022).
Sides and Vavreck have previously written books following presidential elections, attempting to explain not only the campaign dynamics of the two major candidates but also the reasons for why an election turned out the way it did.1 To be honest, these books never really did it for me. Reflecting on the day-to-day minutiae of political campaigns and internal politicking among senior staffers is of little interest to me. But based on their conversation with Klein, The Bitter End seems somewhat different.
Like other books of theirs, Sides and Vavreck combine reflections on the dueling campaigns and rigorous political science research, drawing on original data comprised of hundreds of thousands of data points collected over several years. But it is their theoretical contribution following the 2020 election that struck me as most noteworthy, especially as we prepare for the 2022 midterm elections — and, soon after that, the campaign for the White House in 2024.
Specifically, Sides and Vavreck (and their coauthor, UCLA’s Chris Tausanovitch) describe the hardening of political identities in spite of constantly changing contexts and information as calcification. This is the idea that while people are not especially ideologically sophisticated, social polarization has caused political beliefs and values to become calcified, rigid, and increasingly unmoving.
Calcification has important implications for our elections. Historically, when people would vote in a presidential election, they would do so based on past performance and results.2 Voting in this way keeps elected officials accountable, and tells them what voters want from them in the future. But calcification diminishes this sort of retrospective evaluation, instead inviting voters to lean on negative partisanship and affective polarization when casting their votes. What is increasingly important, according to Sides and Vavreck, is not policy, but identity, fear, and perhaps most of all, beating the other side.
As our political identities and values become calcified, we become increasingly concerned about what our opponents would do if they win a given election. Instead of viewing elections as a two- or four-year check-in on the trajectory of the American political experiment, we see them as a bulwark against encroaching doom. We do not see our opponents as misguided yet ultimately good-hearted Americans; we see them as coming to destroy our way of life, with the ballot box being our last stand.
The whole podcast is worth a listen, as Sides and Vavreck draw on a wealth of survey data and use it to explain not only the 2020 election, but future elections as well. But what stood out most to me is a comment from Vavreck towards the end of the conversation, around the 1:27 mark:
For me, the reason that I lose sleep at night in a post-2020 world is that these trends that we’ve discussed and that we call calcification have led us to this very unusual moment where when candidates and parties lose elections, there’s no incentive to go back and rethink the game plan.
And in fact, it’s worse than that. There may be an incentive to instead change the rules of the game just enough so that the number of votes you got is the winning number. So instead of a first down being 10 yards, boy, my team, we always get 8 yards. Well, instead of changing the way we’re playing that game, let’s just rewrite the rules so that first downs are 8 yards now. And then we win.
And that’s very dangerous. And that is the ultimate challenge to democracy that we’re seeing play out. And I think is the thing that I will be watching on election night in 2022. It is very important who wins elections. But it is also very important who loses elections. Because what they do on Tuesday night in a couple of weeks could very well have consequences in terms of the next steps in the health of our democracy. And so that’s the part that freaks me out.
I’ve written before about the need for people to be better losers in elections. In many ways, the very foundation of our political experiments rests on citizens accepting defeat in free and fair elections. Calcification, however, doesn’t ask the losing side to rethink its strategy and broaden its appeal to more voters for next time. Instead, calcification seductively tells voters and officials that the reason they lost isn’t because of a bad candidate or economic conditions; rather, the system is to blame, and it needs to be fixed.
We see this on both the right and the left in American politics. Following the 2020 election, too many on the right relied on a fundamental misreading of vote counting procedures and media coverage to conclude that there is no legitimate way Joe Biden could have beaten Donald Trump fair and square. And after a series of losses in major Supreme Court cases, too many on the left have called for fundamental changes to the institution to correct for perceived abuse under Republican leadership.
Sides and Vavreck didn’t provide the silver bullet to calcification in their exchange with Klein, nor did they suggest that one would need to buy their book to find the answer. But as citizens, we owe it to ourselves (and to each other) to reflect on how calcification is shaping our own political attitudes and behaviors, and how we can begin to counter its insidious effects. There is far more than any forthcoming election at stake.
Related reading:
Why We’re Polarized, by Ezra Klein
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason
See The Gamble and Identity Crisis, on the 2012 and 2016 campaigns.
In his debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan famously summarized this approach to voting when he encouraged voters to ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”