Fred Bauer joins Brian Anderson to discuss the lessons of the 2024 presidential election.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.
Joining me on today’s show is Fred Bauer. Fred writes regularly for City Journal on politics, political campaigns, other issues. His writing has also appeared in National Review, UnHerd, and The Atlantic. He joins us today to talk about some of his recent articles for us, especially a pre-election piece, “A Tale of Two Coalitions,” which described the voter support and strategies that the Trump and Harris campaigns were pursuing. And his post-election commentary, “A Political Realignment,” which analyzed Donald Trump’s stunning victory Tuesday night.
So, Fred, thanks very much for joining us.
Fred Bauer: Thanks for having me on.
Brian Anderson: So both the media and pollsters, or at least some pollsters, had told Americans for weeks to expect a very close election, but on Tuesday, Trump won not just clearly, but decisively, even some who had picked him to win were surprised by the extent of the Electoral College victory and the margins of his victory in terms of developing new areas of support in the electorate.
So what, in your view, are the characteristics that led you to describe this in your City Journal piece as a realigning election?
Fred Bauer: Yeah. Well, one of the funny things about 2024 is that it’s both a very expected and very unexpected campaign. And I think one of the most unexpected things about last night, or I mean Tuesday night, was that Trump did better than his polling would have indicated. Polls consistently of underestimated Trump. They did in 2016, they did in 2020, and I guess they did it again in 2024. While the outcome surprised many people how quickly it was decided, the fact that there was a polling miss in Trump’s favor is actually in some ways what you’d expect, I suppose. But I think in the City Journal piece, I was thinking about what I call this “Grand New Bargain” coalition, a Republican Party that is more working class, that’s more blue collar, that is really racking up more support among voters without a college degree. And to some extent, that’s what we saw in Tuesday night’s results.
Trump did much better in many of these working class areas than past Republicans have, in many ways improving upon some of his old performance with them. And I think as the Republican Party has become more working class, it has also become more racially diverse. One of the biggest swings you see, and I think you see this at the exit polling level and at the returns of particular states themselves, is that you see many of these multi-ethnic, racially diverse areas, you see a big move towards Republicans. I mean, for instance, in Starr County in Texas, which is a border county, it’s I think around 97% Hispanic or something like that. It’s very high number, and Trump won it by 16 points on Tuesday. I don’t think a Republican had won it for around a century, maybe even longer than that.
Brian Anderson: Including Trump had lost that district on two previous occasions.
Fred Bauer: Yes, exactly. Yes, he’d beaten into democratic margins, but I think he improved around 20, 21 points from where he did in 2020, which shows that this process of what some people have been describing as a realignment is an ongoing thing that Trump, as he’s continued as a political figure, has continually refined his messaging and exchanged what his coalition looks like so that he is performing much better in many of these working class areas in these ex-urban areas in many of these rural areas. Even in so-called Blue states, you see him really doing much better than he had before.
Brian Anderson: As the election approached, you formulated what we found to be a useful terminology for describing the two coalitions, the Trump and Harris coalitions. Trump’s you called the “Grand New Bargain” coalition, Harris’s, the “Belmont+” coalition. So let’s talk about the winner first, the Trump coalition. What is the “Grand New Bargain” coalition, you were starting to describe this and how does it differ from the base of support that Trump ran on eight years ago in 2016?
Fred Bauer: Yeah, no, well, I think what exactly the so-called “Grand New Bargain” is itself kind of evolving. So I’ll just have to sort of jot this as the tide comes up to erase what I’m writing. But I think we’re seeing a few different things here. We’re seeing this as a party that is more attuned to working class issues, and I think we see that breaking with some of the financial orthodoxies of the past. If you think of Republicans from, say, the Paul Ryan era, they were deeply concerned about the deficit. They talked a lot about that. I mean, Paul Ryan especially was trying to be an architect for some major reforms to federal entitlements because entitlements are a major driver of federal spending and by the views of many analysts and major driver of federal deficits over the long term.
And Trump has rebuked some of that messaging to some extent. He pledged quite notably, and made this part of the Republican platform this summer that he would not touch entitlements. He would not cut them in any way, especially social security and Medicare. So it’s a Republican Party that’s more favorable to entitlements than say the Republican Party of the Tea Party era was. It’s a Republican Party that ... I mean, the Republican Party has, or at least Republican politicians have talked a lot about border controls for a long time though, say, if you look back to the George W. Bush era, they also tried to say, okay, we want to have a compassionate immigration system. And George W. Bush was a major proponent say, so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Trump has instead picked up a theme that was a key part of more populist critiques of the Republican establishment in the Tea Party era, that we just need to really strengthen border security. And I think in some ways the breakdown of border security under Joe Biden, the asylum crisis and the overwhelmed border has really actually strengthened Trump’s hand in arguing for a much stronger and more aggressive approach to border controls.
Brian Anderson: What about Harris’s “Belmont+” coalition? What exactly do you mean by that and what are its characteristics in contrast with the Trump coalition?
Fred Bauer: Yeah, sure. In the term “Belmont+”, I was borrowing from Charles Murray’s book from about a dozen years ago, called Coming Apart, in which Murray argues that, and quite presciently argued that American politics was polarizing in two directions. On one hand, we’re going to see what he called “Fishtown,” which is more working class, more blue-collar kind of cultural environment versus say, Belmont. Belmont, which is named after a very wealthy Massachusetts suburb, which Murray uses a shorthand for college-educated Americans with a high degree of cultural and financial capital.
And to some extent, that’s what Harris seemed to really be reaching out towards. Her messaging was focused on cultural issues that she thought would be appealing to college-educated suburbanites and turn them out. I mean, especially she really led with abortion hoping to do that, but also a lot of very fierce denunciations of Donald Trump, which she had hoped to use to turn out suburban opponents to Trump. And so this is really a political paradigm that’s aiming again to appeal to the college-educated people, people in urban cores, and less focus on say, the working class voters who used to be the base of the Democratic Party.
Joe Biden was kind of a fusion figure in some ways because I mean, he’d spent decades in Washington. He had a lot of strong connections with organized labor and with blue collar voters, and he had this sort of old-fashioned effect. Harris was much, I mean, a veteran of California politics, is much more tied in what has become the new base of the Democratic Party, these highly educated, upper middle class people. And she was hoping to turn those voters out. And I think one of the things we saw earlier this week is that she had some success with that. If you look at, say, some of the suburbs around Atlanta, and there are a few other maybe suburban areas where okay, she improved on Biden’s performance in 2020, but in a lot of ways, actually, I think that strategy didn’t really pan out because if you look at even many highly educated suburbs, she lost ground compared to Biden compared to the past.
And I think that’s one of the reasons why some states like New Jersey and Virginia were closer than some people thought. And if you look at maps showing a swing in political preference from 2020 to 2024, it’s a sea of red in terms of the shift of preference. So we saw a swing to Trump across a lot of different communities. And so this message apparently just did not resonate, didn’t hit with a lot of people. They were, and I think the disruption that many voters saw under the Biden administration in terms of inflation, in terms of immigration turned a lot of voters away from her.
Brian Anderson: Well, losing campaigns never lack for scapegoats, and we’re already seeing some of that emerging in terms of the early postmortems on the Harris campaign. Now admittedly, she didn’t have a great hand to play. She was constrained by her association with the Biden administration, obviously as vice president and its unpopularity, but also her past views, which tended to be pretty far to the left of the electorate. You mentioned her as a San Francisco-born figure. That’s where she emerged first, and she shares a lot of the political views of that milieu. But I just wonder, what’s your assessment of some of the most significant missteps that the campaign made in this election?
Fred Bauer: Yeah, I mean, as you say, there are all sorts of scapegoats that people could have. If I were to think of a few moments here, some that I would illustrate, I think in a lot of ways, Harris’s various tactical mistakes can be traced to a bigger failure of strategic vision. I mean, as you said, she had this record of these very left-wing policy positions, and a lot of ways she’d set up this kind of architecture for her campaign that she was always afraid to really break decisively from the left of many issues, and also from Joe Biden himself in many issues. And so as a result, she never really wanted to define herself fully as a candidate.
And so you’d see these weird things where her past positions would be walked back by aides, but she herself would never get up there and really explain why the positions had changed. And this desire to keep herself undefined also influenced her media strategy because she didn’t get out there and do that much media for a long time. She was hidden from the press. She did at most very limited interviews. When she did do them, they’re very short, they’re very minimal. I mean, I think something that really distilled the contrast and the media strategies between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the closing weeks of the campaign is that Trump went on Joe Rogan podcast and got tens of millions of views and spent I think three-plus hours discussion with Joe Rogan, whereas Kamala Harris did a quick couple minute cold open on SNL, and that’s really the difference between the two campaigns right there.
So she didn’t really reach out to a lot of voters and I don’t know, didn’t take a lot of chances that would’ve been low cost to separate herself from the cultural left. I mean, so for instance, on a ballot question that was voted on in California, which would’ve increased felony penalties for some people for certain theft and drug crimes, and it seems to have passed overwhelmingly. And yet when Harris was asked where she stood in that she refused to give an answer. And so this is something where even California voters support overwhelmingly, but she just refused to break with the left on it, which I think was illustrative of a bigger kind of failure of vision on the part of her campaign.
Brian Anderson: I think for the Trump campaign, you would have to say, and you just alluded to this, they pursued a very new strategy in terms of alternative media. Trump appeared on Joe Rogan. JD Vance appeared on Rogan as well, did I think another over three-hour segment. And then the waning days of the election, Elon Musk, who was a major surrogate of the Trump campaign, did three hours himself, but it wasn’t just the Rogan podcast. They were all over the alternative media space. And the Harris campaign tried to do a little bit of that, but it just seemed to me that they dropped the ball there and that the Trump campaign seemed to understand a shift in the way media is consumed in this country that is going to be quite significant going forward. I wonder what your perception of that is.
Fred Bauer: No, I think you’re very much on the right track there. I mean, Trump is, and this is actually a really political advantage. As we’ve seen, he’s the consummate celebrity. He’s very much attuned to trends in popular culture. He made his name in the tabloid game of New York City, which is really intense, and he’s become like a national brand name now for decades. And he is surprisingly, perhaps to some people, adapted to this new digital age very smoothly. He was this major presence on Twitter for so long, but now he’s moving into the era of podcasting and really getting his name out there. And often people think of Democrats as more savvy in terms of media, but you’re right that Harris was very adverse to doing that.
As you’re right, she did do some of it, but she did not reach out to a lot of these podcasters, especially podcasters like Rogan who have an audience that skews younger and more male, places where she probably needed to improve her margins, she wanted to win and she didn’t do it. She wanted a much more staged, managed kind of approach to politics. And one thing you can say about Donald Trump is that he’s not really stage-managed. He likes that more so spontaneous free-flowing, sprawling kind of rhetoric that you’ll see, for instance, on many podcasts
Brian Anderson: And this campaign, it came off as far more authentic and to the extent that voters are looking for non-scripted responses and a certain level of authenticity, I think he gained a tremendous advantage there. We mentioned polls a bit earlier. I will say that some polling groups were very accurate. The second election cycle in a row that AtlasIntel did a superb job. They were just right on the money. Rasmussen polling did very well both on the state and national level, but you’d have to say this is the third cycle in a row in which more broadly, polling didn’t provide a reliable picture of reality.
We’ve seen this both nationally and at the state level, again. The Sunday evening now notoriously before the election, the highly respected pollster Anne Seltzer released a survey showing Harris winning Iowa significantly, and it was a projection that turned out wildly wrong. Trump won the election by, I don’t know, 15% or something like that there. So talk a bit about what’s going on there. Why are the polling groups most of them missing, not just in the US, we’re seeing this internationally. It does seem to represent a kind of methodological crisis that’s been going on in the polling world, and what are the factors driving that new uncertainty? And is it something that can be overcome? We do have the positive examples of these other groups that are getting it right.
Fred Bauer: No, you’re right. And I think you’re drawing attention to the international way that we’re seeing this as well, I think is especially important because I think we do want to keep in mind this is not just about Trump. Trump illuminates a bigger structural problem that polling is facing. I think a lot of pollsters have argued that we’re facing this real challenge in what’s called a response rate in terms of people answering your poll, whether it’s an online poll, whether it’s a poll on the phone. And it seems as though there are a certain section of the electorate and that we see in the United States and elsewhere that does not want to answer the phone. And especially it seems here in the United States that a lot of say Trump-friendly voters will not talk to pollsters. They do not like to talk to them, whether they feel embattled or whether they just don’t like pollsters and they think they’re part of New York Times, that’s a world they’re not really interested in, but they’re not picking up the phone.
And this is, you’re right, has created a big methodological problem for pollsters because how do you model for an electorate, which now is actually polarized in terms of how it responds to polls because often it seems as though more left-wing, especially slightly older voters, really don’t mind picking up for pollsters, which is why you saw in a lot of these polls, Kamala Harris winning supposedly senior citizens by this huge number because oh, these people who like to sit at home and watch MSNBC will love to talk to pollsters, but their neighbor who likes to watch Fox News, doesn’t want to talk to pollsters. So it’s a real methodological problem. And you’re right that some polls have gotten it right, some polls have got it really wrong. And it’s hard to say how much these pollsters who got it right, how much they’re just lucky versus how much some of them have found like a secret sauce for weighing the voters.
I think it’s sort of up in the air. I will say, on behalf of some of the pollsters, even though Trump did win the Electoral College by a big margin and looks like he’s won the popular vote by a healthy number too, some of these states it did ... Look, the end result is still kind of close. I mean, if you look at right now, Wisconsin is about under a point Trump’s victory margin. Michigan is about probably 1.5, and Pennsylvania’s around two points and so. Well, that’s margin territory. You could see a poll getting it a little bit wrong, but nevertheless, it’s a lot of pollsters have given these totally out there numbers that basically have no connection to reality. And I think the fact that pollsters generally are underestimating Trump is a suggestion that there’s a problem here in how we’re reaching out to voters.
Brian Anderson: Finally, Fred, it’s fair to say that neither campaign tried really that hard to appeal to voter groups that they weren’t targeting, that weren’t part of these coalitions that they were relying on in this election cycle. And most assessments of the electorate indicate that Americans remain deeply polarized. We see evidence of this every day we walk around. Maybe this is more true than ever after Tuesday night. As Trump prepares to take the White House for a second time, what prospects do you see for him broadening his political base through policy decisions? Or are we just looking at four years of very, very intense partisan warfare?
Fred Bauer: I think this is the big question going forward, and I’ll be honest, I tend to think it’s a little bit up in the air if I think about Trump’s ability to potentially broaden his coalition. If you think of some of the messages that Republicans have been starting to send on say, economics and some of these things, that’s a way you could actually try to expand your coalition and pick up even more of these working class voters. And it seems as though Trump didn’t actually lose the suburbs by as much as people thought that he could have. So maybe you could keep those suburbs and keep building beachheads into some of these more working class areas, especially if you can deliver for them, if you can deliver rising wages, if you can manage inflation, if you can not make them feel like the world’s topsy-turvy, if you can maybe help with some infrastructure or help re-industrialize parts of the country, I think that’s a way of Trump potentially building out his base of support and expanding his coalition and setting Republicans up for good position for the future.
However, as you know, political tempers are running very high right now, and it’s not right now quite yet clear to me how it will break. I think 2024 is a little bit different than 2016 because you could argue, and many progressives did argue in 2016 that yeah, Trump won the electoral college, but that was kind of this weird freak thing that happened and he really lost the popular vote and Republicans barely hung onto power, and so he didn’t “really win.” Now whether you find that argument persuasive, a lot of Democrats and progressives did offer that argument in 2016. That’s a lot harder to make in 2024 because I mean, it looks like Trump has won the popular vote by a significant margin. Republicans have a stronger position in the Senate now than they did, so he had some coattails in the Senate. The house is still up in the air because the coalitions have changed a little bit.
Many people think Republicans are favored to win it and perhaps by a narrow margin, but nevertheless, you can make an argument that, okay, that what was being offered by Democrats was pervasively rejected by voters. And this is sort of, the ball’s in the court of progressives now here to make the decision, will we try to use this to readjust and recalibrate as some people like Congressman Ritchie Torres from New York have tried to suggest, okay, maybe we need to rethink how we’re approaching especially some of these cultural issues? Or instead, will you see the rise of the resistance too? And you might be seeing that it’s California Governor Gavin Newsom is just called a special session of the legislature to “protect California values,” and already Newsom is arguing he will issue a whole new wave of legal conflict with the Trump administration to try to block it from taking action, all sorts of things.
And we might see other Democratic governors take a similar approach, in which case we could see more partisan warfare. In which case, I mean, I don’t know if Republicans then will have to make a decision, can we try to work around this and say, look at the Democrats are trying to block us from doing these things that can help working families. So this is a really sort of dynamic and I think exciting time for both political coalitions to see what they want to do going forward.
Brian Anderson: Well, much of interest to keep watching and be concerned about. Fred Bauer, thanks very much. We appreciate you coming on 10 Blocks and for your excellent political commentary in recent months for City Journal. You can read that work by Fred Bauer on the City Journal website, and we’ll have a link to his author page in the description. You can find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi. If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, please give us a nice rating on iTunes.
Fred, thanks so much for this insightful discussion.
Fred Bauer: It was great to talk, Brian.
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