The 2024 Stakes Are Lower Than You Think

By Yuval Levin

Thursday, October 24, 2024

 

In the buildup to the 2024 election, Republicans and Democrats have not agreed about much, but they have agreed that the stakes of the race could not be higher.

 

“If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country,” Donald Trump told a rally in Ohio earlier this year. Kamala Harris has said much the same. “At stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our Founders, and generations of Americans, have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution itself,” she told supporters in Pennsylvania in October.

 

Such rhetoric has become par for the course in our presidential contests. Every election is said to be the most important of our lifetimes, holding in the balance the direction of America’s future if not the very possibility of a future.

 

The narrowness of our elections intensifies this perception of the stakes. The outcome rests on a knife’s edge. Things could easily go either way. This motivates apocalyptic rhetoric to get out every last voter, but it also contributes to a heightened sense of the significance of the outcome.

 

There is a kind of visceral logic to the notion that the stakes are higher when elections are closer, and when the parties are more bitterly divided and polarized. But there is not a constitutional logic to that view. In fact, closer elections tend to have lower stakes in our system of government, very much by design.

 

The American regime is built to restrain narrow majorities. Unlike the consolidated parliamentary systems of most of the world’s democracies, where assembling a majority coalition gives you all the power of the state for as long as your majority holds, the American system pits multiple power centers against one another. Advancing meaningful policy objectives requires relatively broad majorities that endure for an extended period — long enough to craft legislation, see it through the series of complex obstacles that must be overcome in our bicameral Congress, and secure a presidential signature. Narrow majorities can rarely do this effectively, which means that close elections generally do not yield transformative governance.

 

The 21st century has so far offered ample evidence of this. Elections have been closely contested throughout this period, and majorities have usually been narrow. In the final quarter of the 20th century, the party in power in the House of Representatives averaged an 81-seat majority there. In the first quarter of this century, the average has been a 34-seat majority, and the coming election is likely to yield a much narrower advantage than that. In the Senate, the average size of the majority has gone from 13 to six seats over the same period, and again the next Senate is likely to see an even narrower edge than that.

 

Such narrow majorities make legislative action very difficult and all but foreclose highly significant yet purely partisan legislative achievements. Major legislation in this century has generally responded to emergencies — the September 11 attacks, the financial crisis, the pandemic — and has usually advanced with bipartisan support. The very few exceptions (such as Obamacare, which happened after the most decisive election victory of this century so far gave the Democrats 60 Senate seats for a brief period) have exacted a high political price for the party that pursued them. And they have been very rare.

 

Even the budget-reconciliation process, which allows for a way around the Senate filibuster and has made some partisan tax legislation possible in this century, has not allowed for radical measures or fundamental policy change that endured. Winning narrowly in Congress has not enabled the victorious majority to transform the country.

 

Presidents win all the power of the presidency even if their margin of electoral victory is thin. But narrow victories nonetheless narrow their political freedom of action and tend to leave them without the kinds of congressional majorities they would need in order to make durable, transformative change. The modern presidents we think of as powerful change agents are remembered for legislation they pushed through — the New Deal, the Great Society, Reagan’s tax reforms or defense buildup, welfare reform in the Clinton years, Obamacare — and not for executive actions that were easily reversible by their successors. Narrow election wins are not likely to yield such a president.

 

Of course, a singularly disruptive black-swan event is always possible. And if Donald Trump really does send the military after his political enemies, or Kamala Harris declares that her administration will refuse to abide by Supreme Court decisions, then the constraints of our constitutional system would themselves be under assault and might not serve as guards against rabid narrow majorities.

 

That is not to say that the system fails to offer such protections, but that it does — and that among the few ways to really overcome those protections and advance partisan priorities with a slim majority is to attack the Constitution. That’s why candidates trying to rev up their supporters’ fears often end up insisting their opponents will do just that. Such scenarios are easily imaginable, yet they remain unlikely to succeed even when presidential contenders exhibit brazen contempt for the Constitution. Our institutions have proven resilient under pressure in recent years, and an election that pits the sitting vice president against a man who already served a full term as president is not the most obvious moment to expect the utterly unprecedented.

 

That does not mean that the election is unimportant. Presidents are immensely consequential, especially in a time of global instability. They can also make judicial nominations that long outlast them. And the winning party could well push the envelope to advance some elements of its agenda. The Democrats, for instance, insist that they will end the Senate filibuster to enact a radically permissive abortion regime nationwide if they control the presidency and both houses of Congress. Republicans have said they will pursue far-reaching changes to federal personnel rules and launch a massive crackdown on illegal immigrants.

 

These would be dramatic policy actions that the opposition party would oppose intensely. But they would fall well within the normal bounds of our politics, would be difficult to achieve with narrow public support, and could quickly prove unpopular. The same would be true of any meaningful policy move along party lines after a close election.

 

Presidential elections always matter, but close ones tend to matter less. If we are in for another tight election, then we are also likely to be in for another presidency characterized by lots of aggressive talk, little durable action, and much partisan frustration. That’s not great news if your party wins and you want to see dramatic change. But it does suggest that if your party loses, it will have another shot soon enough, and the country won’t be lost in the meantime.

 

Both partisan hopes and partisan fears are misdirected in an era of narrow majorities. A transformative election would require what neither party has managed in a long time: a decisive win signaling broad, durable public support.