RFK Jr. and MTG are using the same dismissive term for major-party differences. I took at look at this phenomenon at New York:
Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George W. Bush was de rigueur — “Vichy Democrats.”
Today the term “Uniparty” has come to denote the idea that Democrats and Republicans are actually working for the same evil Establishment enterprise, their loudly proclaimed differences being a mere sham. This contention was the culmination of a five-page letter Marjorie Taylor Greene recently sent her Republican colleagues calling for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal, unless he changes his ways instantly. She wrote:
“With so much at stake for our future and the future of our children, I will not tolerate this type of ‘leadership.’ This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority …
“If these actions by the leaders of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican party – we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also leaned heavily into the Uniparty idea in his recent speech introducing running-mate Nicole Shanahan:
“Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.”
The Uniparty claim is ridiculous, of course, as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley demonstrates:
“[O]ur current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn’t see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.”
Kennedy’s subscription to the Uniparty notion is understandable on two points. The first is that his candidacy is vastly more likely to tilt the 2024 presidential campaign in the direction of one of the two major-party candidates (likely Donald Trump, according to most of the polling) than to actually succeed in winning the presidency. Maintaining that it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Biden or Trump running the country is essential to maintaining RFK’s appeal as November approaches and the futility of his bid becomes clearer. Second, Kennedy’s pervasive conspiracy-theory approach to contemporary life lends itself to the argument that the apparent gulf between the two major parties is a ruse disguising a sinister common purpose.
MTG’s Uniparty contention also reflects dual motives. In part she is simply echoing Trump’s weird but useful contention that he’s an “outsider” battling a Deep-State Establishment that secretly controls both parties, which is pretty rich since he dominates the GOP like Genghis Khan dominated the Golden Horde. But there is a marginally more legitimate sense in which key elements of the two parties really are in line with each other on isolated issues that happen to obsess Greene, such as aid to Ukraine. If you are a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.
The same is true of other implicit Uniparty claims, particularly those made by progressive pro-Palestinian protesters who adamantly argue that the need to smite “Genocide Joe” Biden for his pro-Israel policies outweighs all the reasons it might be a bad idea to help Trump return to the White House (including the fact that Trump is palpably indifferent to Palestinian suffering). If the two parties do not appear to differ on your overriding issue, then the fundamental reality of polarization can fade into irrelevance.
So we’re likely to hear more Uniparty talk even as Democrats and Republicans head toward another highly fractious election with very high stakes attributable to their differences.
Why are Bush’s numbers still high among Republicans? I have two thoughts:
1) After the “Washington 5” were indicted for the Watergate break-ins, Nixon’s approval ratings were still at 60 percent among everyone (I’m not sure what it was among Republicans, but you can bet that it was very high). It wasn’t until it became painfully obvious that the break-in was a straight-line directly connected to Nixon that his numbers began to plummet. Similarly, I think Democrats see a straight-line connecting Bush to the corruption and incompetence of his administration in everything from the war with Iraq, to our struggling economy, to environmental degradation (or at the very least hold him responsible). Centrist Republicans have a clear disconnect.
Why? Well, thought number 2) the right-wing media juggernaut gives them cover. They need not ever confront the realities of their president or what he has done – and neither does the president. Hannity and Limbaugh are more than capable of mounting a straw man defense against the most egregious Bush missteps and malfeasance. Additionally, the Republicans have so vilified Democrats that a core majority of Republicans would rather deal with Satan than that French looking John Kerry who lies about the severity of his combat-wounds …
In “Independent Voters and the Bush Presidency” (June 5, 2004) the question of turnout/participation in November is briefly mentioned:
“Alas for Bush, this may turn out to be the election where everyone shows up. And, if that’s the case, it’ll be the Republican base that gets swamped, not the other way around.”
But what drives turnout? What sorts of issues and poll numbers make people more rather than less likely to vote?
Won’t Kerry have to emphasize economic populism in order to fire up his base? And isn’t his reported reluctance to speak in those terms cost him in November in terms of turnout? This, of course, was the Dukakis experience.
If the author avoids the “Likely Voter” screen, does this mean that he is agnostic at this point about the shape of turnout come November?
doofus,
one thing that has changed is that touch screens with no paper trail have replaced verifiable levers and ballots. What is being done to ensure that voting will be verified and ballot access will be equal for minorities and poor counties?
some important groups working for voting fairness
see
verifiedvoting.org
fairvote.org
naacp.org
aclu.org
To the poster who wondered why it isn’t obvious to a lot of people that Bush is a complete moron and totally unqualified to be President , let alone anything else I give you this: Many people think about life and the world they live in in simplistic terms. Their minds are incapable of thinking anything because that requires a thought process. Allthroughout Right-Wing history their thought process is it’s the Communists fault, its the fault of liberals, its the fault of big government etc. Being a citizen in a democracy REQUIRES that people pay attention. Many people do not WANT to think therefore “ALL POLITICIANS ARE CROOKS” is easier than thinking about the real differences between the two major political parties. That’s why liberals have problems, most of their issues are not easily boiled down to simplistic phrases like everything will be fine if we just get the government off our backs, etc.
Or it may indicate that (3) if you have enough Gallup numbers to look at, you are bound to find some striking but meaningless chance correlations that hold over several elections.
The correlation is interesting, and it could indicate something like a causal relation. But “incumbent job approval among independents in May of an election year with an incumbent running for reelection” does have the air of those surreallistically overspecified stats that baseball announcers like to report: balls thrown against left-handed hitters in the bottom of the eighth, etc.
That’s a very interesting analysis, PhillyGuy. Also very encouraging. I’m wondering, though, if there might be a new independent variable this year in the extent to which Bush/Cheney is spending its massive war chest on overwhelmingly negative ads. An analysis by the Washington Post a week or two ago showed that, while about 25% of the Kerry campaign’s ads so far have been negative, an amazing 75% of Bush/Cheney’s have been. And they are running these ads in the key battleground states where they can do the most harm. (This doesn’t even take into account the Rove-inspired dirty tricks and election fraud that also will undoubtedly be run “below the radar,” a la South Carolina and Florida in 2000.) Bush/Cheney spokesmen have said, off the record, that their objective is to define Kerry and create enough doubts among undecided voters that — come November — they’ll hesitate to pull the lever for Kerry. My point here is simply that the independent-voter paradigm this year may not follow history, because never has so much money been spent to tear down smear an opposing presidential candidate, rather than build up the spending candidate. Let’s hope that this is not the case.
The most intriguing and beautiful aspect of Gallup’s data is the extent to which the incumbent’s May approval rating among independent voters so closely reflects his eventual popular vote in November:
Year, Incumbent, May Independent Approval, Popular Vote
1996, Clinton, 47, 49.23
1992, Bush, 34, 37.45
1984, Reagan, 58, 58.77
1980, Carter, 36, 41.01
1976, Ford, 51, 48.02
1972, Nixon, 63, 60.67
The average differential between the May approval rate among independents and the popular vote share in November is only 2.8%. In other words, if recent electoral history is any indicator, Bush can count on a popular vote share of between 37.2 and 42.8 percent.
Interestingly, the person who did best in the popular vote compared to his May rating among independents was Jimmy Carter, who’s vote total was 5.01% better than his May rating. Even if Bush were to do as well as Carter, he’d still only end up with 45.01% of the vote. Let us pray…
I think the similarity between May independent approval rating and November popular vote tells us two things: 1) attitudes toward the incumbent have largely hardened by May of his election year; and 2) independent voters truly are the critical key to a presidential election since Republicans and Democrats tend to be loyal to their candidate–if independents dislike you, you’re in big trouble. Bush is in big trouble.
2 points:
1) But, among the 55 percent who strongly disapprove of his performance, 41 percent strongly disapprove.
Um. Shouldn’t it read: …among the 55 percent who disapprove of his performance, 41 percent strongly disapprove
2) Re: Republican streadfastness. Let me paraphrase Robert Jordan here: “As a deer will freeze when it sees a boulder rushing down a mountainside…” I think that’s why. Deer in the headlights.
How precisely could the Republicans “paper over” the fact that the very people they need most to win, hate their guts?
What *I’m* confused by is how nearly 90% of Republicans could possibly continue to support this president and his administration. I suspect that they are simply not paying any attention, and won’t until later in the campaign.
Of course, I include “watches nothing but Fox News” as functionally equivalent to “not paying attention”.
The good thing about this is that at about the same time they really start paying attention, so will the vast majority of Democrats and Independents. And there’s a lot more Democrats and Independents than there are Republicans.
And it’s darn nice of us to point out their weaknesses while they still have time to paper them over, isn’t it?