Ronald Brownstein. Gourevitch also points out that even if the pandemic hasn't significantly reduced Trump's support, it has significantly changed the terms of the 2020 debate in two respects. These actions are accelerating what’s been a long-standing political separation. The immovability of the battle lines in 2020 captures how thoroughly the two parties are now unified -- and separated -- by, "That is certainly what gives Trump a floor: By stoking those cultural war fires you are going to win over a certain share of the electorate that has this more racist and sexist and xenophobic views," says Brian Schaffner, a Tufts University political scientist who has extensively studied the correlation between political preferences and cultural attitudes. Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, Trump's approval ratings and support in the presidential race against Democratic nominee, The durability of both support and opposition to Trump shows how the motivation for voters' choices is shifting from transitory measures of performance, such as the traditional metrics of peace and prosperity, toward bedrock attitudes about demographic, cultural and economic change.
But it could prevail in the near term, especially since both the Electoral College and the Senate benefit small states that remain mostly white and Christian. August 12, 2020 .
I mean, it just seemed to me unimaginable that someone who was in the same species as me wrote something that monumental. Increasingly, campaign strategists and political scientists agree, voters are choosing between the parties more on their views about fundamental demographic and cultural change than on their immediate financial circumstances or even their views of economic policies, such as taxes, spending and regulation. Because it did show a big part of the country trying to grapple with the central issue that we face over the next 20 years—how do you create a more equitable, inclusive society, when you are diversifying to this extent? I should go back a step. That the parties are growing in their differences only compounds that fear. It’s this combination of factors that makes American politics so uniquely volatile at this moment. And polls put Biden within range, to varying degrees, in four other states Trump carried: Iowa and Georgia, especially, but also Ohio and even Texas. In this Feb. 26, 1980, file photo, Republican presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy do some last-minute campaigning in Manchester for New Hampshire's presidential primary. His first wife was Nina Easton; they had two children before divorcing. To fight tooth and nail for something that is going to actually undermine your basic identity is not too surprising.
You were an English major at SUNY Binghamton. "Particularly White Christian folks really did think they were the country," he says. I have, like, serious Zoom bookshelves, if you've ever seen me on CNN. [3] In 1993, he was named their national political correspondent. He has been unique among presidents in offering virtually no concessions to viewpoints outside of his coalition. Each of them just had gave me this sense of like, wow, you know, you should aspire to do something really good, because these are like, really, really good. And I was at my girlfriend’s parents’ house. [5], Brownstein has been married twice. [3] In 1998, he went to work for CNN as a political analyst where he remained until 2004. Brendan Smialowski / AFP.
Separate polling from Pew has found that Democrats and Republicans hold views of the other that are growing more negative, with GOP partisans especially likely to view Democrats as immoral and unpatriotic. [3] He then worked as senior staff writer for Ralph Nader. March 20, 2020 . Brownstein in 2016.
It was just so powerful. On my left shoulder, you can see all of the LBJ books [the multi-volume biographies by Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker]. But even Democrats acknowledge that Biden's advantage isn't large enough to guarantee him victory in the Electoral College. Even before the presidential race began in earnest, Trump's approval rating had oscillated within a narrower band than those of previous presidents. Ronald Brownstein. The relentless geographic and demographic sorting of the parties means that the two coalitions more and more inhabit separate realities: Nationally, Clinton beat Trump in the 2016 popular vote by a little more than two percentage points, but 60 percent of Americans lived in counties that were decided by 20 points or more, according to calculations by Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort.
Is there anything of this moment in pop culture that sort of gives you that Born to Run feeling today? I'm pretty sure it was Dennis Elsas, who is still on SiriusXM. The nonfiction equivalent of that, and this is going to almost sound like a cliché, but it wasn't a cliché in 1975 or ’76, was The Power Broker. And for some people it's enthralling.". But I'm not sure we have the truly great novel that captures that yet. 'What a coward': Cohen reacts to Trump hinting he'd fire Fauci, Trump supporters block traffic on highways in New York and New Jersey, Tensions escalate in some areas ahead of Election Day, Both Trump and Biden voters worry about what the other side will do, Key state district attorney has a sharp warning for Trump, Former CIA director: Trump likely to put up challenges to election result, Avlon calls out Trump's 'voter suppression strategy', Analyst McCabe breaks down when the FBI gets involved, their contrasting attitudes toward these fundamental changes. Whatever the outcome on Tuesday, November 3, journalist Ronald Brownstein is warning that the political tensions in the U.S. will not be going away anytime soon. Why Trump emerged. And The Power Broker is somewhere over my right shoulder. [4], State University of New York at Binghamton, State University of New York - Binghamton, "Ronald Brownstein on America's political and electoral fault lines", "Ronald Brownstein Transcript - Conversations with Bill Kristol", "Ron Brownstein - Senior Political Analyst", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ron_Brownstein&oldid=983850545, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 16 October 2020, at 16:34.
"You would think Biden would be up 15 or 20, not 6 or 7 or 8 points. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can truly be confident about the outcome of the presidential race in 2020, and while each party might be favored to hold the congressional chamber it now controls, neither advantage is impregnable. With more voters firmly locked into each party, "there is maybe 10 or 12% who are untethered independents," notes Abramowitz. Before moderating a Zócalo/Noēma Magazine event titled “Has Hysteria Conquered America?,” Brownstein called into the virtual green room to discuss Springsteen, Venice Beach in the early ’70s, and what’s on his Zoom bookshelf. "Now the parties are very clearly sorted on issues of identity politics," Schaffner says. Ronald J. Brownstein (born April 6, 1958) is an American journalist, political correspondent, and analyst. Was there a book you studied there that changed your life in some way? After the 2012 election, I wrote that the main dividing line between the parties had become attitudes toward the cultural, demographic, and even economic trends transforming the nation. Link Copied. [3] In 1987, he became a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times. Watch the presidential race, This is Biden's shortest path to the White House, How 2020 may reconfigure politics in the Southwest, Why the Southeast is up for grabs in the 2020 election, Joe Biden implores Americans to wear a mask: 'Be patriotic', CNN's Abby Phillip says the White House reaction to COVID-19 positive cases within its ranks is a 'case study in what not to do', How conservative Catholics became supreme on GOP's court. She had these large Advent speakers, and we were sitting in her room, listening to WNEW-FM. The two of them were just such unbelievable achievements. People are much less compromising on those views, so once party politics becomes concentrated on that stuff the coalitions become much more stable. "Because politics mirrors [attitudes about] culture, we are kind of stuck," he says. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. And if you have the opposite views you are very likely to be in the Democratic Party. Underworld I love by Don DeLillo. American Pastoral is basically the story of the Baby Boomers, and their parents, and it's a great, great book, but it's not this story. The flip side, others note, is that the relatively centrist 77-year-old Biden may not inspire as much turnout as other potential nominees from younger people of color who consider Trump a racist. Updated 6:41 AM ET, Tue September 15, 2020. But this was kind of like the other side. While most Democrats in the Pew poll indicated that they would prefer their party to seek common ground with the other, most Republicans did not—attitudes that explain both the appeal to Democratic voters of former Vice President Joe Biden’s promise to seek bipartisan cooperation if elected and the widespread skepticism among leaders in both parties that he’s likely to obtain it. Brian Schaffner, Tufts University political scientist. I originally thought I was going to write fiction.
Born to Run. When I heard “Thunder Road,” my life changed.
Do you remember what piece of pop culture influenced you the most at that age? What happened after the death of George Floyd was pretty inspiring. You know, you’re in South Africa if you do that.
The past four times a president went into a midterm election with unified control of government, most recently Trump in 2018, voters revoked it. [3] He then worked as senior staff writer for Ralph Nader.
He has governed almost entirely as the president of red America, excoriating his political opponents while wielding the power of the federal government to punish blue America. [5], Brownstein has been married twice. Can majority rule survive America's widening political divide? But even so, Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, says the White constituencies most hostile to demographic and cultural change will likely become more embittered through the 2020s as evidence mounts that they no longer constitute the nation's majority. Republicans believe that the strong economy and Trump’s swaggering style will lead them to make small gains with Hispanic and African American men, suppress any defections from the working-class white women who backed him in 2016, and prompt greater turnout among the party’s base.
His sixth and most recent book, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America. Polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute captured that separation: In an October survey, 92 percent of voters who approved of Trump said Republicans are working “to protect the American way of life against outside threats,” while 75 percent of voters who disapproved of him said the GOP has been taken over by racists. (Penguin 2007). [1][2], Brownstein was born to a Jewish family on April 6, 1958 in New York City,[3] the son of Shirley and David Brownstein. We've just gotten the new album from Bruce Springsteen, and we're going to play it right now.” And I just remember he dropped the needle, and “Thunder Road” came on, and I was like, whoa. Across the red and blue divide, it is now common to hear voters say they fear that the America they believe in will disappear if the other side prevails in 2020. But that is a foundational piece of their self-understanding. Over the long term, the durability of attitudes toward Trump spotlights the likelihood of a widening rift between two Americas fundamentally diverging in both their exposure to and attitudes about such fundamental dynamics as the nation's growing racial and religious diversity, rising demands for greater racial equality, changing gender roles and the transition from an industrial to an information age economy.