Morris P. Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He published a new collection of Unstable Majorities essays ahead of the 2024 presidential election that sought to explain how American voters saw their choices. Here, he describes how the lessons from those essays could be applied to the November vote, and imagines the path forward for both Republicans and Democrats.
Chris Herhalt: I want to start with your essay about the white working class. In it, you write, “Many people like Trump because they resent the people who hate him.” President Trump does appear to be an effective conduit of disdain for elites on the part of the masses. In your opinion, how does someone who appears to be such an elite himself effectively transform himself in that manner?
Morris Fiorina: You’re right. Here’s a guy who’s rich, who comes out of a rich New York environment, but if you read about him, it’s clear he was never part of the New York elite. His origins were not elite origins, exactly. He was always a little on the . . . not the dark side, necessarily, but just not the elite side. And I’ve always wondered if because of the business he was in, construction, and dealing with building trades and unions, whether he was regularly in contact with working-class-type people, unions and so forth, and understood how those people think and how they react to things. That’s a question that I think Trump biographers will have a field day with once we have some distance from this era and try to figure out how this guy came out of nowhere politically and seemed to know how to connect.
In early 2016, after Trump had announced but before he was being taken seriously, I was visiting some of my old friends at Harvard. I went down to the square and hailed a taxi, and I got in; the driver was a black guy. And he said, “Do you mind if I keep listening to this? I really like this guy.” And I said, “Sure, go ahead.” After a few blocks, I realized he was listening to Trump. And every now and then, Trump would say something and the guy would laugh a little and sort of hit the steering wheel, like, “Right on.” And by the time I got to where I was going—and all kinds of people have realized this since—I realized Trump was connecting with this guy, and he wasn’t connecting on the level of substance but on the level of attitude. That in the same way Trump was lashing out at people who had marginalized him, this guy could imagine how good it would feel to hit back in the same way. And I remember thinking at the time that there’s an aspect of Trump’s appeal that people are not getting.
Especially in the kind of circles that I live in. At a conference earlier this year, one of my visiting professor friends got up and said, “Isn’t there some issue that could peel away Trump’s support?’ And I remember thinking, it’s not issue-based. That’s the thing. It really doesn’t matter what he says. It’s how he says it is that appeals to a whole lot of people. I’m not a psychologist, but I think the biographers are going to have a good time with this one, for sure.
Herhalt: In that same essay, you counter the perception that the Democratic base has been eroding only recently, that the cracks are new. You write that this has been happening for fifty years. What would they need to shore it up?
Fiorina: I’m not sure there’s much they can do now. One of the things I write about is that, as you know, it’s not as if people follow the news every day. That’s not how it works. People form their images of parties over long periods. And I think now the Democratic image among large elements of the white working class is sufficiently negative that it’s going to take a long time to repair.
The progressives on the Democratic side typically say, we’ve got to emphasize economics more. That’s not the answer. They do need to emphasize economics, but they also need to come to grips with the fact that the working class is simply not buying progressive positions on cultural issues: where the Democrats stand on race, on immigration, on gender, et cetera. And the problem is the activist groups say these are the most important issues for them, so the pragmatists in the Democratic Party are caught in between. On the one hand, they have these highly active groups who work and give money, and these are the issues they care about. On the other hand, these issues put off a large number of people in the working class, especially in the swing states.
Doug Rivers had a conference here at Hoover a couple of weeks ago, where pollsters from both parties came. Everyone agrees that campaign ads are overrated in terms of their actual impact. But the pollsters agreed that the transgender ad [against Kamala Harris’s 2019 positions on gender therapy for prison inmates and illegal migrants in detention], that one mattered. It mattered a couple of percent, they figured, enough to carry the vote in some swing states.
I think most Americans have no problem with transgender issues until you get to the real extremes—until you start saying transgender women are women, and they should play in women’s sports, and they should go into women’s restrooms and locker rooms. People are willing to go about 90 percent of the way, but it’s probably the last few percent that is just too far for many people. It’s black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking on the part of various groups that’s creating the problem for the Democrats right now.
We’ve seen these problems among the Republicans also in the past, but right now the problem is mostly evident on the Democratic side.
Herhalt: In another of your essays, “Economic Anxiety or Cultural Backlash: Which Is Key to Trump’s Support?” you say that measurement and modeling decisions of voter sentiment tend to enhance the appearance of the cultural backlash while downplaying the presence or the impact of economic anxiety in 2016. Is this still the case? It seems as if inflation has compounded the economic anxiety.
Fiorina: As I said in 2016, most of the intellectual class and many of my colleagues in academia were predisposed to believe that misogyny and racism were the real motivators. But I don’t think they were as critical in their examination of the data as they should have been.
Now, you’re right, this past year, it seems so obvious that economics was the deciding factor. Poll after poll after poll showed inflation and the economy was the primary concern of Americans, and the social issues were way down the list. Except for the transgender question in certain areas.
I come from western Pennsylvania, the heart of Trump country. My county voted something like 70 percent for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and they’re voting almost that much for Trump now. It’s a classic illustration of what we’re observing nationally. Even in 2016, among all the people I knew, I never saw racism. I never saw misogyny. What I saw was that in my town, there were five functioning steel mills when I went to college, and now they’re gone. What I saw was economic. I saw whitewashed windows downtown. This has happened all over the Midwest, broadly speaking, all of these factory towns are just decimated by the economic transformations of the past generation. And to me, that always seemed like the most obvious, the most important factor.
And you can’t just separate out this factor. You can’t say, “Well, it’s 20 percent economics and 10 percent racism.” These things interact in certain ways. It’s long been argued in the sociological literature that economic distress is a breeding ground for all the other kinds of pathologies people find. Hitler’s party in Germany got, I think, 3 percent of the vote in 1928, and then 30-some percent in 1933. You know what happened in between. Suddenly, when things go really bad and people begin to look around for scapegoats, people who seemed on the fringe seem to have some credibility that you can’t just parse out in percentage terms. You have to look at things holistically.
I know that coming from a political scientist, that’s sort of heresy. But that’s what I think, on an intuitive level, has been going on. If we had 5 percent growth rates broadly spread out, which we obviously never will have, we wouldn’t have the problems we have right now.
Herhalt: In another of your papers, “Is America Polarized?” you point out that the parties have sorted themselves and become more ideologically disciplined and aligned, more so than ever before. And I’m curious because the Republicans during the 2024 campaign, and the Democrats after they lost, both expressed a desire to widen the tent to hear more diverse views. With the Republicans, it was appealing to minorities. With the DNC, it was “let’s not just shame everyone who doesn’t align with us anymore.” Would this be helpful for them? In this paper you point out that the electorate is really 30 percent on one side, 30 percent on the other, and 40 percent in the middle who will move and deviate.
Fiorina: There used to be a lot of Joe Manchins in the Democratic Party. By the time he retired at the end of the year, he was a unicorn. And there used to be a lot of Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Charlie Bakers in the Republican Party. They’re almost all gone. One of the points I’ve made is that the country isn’t polarized, but it’s accurate to say we have party polarization. If I tell you this congressman is pro-choice, you know he’s a Democrat, and the guy also favors gun control. In the past, that wasn’t the case. So, it was possible for Democrats to get elected in Republican areas and Republicans to get elected in Democratic areas. They could take the positions that would fit their districts.
And I find that that younger people don’t understand when I say the parties are polarized but not the electorate. They ask, well, what else is there? In the 1950s, when I was a boy, we had polarization on race, polarization around the civil rights movement, but it wasn’t party polarization. The most liberal people were Democrats, the most conservative people were Democrats—Southern Democrats—and Republicans were in between. And a decade later, during the Vietnam War, the anti-war protesters were Democrats, the cops who beat them up were Democrats, and Republicans were sort of in between, leaning toward one side or the other.
If we could have the same public opinion distribution today but we still had 1970s parties, we wouldn’t have the stalemate and gridlock politics of today’s era. We would have more coalition—shifting, bipartisanship—just as we had in the 1960s and ’70s.
Herhalt: In your view, is President Trump continuing the trend of what you call “overreach” that’s imposing the position of the party on a more moderate electorate?
Fiorina: Right now, he is doing overreach on steroids. You always have a feeling that Trump doesn’t necessarily believe in much of what he does, that he’s throwing things against the wall to see what will stick. Any time he runs into real resistance, he sort of pulls back and declares victory. So, we’ll see. But the problem is he has a lot of people around him who are really serious about these things and are going to push him in that direction.
And that happens to every president. I don’t think Barack Obama was necessarily a flaming liberal, but he had a lot of such people around him. All the pressures, once you’re elected, come from your side: the side to the left of you if you’re a Democrat, the right if you’re Republican. I’m interested in seeing how this plays out with Trump.
Herhalt: Going back to the idea that the parties are locked in to their positions, can you describe who your perfect nominee would be for the Democrats in 2028? Not a specific person, but what kinds of positions they would hold, where they would come from.
Fiorina: Well, first I’d say we need the right conditions. We’d need the sort of situation—and Lord knows I don’t want this—where there might be a war that’s going badly or a terrible economic issue. People are fed up with both parties. We know they don’t like either party now, but then they would be totally fed up. And then we need the appearance of somebody who is different and I think from outside of politics.
So, you can imagine a person who, coming in like Trump, says, “We’re not going to touch the programs that hurt the broad middle class, but we have to get hold of spending in other areas.” Like Trump is doing, frankly. But saying at the same time, “We’re done arguing over these cultural issues. We’re going to try to live and let live and let common sense prevail as much as possible, and then win and govern that way.”
Is somebody out there going to succeed? I don’t know. But I always point out that we’ve had these crappy periods in our politics before and you never can see how they’re going to end. Nobody in 1894 can foresee that William McKinley is going to win the next election and the Republicans will be the majority party for the next thirty years. And I think nobody can see in 1930 that the Democrats are going to be the majority party for the next generation. We have no ability to predict these junction points, these inflection points, or whatever you call them. We can all explain them, but we have no ability to predict them.
