Comprehensive Lecture Notes on Midterm Realignment, Ideological Cleavages, and Modern Populism

Administrative Announcements and Upcoming Events

• Charlie Cook Lecture and Class Visit:

  • Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report is scheduled to speak through The Harkin Institute next Wednesday at $7:00\,\text{PM}$.
  • The Cook Political Report is widely recognized for rating political races across categories such as Lean Democratic, Lean Republican, and Solid Republican.
  • Event registration can be completed by searching for Charlie Cook via student email accounts; registering provides access to the session recording for those unable to attend live.
  • The presentation will focus on the methodologies behind rating states and congressional districts, evaluating fundamentals versus noise, and interpreting election dynamics.
  • There is a $95\%$ certainty that Charlie Cook will visit the class session next Wednesday at $2:00\,\text{PM}$ (NR class F two).
  • Preparation expectation: Formulate substantive questions regarding election modeling, fundamentals, polling discrepancies from election night, and notable shifts on the electoral map.

• Post-Election Analysis Panel:

  • Date and Time: The $10\text{th}$ at $4:30\,\text{PM}$ (running until approximately $5:30\,\text{PM}$ or $5:45\,\text{PM}$).
  • Location: Johansson Center, Room $350$ (Ernst).
  • Panelists include:
  • Rachel Nussbaum: Political Science faculty member specializing in American political institutions and political theory.
  • Tom Beaumont: Associated Press (AP) political reporter and journalism faculty instructor.
  • Amy McCoy: Representative from Strategic Political Communication.
  • The course instructor.
  • Scope: Discussion on the institutional and political transition from campaign season to governance; complimentary food will be provided.

2026 Midterm Election Results and Key Race Analyses

• Historical Precedents and Notable State Breakthroughs:

  • Texas: Elected a Democrat statewide for the first time in $35\,\text{years}$, demonstrating significant down-ballot and gubernatorial effects.
  • New Mexico: Elected the first-ever Native American woman governor in state history.
  • Illinois: Achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first state in United States history to be represented simultaneously by two female senators.
  • Kansas: Elected a Democratic senator for the first time in over $90\,\text{years}$, with the previous occurrence dating back to $1932$.
  • Georgia: Elected Keisha Lance Bottoms as the first Black woman governor in the history of the United States, winning by a margin of approximately $+8\%$ ($+7.5\%$ to $+8.5\%$), trailing Senator Jon Ossoff's margin of $+18\%$.

• Uncalled and Highly Competitive Contests:

  • Mississippi Senate Race: Remained exceptionally close and uncalled, separated by a razor-thin margin of approximately $43\,\text{votes}$ while counting continued in outstanding precincts.
  • Prediction Market Fluctuations: On election night at approximately $10:00\,\text{PM}$, prediction markets (such as Polymarket) had Republican candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith listed at a $95\%$ probability of winning, failing to account for delayed reporting from unfavorable Democratic-leaning geographic areas.
  • Oklahoma Gubernatorial Race: Forecasters and models provided Democratic challenger Munson with no more than an $8\%$ probability of victory, yet the final margin proved far more competitive than predicted.
  • Alabama: Experienced high volatility and delayed projection, being officially called the morning after election day.

• Southern Realignment:

  • Significant Democratic margin shifts occurred across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia compared to baseline results from $2\,\text{years}$, $4\,\text{years}$, and $6\,\text{years}$ prior.
  • These shifts demonstrate that the South exhibits greater potential to become politically competitive and reliably blue than established consensus models assumed.

Candidate Quality versus National Partisan Waves

• Dynamics of National Waves and Candidate Selection:
  • While the election represented a broad national blue wave, candidate quality retained decisive importance in determining competitive outcomes.
  • Texas Senate vs. Gubernatorial Race:
  • Ken Paxton underperformed baseline metrics due to pronounced liabilities, losing by $12\,\text{points}$.
  • In contrast, the Texas gubernatorial race concluded with a narrower margin closer to $7\,\text{points}$, demonstrating that poor candidate quality compounds national headwinds.
  • Kansas Senate Race:
  • Incumbent Roger Marshall exhibited severe campaign passivity, choosing not to run an active campaign until approximately $3\,\text{weeks}$ prior to election day under the assumption of an unassailable advantage.
  • Comparative Contrast: Representative Ashley Hinson exemplified candidate vigilance by actively campaigning across Iowa rather than taking electoral victory for granted.
  • Coattail Effects and Local Governance Records:
  • Keisha Lance Bottoms' gubernatorial victory in Georgia demonstrated that past mayoral performance in Atlanta during the early $2020\text{s}$ did not depress turnout, benefiting substantially from Jon Ossoff's coattails ($+18\%$ win margin).

Democratic Governance Challenges and Coalition Dynamics

• Institutional Roadblocks Facing the New Democratic Majority:

  • Senate Filibuster: Prevents majoritarian statutory passage without broad bipartisan compromise or procedural abolition.
  • Executive Veto: The sitting Republican president retains constitutional veto power over progressive legislative initiatives.

• The Core Dilemma of Coalition Preservation:

  • Broad, disparate political coalitions unite easily in electoral opposition but fracture rapidly when transitioning to governance.
  • Economic Populism vs. Cultural Politics:
  • Economic populism serves as a unifying umbrella across moderate and left-wing factions.
  • Identity politics and social/cultural issues introduce immediate internal conflict.

• Three Inherent Policy Dilemmas:

  • The Economy:
  • Voters expressed overwhelming frustration with economic conditions and voted with their wallets.
  • Congress lacks unilateral power over macroeconomic stabilization, especially without executive branch coordination, risking public blame by $2028$.
  • The War on Iran:
  • Despite popular dissatisfaction with foreign conflict, Congress has delegated vast war-making discretion to the executive branch over the past $25\,\text{years}$ to $26\,\text{years}$.
  • While the War Powers Resolution exists, executive hegemony in defense policy limits congressional ability to alter military strategy on the ground without high political costs for supportive Republicans.
  • Government Funding and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement):
  • Restricting ICE funding remains a shared policy target, but legislative leverage is tied directly to appropriations.
  • Pursuing aggressive cuts introduces the political risk of government shutdowns, forcing leadership to navigate whether the public attributes the shutdown to Democrats or Republicans.

The Debate over Impeachment and Executive Accountability

• Risks of Pursuing Immediate Impeachment:
  • Post-election polling revealed a temporary surge in public support for impeaching Donald Trump ($53\%$ in favor to $39\%$ opposed).
  • Strategic Liabilities:
  • Trump serves as a term-limited lame-duck president ineligible to run in $2028$.
  • Impeachment would consume limited political capital and dominate media bandwidth with procedural hearings.
  • Removal in the Senate remains institutionally impossible due to supermajority thresholds, setting up the activist base for disillusionment.
  • Removal would elevate Vice President JD Vance to the presidency, potentially strengthening his executive positioning and incumbency advantage heading into the $2028$ presidential election.
  • Mandate Disconnect:
  • Democratic congressional candidates ran on anti-corruption principles in the abstract rather than an explicit mandate to impeach.
  • Targeted oversight against secondary administration figures (such as Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr.) provides a more legally defensible and strategically sound path than pursuing executive impeachment.

Factional Tensions: Progressive Populism versus Moderate Liberalism

• Structural Differences between Chambers:

  • House of Representatives: Moderate versus progressive friction is acutely felt because members must defend hyper-localized, competitive swing districts requiring moderate positioning.
  • Senate: Statewide geographic bases allow for broader synthesis of economic populism, although leadership remains anchored in establishment figures like Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House.

• Policy Divergence on Core Issues:

  • Immigration Rhetoric:
  • Moderate figures like Josh Shapiro campaigned on a willingness to cooperate with the administration on border enforcement.
  • Progressive figures (such as Abdul El-Sayed or Chris Pappas) endorsed structural reforms and defunding ICE.
  • Economic Populism Ambiguity:
  • The campaign umbrella encompassed diverse, sometimes contradictory proposals: universal healthcare, progressive income tax reform, and discrete wealth taxes.
  • Broad agreement on economic populism lacks an institutional, unified legislative framework.

Identity Politics, Demographic Realignment, and Media Critiques

• Critique of Legacy Media Assumptions:

  • Major media networks (such as CNN and MSNBC) frequently rely on reductive demographic models that treat racial and ethnic identity groups as static, monolithic voting blocs.
  • The Michigan Senate Race:
  • Pundits suggested Abdul El-Sayed would struggle significantly with minority and religious demographics.
  • Exit Poll Reality: El-Sayed secured $67\%$ of the Jewish vote and $88\%$ of the Black vote, while Republican opponent Mike Rogers captured only $3\%$ of self-identified Democrats.
  • Voter Elasticity:
  • Assuming a district with a $30\%$ Black population is an automatic partisan lock ignores voter volatility and anti-incumbency sentiment.
  • Hispanic voter volatility in Texas between $2024$ and $2026$ proved that demographic cohorts cross party lines or withhold turnout depending on perceived economic and governance outcomes.

• Counter-Trend Gerrymandering Outliers:

  • In an election marked by broad Democratic gains, counter-trend Republican pickups were limited almost entirely to aggressively redistricted seats in Tennessee and Texas.
  • Statewide Counter-Trend: The New York gubernatorial race showed localized trends shifting slightly more Republican compared to past baselines, highlighting critical messaging vulnerabilities for national strategists.

Ideological Foundations: Classical Liberalism versus Conservatism

• Conceptions of Human Nature:

  • Conservatism: Posits that human nature is intrinsically flawed, imperfect, and governed by underlying psychological irrationalities and passions requiring institutional constraint.
  • Classical Liberalism: Originating in the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, liberalism holds that human beings are fundamentally improvable through reason, education, and the accumulation of knowledge.
  • Nurture versus Nature: Classical liberalism views human outcomes as products of external circumstances and socialization (nurture) rather than fixed biological or moral destiny (nature).

• Criminological and Institutional Implications:

  • Liberal Penology: Emphasizes rehabilitation, educational reform, restorative justice, and social reintegration based on the premise that flawed behavior can be improved.
  • Conservative Penology: Prioritizes retribution, incapacitation, and punitive measures grounded in skepticism regarding human reformability.

• Individual Experience versus External Authority:

  • Classical liberalism prioritizes individual autonomy, personal experience, and subjective rationality over external moral constraints such as dogmatic religious codes.
  • Universalism: Premised on the belief that human rational capacity is universal; equipping distinct individuals with equal opportunities and tools enables them to optimize their outcomes.

The Broken Ladder, Systematic Dynamics, and Nurture versus Nature

• Keith Payne's The Broken Ladder and Relative Inequality:

  • Inequality is evaluated in comparative rather than absolute terms; modern discontent in $2026$ is intensified by high-visibility concentrations of extreme wealth (e.g., Elon Musk).
  • The Metaphor of the Flock of Birds:
  • When observing a flock of birds, psychological and ideological dispositions dictate perception.
  • Conservative Lens: Narrows focus onto the individual bird, evaluating its specific actions, effort, and individual merit.
  • Liberal/Progressive Lens: Examines the trajectory, wind currents, and structural dynamics of the entire flock (systemic focus).

• Divergence between Classical Liberalism and Left-Wing Progressivism:

  • Rationality versus Hot Cognition:
  • Classical liberalism relies heavily on methodological rationality and deliberate cognitive assessment.
  • Modern progressives recognize "hot cognition"—the reality that political choices are driven by emotional resonance, instinct, and visceral narratives.
  • Universalism versus Localized Class Consciousness:
  • Classical liberalism promotes cosmopolitan universalism and market integration.
  • Progressive economic populism focuses on localized community survival (e.g., El-Sayed prioritizing Michigan community outcomes over globalized engagement) and collective working-class consciousness rather than individual entrepreneurial initiative.
  • Moral Codes:
  • Traditional liberalism asserts that economic empowerment naturally improves social mores without state intervention.
  • Modern progressivism occasionally mirrors moral regulation by actively promoting specific cultural and social values.

Liberal Economic Governance and the Role of the State

• Keynesian Interventionism:

  • Influenced by John Maynard Keynes, New Deal liberalism maintains that market economies possess inefficiencies that require state intervention.
  • Primary Policy Objectives:
  • Full Employment: Government programs should optimize market conditions to guarantee employment opportunities for all willing workers.
  • Establishing a Socioeconomic Floor: Creation of social safety nets (e.g., Social Security, universal healthcare guarantees) beneath which no citizen can fall.
  • The Nature of the Floor:
  • Classical and New Deal liberals argue that the social floor should prevent abject misery but should not be overly comfortable, preserving market incentives to seek work.
  • Bipartisan Welfare Reform: Work requirements advanced by Ronald Reagan and codified by Bill Clinton reflect the liberal consensus that public assistance must be balanced with workforce engagement.

• Corporate Power and Capitalism:

  • Classical liberalism and New Deal liberalism maintain foundational faith in the benefits of capitalism and competitive markets.
  • Democratic Socialism Divide: Unlike democratic socialists who diagnose late-stage capitalism as inherently exploitative, liberals seek to regulate capitalism rather than abolish it.
  • Historical Antitrust Framework: The New Deal model recognized corporate legitimacy only when paired with social responsibilities, worker protections, and antitrust oversight against excessive market concentration.

• Institutional Responsibility:

  • Intermediary institutions (churches, private charities, family units) must not replace state responsibilities; delegating safety-net functions to private charity leaves human welfare to chance.
  • Centralized Federal Governance: The federal government is viewed as more effective and equitable than decentralized state governments due to economies of scale and administrative scope.

The Mechanics and Dimensions of Populism

• Definitional Structure of Populism:

  • Populism is defined by political scientists (such as Cas Mudde) as a "thin ideology" that separates society into two antagonistic, morally homogeneous groups:
  • The Pure People: The virtuous, exploited general public.
  • The Corrupt Elite: The self-serving political, economic, or cultural establishment.
  • General Will: The populist leader claims a unique, unmediated ability to discern and execute the collective general will without reliance on institutional checks.

• Right-Wing versus Left-Wing Populism:

  • Left-Wing Populism: Concentrates primarily on economic cleavages, pitting the "have-nots" against corporate monopolies, financial oligarchs, and concentrated capital.
  • Right-Wing Populism: Centers on cultural cleavages, targeting an unaccountable cultural and managerial elite entrenched in three primary institutions:
  • The State Bureaucracy: The unelected administrative state or "deep state."
  • Academia: Liberal universities promoting cosmopolitan, post-national ideologies.
  • Philanthropy and NGOs: Non-profit organizations and foundations that dictate social policy while remaining insulated from democratic accountability.
  • Cross-Ideological Crossover: In $2016$, significant numbers of Bernie Sanders primary voters supported Donald Trump in the general election due to shared anti-establishment, anti-elite sentiment.

Multi-Dimensional Ideology, Polarization, and Moral Conviction

• Joseph Uscinski et al. ($2021$) Empirical Framework:

  • Published in American Politics in Two Dimensions, mapping public opinion across two distinct axes:
  • Left-Right Ideological Dimension: Economic and social positions from $0$ (most conservative) to $1$ (most liberal), where extreme liberals represent only $8\%$ to $9\%$ of the population.
  • Establishment vs. Anti-Establishment Dimension: Measures anti-elite sentiment, revealing widespread anti-establishment beliefs across both the political left and right.
  • Rhetorical Elasticity: Figures like Donald Trump successfully disrupted traditional conservative policy orthodoxies (e.g., protecting entitlement spending, criticizing free trade) because voter attachment was driven by anti-establishment positioning and personal loyalty rather than rigid ideology.
  • Attribution Experiments: Experimental data demonstrates that voter support for identical policy proposals shifts based almost entirely on whether the policy is attributed to Donald Trump, neutralizing traditional ideological content.

• The Tripartite Hierarchy of Opinion Formation:

  • Personal Tastes: Subjective preferences easily abandoned or altered.
  • Normative Conventions: Internalized cultural norms derived from social environment and peer interactions.
  • Moral Convictions (Moral Imprints):
  • Beliefs perceived as universal, absolute facts rather than negotiable opinions.
  • Highly emotional and completely immune to countervailing factual evidence.
  • Hyper-polarization occurs when everyday political preferences transform into moral convictions, rendering democratic compromise impossible.

Politicization of Media Coverage and Future Outlook

• Empirical Study on Media Politicization:

  • Longitudinal content analysis compared media coverage in the $1980\text{s}$ against the modern decade ($2015\text{--}2024$).
  • Metric: Politicization score calculating the frequency of explicit partisan and ideological terms (Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative) in mainstream news stories.
  • Key Finding: Massive, systematic escalation of politicized framing applied to traditionally non-partisan topics, including creative arts, lifestyle, athletics, and public health.

• Research Assignments and Class Follow-Up:

  • Student Survey: Completion of a short diagnostic survey tracking individual social media news consumption habits and platform reliance.
  • Analytical Questions: Assessment of social media's causal role in the $2026$ election results, paired with upcoming modules examining legacy media, social algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Classroom Dialogue, Student Inquiries, and Discussion

• Exchange on Senate and Gubernatorial Milestones:

  • Student Inquiries (Erin, Sadie, Carmela):
  • Highlighted the election of the first Native American female governor in New Mexico and Katie Flanagan's political emergence.
  • Noted Mississippi's razor-thin $43\,\text{vote}$ margin and Illinois electing two female senators simultaneously.
  • Response:
  • Confirmed the historic significance of these races and recalled observing Polymarket misprice the Mississippi contest at $95\%$ for Cindy Hyde-Smith despite outstanding Democratic ballots.

• Exchange on Partisanship, Candidate Elasticity, and the South:

  • Student Observations (Denny, Siggy):
  • Denny highlighted Keisha Lance Bottoms' historic win as Georgia's first Black female governor.
  • Siggy noted commentary from a Texas analyst arguing that states should not remain permanently fixed colors, proposing that fluctuating margins better reflect candidate quality and policy platforms.
  • Response:
  • Affirmed that voter elasticity was severely underestimated by forecasters; dissatisfied electorates readily switch parties or withhold participation.
  • Emphasized that Southern shifts across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia signal genuine regional competitiveness.

• Exchange on Institutional Roadblocks and Impeachment:

  • Student Questions (Erin, Antoine):
  • Erin questioned why maintaining the broad Democratic governing coalition would prove exceptionally difficult.
  • Antoine asked whether Donald Trump's low approval ratings justified launching immediate impeachment proceedings.
  • Response:
  • Outlined the threefold trap: economic delivery limitations, structural war-making dominance by the executive regarding Iran, and anti-corruption fragmentation.
  • Discouraged impeachment: it lacks an explicit campaign mandate, risks elevating JD Vance ahead of $2028$, faces guaranteed Senate acquittal, and dissipates valuable legislative momentum.

• Exchange on Moderate-Progressive Tensions and Identity Politics:

  • Student Queries (Carmela, Hunter, Abby):
  • Carmela asked how leadership will govern divergent moderate and progressive factions.
  • Hunter highlighted legacy media mischaracterizations regarding Abdul El-Sayed's coalition in Michigan, noting exit polls showing $67\%$ Jewish and $88\%$ Black support.
  • Abby noted populism transcends traditional party definitions.
  • Response:
  • Moderates and progressives can align on broad economic populism, but immigration policy (working with Trump vs. defunding ICE) presents severe friction.
  • Criticized cable networks (specifically CNN) for clinging to outdated identity-politics models that assume minority groups operate as uniform voting blocs rather than economically rational, highly elastic voters.