What happened to the Feedback Loop Between Policy and Politics?

One party's coalition delivers results for people who've stopped voting for it, and vice versa. That can't be sustainable.

[This is a slightly expanded version of my contribution to a roundup by my colleagues in the Political Reform program at the think tank New America, on what we’re looking at in the election, beyond the results. I encourage you read the whole roundtable: https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/blog/election-2024-signals-shifts-and-whats-at-stake-for-american-democracy/https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/blog/election-2024-signals-shifts-and-whats-at-stake-for-american-democracy/]

During the first Trump administration, and into the early Biden years, a debate emerged among progressive Democrats about two political strategies, similar but different in one respect: “Popularism,” an idea promoted by some young pollsters, was simply the idea that Democratic candidates should advocate policies that appeared to have broad public support. The alternative, called “Deliverism,” argued that a Democratic administration needed to do more than promise good things; it needed to actively improve people’s lives. Think of it as the difference between Bill Clinton’s politics, full of symbolic but immaterial gestures, and FDR, in which big moves like rural electrification transformed people’s expectations of what government could do for them.

These were actually unduly complicated terms for a basic story we’ve all been told about how politics and government works. When the economy does well for most households, and when programs help create security and opportunity for more people to participate in that economy, political rewards follow. It’s a simple feedback loop. It’s the story we tell about FDR, but also about Ronald Reagan, for example—after a sharp recession in his first term, the economy recovered and voters gave him credit for it, credit that extended to his party for years.

What I’m looking for in the 2024 election is some indication of whether this feedback loop still works at all, and if not, whether we can ever hope to recreate some connection between policies—what government does—and politics—the process by which people express what they want government to do, and who they trust to do it. If there’s no longer a connection between policy and politics, or people are so locked into political identities that neither policy successes nor policy failures that directly affect their lives can shake them, then there’s no accountability in government, and little incentive for politicians to actually improve people’s lives.

Much of politics since Trump appeared almost a decade ago has cast doubt on this common-sense theory about politics and policy. That the 2020 election was so close, after Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and with unemployment still over 6 percent, was as mystifying as the fact that a majority of Americans today describe the economy as poor despite an unemployment rate that’s remained near or below 4 percent for three years, sustained economic growth, the highest labor force participation rates ever recorded, and real wage growth in the lower and middle portions of the economic ladder. Further, legislation enacted under Biden generated real investment—and jobs—in the very counties and regions that had been left behind during the decades before. The administration supported unions and challenged neoliberal dogma on trade. And while there’s terrifying conflict and tragedy in the world, and the US must do more to end it, it’s also true that after two decades, U.S. troops are not directly involved.

It’s tempting to come up with a glib, knowing answer to the failure of this shining story of “deliverism” in practice. Maybe it was just inflation. Sure, inflation hits hard, and hits every household, but it’s been more than two years since price increases peaked and 15 months since the Consumer Price Index dropped to a familiar 3 percent level, while gasoline prices are barely over $3/gallon. Maybe it was just the media talking down the economy, or the influence of moneyed interests, or “vibes,” but people have a sense of their own well-being. Maybe we’re in a post-materialist era, when politics isn’t about “who gets what” (as a classic political science text of the mid-20th century put it) but about identity, alienation, disconnection from one another, or perhaps entirely unrelated anxiety about changing norms around race, gender, and sexuality.

I don’t want to rush to an answer. Sometimes it’s best to pause and admit what we don’t know, that the stories we’ve been told about how economics, policy, personal well-being, and political success interact with each other no longer make sense. But perhaps some clarity will emerge in the patterns of the election.

The most notable of these patterns is the inversion of political coalitions, in which more affluent suburbs and their college-credentialed residents move in the direction of Democrats, while voters without degrees, possibly including a growing number of Black and Latino voters, move in the direction of Trump’s Republicans. Republican support for Kamala Harris, particularly from iconic figures of the traditionally conservative party such as Liz Cheney and her father, is a big part of that story.

But in a further instance of the disconnection between politics and policy, while many progressives are naturally anxious about what that coalition might mean, it doesn’t seem to mean anything in terms of policy. While Harris has pledged to “listen” to all sides and to business leaders, she’s made no real concessions. And the Democrats who represent these more affluent suburban communities are often as committed to policies that boost opportunity for lower-income and non-college-credentialed workers. Think of the policy advocated by Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and adopted by Harris of removing the requirement of a college degree for jobs that don’t really need it.

Meanwhile, the party that increasingly relies on a working-class base continues to embrace policies such as high-end tax cuts, massive spending cuts (now to be overseen by Elon Musk), and, unique to Trump, tariffs that would amount to a regressive national sales tax.

Will the election end with the coalitions and the policy agendas of the two parties and two presidential candidates so far out of line? Is it sustainable to expect that wealthy voters and their representatives will remain supportive of policies that help ordinary working families, while losing the political support of more and more of those families?

That seems to me the central question in American politics over the next several years or longer. Can we reconnect policy and politics in a way that the feedback loop between them works once again? Or must we reconstruct it on a different basis, perhaps a new configuration of new parties? The 2024 election won’t answer that question, but perhaps it will provide some clues.