To the Normies, the Spoils! Plus. . .

Elon’s million-dollar checks and Kamala’s megadonors. 

‘60 Minutes’ keeps stonewalling. Blackouts in Cuba. And much more.

It’s Tuesday, October 22, and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: The billionaires bankrolling Trump and Harris. The real Hezbollah. Communist Cuba goes dark. And much more.

But first, we are two weeks out from the election, and here’s what I can’t help but notice:

The weird thing about this election is how little has changed given how much has changed. 

Just think about what’s happened since May: Donald Trump was convicted in a criminal trial in New York (May 30). Trump and Joe Biden met in the most momentous presidential debate in American history (June 27). Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by a whisker (July 13). Joe Biden announced he would not run for reelection (July 21). Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination, after no one in her party challenged her (August 22). Oh, and then another gunman tried to kill Trump (September 15). 

In a word: chaos. 

But the polls? Oddly stable. 

Yes, Biden’s numbers took a knock after the debate, and then Harris got a little honeymoon bump. But the gentle slopes of the polling charts—a percentage-point swing here and there—suggest a very different kind of year from the one we have endured. After all the ups and downs, we find ourselves in a very familiar place: another nail-biter of a race. 

Meanwhile, we are said to be living through a seismic political realignment. Non-college-educated voters are flocking to the Republicans and college-educated voters are becoming a reliably Democratic bloc. Latinos have moved right. The Democrats are losing their hold on black voters. Women are turning blue. Men are turning red. 

Where do these once-in-a-generation shifts, with millions of voters marching leftward and rightward, leave us? 

More deadlock! 

If our perennial 50-50 politics feels weird, that’s because it is weird. That’s what Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin argue in a new AEI report, Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?

“Stalemate is not the American party system’s natural equilibrium,” say conservative Levin and liberal Teixeira. Both parties, they argue, have waxed and waned over time: The coalition built during the New Deal era set up decades of Democratic dominance; the Republicans dominated in the 1970s and ’80s. But today, no party seems able to build the necessary coalition for an enduring majority. 

“What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate,” write Levin and Teixeira. “As a result, a noxious back-and-forth has defined American politics for a generation.” 

The only thing stopping the parties transforming themselves from minority to majority parties is themselves, Levin and Teixeira conclude. Both parties, they argue, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.” 

In short, rather than trying to build broad coalitions, “they have focused on fan service.”

Levin and Teixeira’s advice to the parties could be boiled down to three words that any frustrated independent voter has muttered to themselves recently: Just be normal! 

Democrats talking about “Latinx” voters? Just be normal!

Republicans banning IVF? Just be normal!

Donald Trump calling for an encore from the “J6 prison choir”? Just be normal! 

Kamala Harris supporting taxpayer-funded gender realignment surgery for detained migrants?

Just. Be. Normal.

You might think this would be obvious, and yet somehow the parties fail to learn their lesson. Instead they overinterpret their narrow wins, under-interpret their narrow losses, and squander opportunities to grow their coalition. 

Just look at 2020, when Joe Biden campaigned with a narrow anti-Trump message but then governed as if the country had just voted for the Green New Deal and an open border. Meanwhile, Trump didn’t just under-interpret his defeat—he denied it altogether. 

Whoever wins in two weeks, the party that stands the best chance of breaking out of the stalemate is the one who listens to the message from the voters: Just be normal. And get serious about building an enduring coalition. 

 

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