Category Archives: political polarization

“Thune Moves to Speed Trump Nominees Past Democratic Blockade”

legislation and legislatures, political polarization

NYT:

Republicans took the first step on Monday toward changing the Senate’s rules to speed the confirmations of Trump administration nominees being slowed by Democratic opposition, touching off the latest in a yearslong tit for tat between the two parties that has weakened the filibuster.

The move is a response to Democrats’ refusal to allow President Trump’s nominees to be considered, which has slowed their confirmations and frustrated the president. But its consequences will reach beyond Mr. Trump’s tenure, effectively whittling down the ability of the minority to register any opposition to executive branch nominees below the cabinet level.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, made the first move on Monday by introducing a resolution that would group 48 of Mr. Trump’s nominees together to allow them to be considered and voted on as a group. That will queue up a complex series of floor votes this week and next that, if successful, would create new Senate precedents meant to help Republicans clear a growing backlog of nominees.

Republicans, who hold 53 seats, will try to muscle through the rules change using a simple majority, a tactic known as “going nuclear,” in part because of the charged partisan cloud it can leave over an institution that once prided itself on operating according to consensus.

t is the latest change to chip away at longstanding Senate precedent in the face of an increasingly polarized political environment.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Mr. Thune framed the rules change as a necessary response to what he framed as an unprecedented Democratic blockade against fast confirmation of any of Mr. Trump’s nominees, including lower-level picks that have traditionally been confirmed by voice votes or by unanimous consent.

Democrats, staunchly opposed to Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape the executive branch and insisting more attention be paid to nominees they say are unqualified, have insisted on formal votes for each person, delaying approval of the president’s picks for dozens of jobs….

Changes to the Senate’s precedents, which govern how the chamber works, are supposed to require the approval of 67 senators, a barrier meant to make them more difficult to adopt. In using what is known as the nuclear option, members of the majority party instead attempt to take an action that has never been allowed before and then hold a number of procedural votes to overrule any objection by the minority and proceed, thus setting a new precedent that replaces what has been done in the past.

Democrats used the tactic in 2013 to lower the vote threshold on most nominees to a simple majority rather than 60 votes, a response to Senate Republicans systematically blocking a series of Obama administration judicial appointees.

Republicans then retaliated in 2017 to lower the threshold for Supreme Court nominees, allowing Mr. Trump to install three justices during his first term….

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“California voters will decide redistricting in November, escalating battle with Trump and Texas”

direct democracy, political polarization, redistricting

L.A. Times:

Ratcheting up the pressure in the escalating national fight over control of Congress, the California Legislature on Thursday approved a November special election to ask voters to redraw the state’s electoral lines to favor Democrats and thwart President Trump’s far-right policy agenda.

The ballot measure, pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state and national Democratic leaders, is the latest volley in a national political brawl over electoral maps that could alter the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections and the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If voters approve the redrawn lines on Nov. 4, Democrats in the Golden State would see the odds tilted further in their favor, while the number of California Republicans in the House could be halved.

Newsom initially said that new electoral districts in California would only take effect if another state redrew its lines before 2031. But after Texas moved toward approving its own maps this week that could give the GOP five more House seats, Democrats stripped the so-called “trigger” language from the amendment — meaning that if voters approve the measure, the new lines would take effect no matter what.

The ballot measure language, which asks California voters to override the power of the independent redistricting commission, was approved by most Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate, where they hold supermajorities.

California lawmakers have the power to place constitutional amendments on the statewide ballot without the approval of the governor. Newsom, however, is expected later Thursday to sign two separate bills that fund the special election and spell out the lines for the new congressional districts.,,,

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“How a U.S. Senate Race Is Shaping the Fight Over Redistricting in Texas”

political parties, political polarization, redistricting

NYT:

The standoff in Texas over redrawing the state’s U.S. House districts to a sharply tilted Republican advantage has played out before the backdrop of a contentious U.S. Senate race that may well be making the redistricting fight more contentious.

On the Republican side, the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, has set aside his often conciliatory demeanor, as he vies with his Senate primary opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, to see who can look tougher with runaway Democratic lawmakers.

On the Democratic side, State Representative James Talarico and former Representatives Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred have used the standoff to gain publicity and rally the Democratic base around the notion that democracy itself is at stake. All three are potential rivals in the Senate race.

As the candidates position themselves, they’ve woven threats of prosecution and lawsuits with taunts and dares at the other party — and, in the case of Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton, at each other — with few incentives for compromise….

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The Floridization of Politics

Bush v. Gore reflections, political polarization

The U.S. Capitol may be in Washington and the President in Scotland at the moment, but Florida is at the center of American politics, Kimberly Leonard suggests in Political Playbook.

Not only has President Trump spent much of his time governing from Mar-a-Lago and surrounded himself with Floridians like Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio, but many “Florida-tested” policies have found there way to Washington. That includes bans on transgender athletes, immigration crackdowns, attacks on higher education, and anti-woke laws.

As Leonard describes it:

When your author was reporting in Washington over Trump’s inauguration, Florida Republicans and lobbyists were beside themselves with glee about what it would mean to be a major power player in the new administration. Despite being a huge state, Florida had historically been viewed as the loud, embarrassing uncle of American politics. Trump changed that. . . .

“Florida has adopted and replicated President Trump’s America First agenda and has created many emerging leaders to carry on the MAGA torch,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers tells Playbook. “President Trump appreciates Gov. DeSantis’ work and they will continue to advance the same goal — Making America Great Again.”

Some of us are old enough to remember that, a quarter century ago, a disputed presidential election in Florida led to significant changes in how elections are administered and more partisan battles over how we vote. Florida is now changing democratic politics in very different ways.

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Kang, “Party Campaign Finance from FECA to Modern Hyperpartisanship”

campaign finance, political parties, political polarization

Michael Kang’s latest, forthcoming in Fifty Years of Buckley v. Valeo (Lee Bollinger & Geoffrey Stone eds., 2025). The abstract:

Political parties grew from seeming irrelevance in campaign finance at the time of the Federal Election Campaign Act amendments in 1974 to newfound importance in national politics by the soft money era of the 1990s.  When Congress finally restricted party soft money in 2002, soft money shifted to nominally independent groups and then, in time, to Super PACs and other outside groups empowered by the Roberts Court’s de-regulation of campaign finance.  As I explain here, these changes in modern campaign finance are at least partially responsible for today’s hyperpartisan and polarized politics.  Some critics of modern hyperpartisanship and polarization, for this reason, now propose a surprising but simple new reform approach: de-regulation of party campaign finance to strengthen the major parties as counter-weights to the polarizing influence of wealthy donors through their Super PACs and outside groups.  However, I argue that de-regulation of party fundraising likely would deepen the major parties’ dependence on their most wealthy, and ideologically extreme, donors for financial support.  As a consequence, de-regulation of party fundraising would accelerate the lurch toward the polarized ideological preferences of their committed donors rather than counteract it.

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Douglas: “A Month After the Minnesota Shootings, We’re Normalizing Political Violence”

election administration, political polarization

Josh Douglas has this commentary in Washington Monthly. A snippet:

Way too many Americans think that political violence is a necessity. A 2023 survey reported that almost a quarter of respondents agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That number was up from 15% in 2021. In 2024, the U.S. Capitol police reported more threats against members of Congress and their families and staff than ever before. Judges are now the frequent targets of threats, including the murder of a federal judge’s son in 2020.

Unfortunately, the attacks are also part of the election infrastructure. Poll workers reported an increase in threats against them in 2024. Election officials now plan for potential violence on Election Day and its aftermath. The January 6 insurrectionists used violence to try to overturn the 2020 election.

To end the attacks, we must stop normalizing and then forgetting them.

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Former NJ Governors, Whitman and Corzine, Urge New Jersey Supreme Court to Lead the Way

political parties, political polarization, third parties,

Christine Whitman (R) and Jon Corzine (D) urge the New Jersey Supreme Court to lead the way in reducing the cycle of polarization. In an opinion piece, the two former Governors of New Jersey explain how recognizing the constitutional burdens anti-fusion laws place on minor parties is a meaningful path to undoing the pathologies of hyperpolarization and undercutting the appeal of authoritarianism. They write:

“Governance is failing because politics is failing, and politics is failing because our two major parties are no longer the ‘big tents’ they once were. There used to be liberal, moderate and conservative factions in both the Democratic and Republican parties, but now those are long gone. We have sorted ourselves into two distinct tribes, and, for too many Americans, the rival camp is seen as an existential threat that must be degraded and destroyed. Negotiation is for weaklings; compromise is surrender. Nothing but domination is acceptable, and that cuts at the very heart of this wondrous but fragile system known as democracy.

Litigation in New Jersey challenging the state’s anti-fusion laws could–if the Court accepts the case–help break the cycle.

By definition, fusion encourages inter-party coalitions to form, which adds stability and legitimacy to governance. It also punishes extremism, because it allows major party voters who are dismayed by the direction of their traditional party — and may currently feel they have nowhere to go — to build a new one. 

. . . .

It gives us pride to imagine that the Garden State might lead the way to a better political party system and a more representative and effective government. 

Theoretically, the New Jersey state legislature could solve the problem by simply repealing the ban. Still, as these two savvy politicians understand, self-interest makes “[d]ominant parties… generally unwilling to change the rules in order to allow new centers of power to breathe.”

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Two members of ABA Task Force highlight fusion’s potential to break political polarization and empower the center, as New Jersey Supreme Court considers the state’s ban on fusion

political parties, political polarization, third parties,

In an exceptionally clear piece in Newsweek, William Kristol and Tom Rogers, members of the ABA cross-partisan Task Force for American democracy, explain fusion voting and how relegalizing it could “break political polarization and empower the center.” The authors illustrate their argument by “imagin[ing] a new political party of ‘politically homeless’ centrists. Call it the Common Sense Party”–explaining how fusion could empower its voters and elevate their concerns (hypothetically, “the rule of law, principled bargaining and compromise, and civility in public life”).

This is an important opinion piece as the NJ Supreme Court considers whether to take up the legality of fusion under its state constitution.

“We are heartened that the ABA Task Force’s final report may encourage the states to reconsider the bans on fusion voting passed by the major parties a century ago. As we write, there is litigation underway in New Jersey, Kansas, and Wisconsin to have these bans declared unconstitutional under their respective state constitutions.”

The ABA Task Force for American Democracy assessed the most practical reforms for bolstering voter confidence in the integrity of our elections and reinforcing the importance of the rule of law.

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“Minnesota assassination prompts many lawmakers to wonder: Is service worth the danger?”

legislation and legislatures, political polarization,

From the Alabama Reflector, with the subhead based on a Brennan Center report:

Nearly 9 in 10 state lawmakers reported facing insults and 4 in 10 facing harassment and threats.

And these threats aren’t evenly distributed:

Women were three to four times more likely than men to experience abuse related to their gender, according to the report. And people of color were more than three times as likely as white officeholders to endure race-based abuse.

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“The Myth of the Gen Z Red Wave”

authoritarian threats in US, political polarization


Jean M. Twenge at the Atlantic, using data from the Cooperative Election Study (Tufts) rather than the Yale Youth Poll, offers evidence that the Democratic Party’s immediate post-election handwringing about Gen Z conversion was overstated: “the youth-vote shift in 2024 [appears to be] more a one-off event than an ideological realignment.”

“The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people’s deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change.

Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation.” 

Twenge acknowledges that CES’s “data aren’t perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like [David] Shor’s [the loudest advocate of the youth realignment theory].”

“Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020, compared with 6 points for young women.

. . . .

[But] the CES data [also shows] young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent).”

The same is true for issues.

What definitely has changed is the percentage of voters in this age bracket identifying as independents.

“Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn’t in 2020.”

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“Members of Congress worry about lack of plan as political violence rises”

authoritarian threats in US, political polarization

Washington Post reports talk in Congress of putting in place procedures to fill vacancies if its members are assassinated in ways that upend the functioning of Congress. Similar discussions occurred after 9/11, according to the article. A plan would likely require a constitutional amendment. Still, the concern is this:

“‘We have a succession plan for the president,’ Wenstrup said at a House Administration Committee hearing in September focused on political violence.

But there is no plan to easily replace one or multiple House members should the worst happen. The Constitution requires the states to pull together a special election tofill individual vacancies, something that takes anywhere from three months to sometimes a year.

When there’s a clear, large House majority for one party, such a prolonged vacancy makes little difference to the institution at large.But now, after three straight elections left one party with just single-digit control of the lower chamber, every seat canmean the difference between majority control and legislation passing or failing.

‘The status quo also creates a perverse incentive for political violence through targeted killings designed to switch the majority party in the House,’ Kilmer said at last fall’s hearing.”

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