MEANINGFUL POLITICS IS OFTEN LOCAL.

So I've argued, mostly futilely.  "Thus we focus on the presidency, er, the gerontocrats seeking the office, and neglect the dog-catcher and the school board and the city council."  I think that focus is bothering retired political scientist Steven Taylor of Troy well outside the beltway.

G. Elliot Morris provides an empirical example of what it means for our politics to be presidentialized: The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore. Specifically, he notes how “low-knowledge voters” have shifted their views on Trump. His definition of “low-knowledge voter” is not being able to correctly identify which party controls the House and Senate.

What such a data point tells us is that a lot of voters don’t pay much attention to the news or to very basic issues of governance. They don’t really have a strong understanding of partisan politics, and they are not making voting decisions based on messaging in congressional campaigns, i.e., what “The Democrats” or “The Republicans” are saying. What they do know is who the president is and what their general feelings are about politics, society, and the economy.

Such voters are basically reacting to how they feel about the incumbent president and vote accordingly. So, for example, if they are unhappy with inflation and have lingering frustrations over COVID, and Biden is the incumbent president, they are likely to vote for the challenger.

A lot of those voters who were unhappy with Biden in 2024 are now unhappy with Trump.

He's using "low-knowledge" rather than "low-information," and there's probably a great deal of "whip up unhappiness with the current president" unleashed by the out party in each presidential cycle.

The research gives the professor another opportunity to vent about the way national politics works.

Moreover, it shows how various features of our constitutional order, not the least of which being various minoritarian features of the system (e.g., the Electoral College, the Senate, and how those factors influence who sits on SCOTUS) can allow a handful of voters who don’t even know who runs Congress to unlock the doors of power to a White nationalist, authoritarian segment of our politics.

None of this is to state that GOP party leaders and GOP voters don’t have agency or moral culpability for their choices and behaviors, but all of this shows the problems with a national politics focused solely on one person can go horribly wrong.

All of this furthers the argument that while structure isn’t everything, it is massively important.

Let me conclude by noting that all of this is just one piece of a broader puzzle (or, maybe multiple pieces as the role of the president affects voters, co-partisans in office/in campaigns, and the policy-making process). Other key puzzle pieces that directly interconnect include rigid bipartism, a highly polarized electorate, minoritarian features of our system, and numerous institutional features of our constitutional order that I regularly write about.

Strong the Trump derangement is in this one.  I submit for your consideration that the Framers got it mostly right.  Normatively, is it better or worse for local politics that the allegedly low-knowledge voters generally don't participate in local elections?  Local election season is upon us, and there is plenty of work for Normals to do gaining control of school boards, city councils, and state legislatures.