Copy of a Copy of a Copy ...

Why are U.S. state and local elections less and less about state and local issues? Daniel J. Hopkins on the “nationalization” of American political life. “This is the kind of politics Washington, D.C., is exporting.” Sweeping the Nation Why are U.S. state and local elections less and less about state and local issues? Daniel J. Hopkins on the “nationalization” of American political life. American politics has been “nationalized”—with state and local concerns pushed to the margins by national issues. This is an increasingly common media narrative about U.S. elections. The veteran Washington Post correspondent Dan Balz recently [argued]( that it “may be time to revisit the old axiom from Tip O’Neill, the former Democratic House speaker from Massachusetts, who famously said that all politics are local.” The political analyst Stuart Rothenberg wrote a similarly themed article for Roll Call titled “[All Politics Isn’t Local Anymore.]( In making their cases, Balz and Rothenberg both pointed to the current race for the governorship of Virginia, which comes to an end next Tuesday. The New York Times[reported]( that ads from the Democratic candidates, Terry McAuliffe, and the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, “indicate that national is the new normal”—as the two men have clashed “more over the cultural issues currently inflaming national politics than traditional tension points like state and local taxes.” What’s causing this pattern, and what are its effects? Daniel J. Hopkins is a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. Hopkins says the rise of nationalization largely corresponded with the polarization of U.S. politics in recent decades. He notes that the trend is driven to some extent by polarizing forces in national media—and the decline of local and state-level journalism—but also by changes in state political parties, along with candidates’ growing incentive to court party activists with national messaging and raise money from across the country. Hopkins sees some advantages to nationalization—it can make choices clearer for voters and infuse sleepy state and local elections with the passion of national debates—but it’s also directing a lot of attention to superficial symbolic issues rather than the primary responsibilities of state or local officials. ——— Graham Vyse: What’s happening here? Daniel J. Hopkins: I started tracking the nationalization of American elections for governor more than a decade ago, and with each successive year it was clearer that the phenomenon was only intensifying. A nationalized political system is one where the same issues, concerns, and divisions animate national, state, and local politics. It used to be the case that you had Democratic governors in Republican states like Nebraska and Republican governors in all kinds of Democratic states—you still have a bit of that in Maryland and Massachusetts—but the ability of particularly the Democratic Party to win governor’s races in Republican states has been limited in recent elections. You see a lot of nationalization in Virginia. Partly there’s national attention on the governor’s race because there’s a nationalized political audience—people constantly looking for the next sign of which way the country is trending. Virginia holding these off-cycle elections for governor and the statehouse [in neither a presidential nor midterm election year] provides a very useful bellwether. Virginia also gets attention for another reason related to nationalization—it’s just outside of Washington, D.C., and many members of the D.C. press corps live in Virginia, so it takes on outsized importance. The key idea is that even Terry McAuliffe, who was formerly the governor of Virginia, is making substantial arguments based on national politics rather than the specific policy challenges Virginia faces. For any one politician or political actor—even somebody with the resources of Glenn Youngkin or Terry McAuliffe—it’s so much easier to ground your arguments in the kinds of issues that have already been proven to work nationally than it is to try to make a distinctive argument or develop your own brand. More from Daniel J. Hopkins at The Signal: “You see a lot of nationalization in Virginia. Partly there’s national attention on the governor’s race because there’s a nationalized political audience—people constantly looking for the next sign of which way the country is trending. Virginia holding these off-cycle elections for governor and the statehouse [in neither a presidential nor midterm election year] is a very useful bellwether. Virginia also gets attention for another reason related to nationalization—it’s just outside of Washington, D.C., and many members of the D.C. press corps live in Virginia, so it takes on outsized importance.” “As congressional politics polarized in the U.S., you could almost immediately see that polarization reflected in state-level politics also. Which suggests that this isn’t just a top-down story. In essentially any community in the United States, there are party activists. To win primaries and earn donations, you need to align with those party activists. They’re a hard group to connect with, but you can try to speak the already proven language of national politics—to raise specters with nationally evocative symbols and use them to build support.” “In many state legislatures, we’re seeing gridlock getting worse. Increasingly, these legislatures are taking steps to foreground partisan issues relative to issues that are focal points for their states. If you look at what’s happening with school boards right now, many state and local leaders and administrators find themselves dealing with furious partisans and activism—where they’d thought they were working in a more protected, professionalized space.” ——— Meanwhile: How strong are the Taliban in Afghanistan? Four suicide bombers from Afghanistan’s branch of the Islamic State, known as Islamic State-Khorasan or IS-K, [attacked]( a Shiite mosque in Kandahar two weeks ago, killing 47 people and wounding 70. The assault came one week after another IS-K suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Kunduz killed 46 Afghans and injured some 50 more. Two months ago, the Taliban seized control over the country in a matter of weeks from overmatched government forces; but these recent attacks, and a national economy near [collapse]( raise a question about how stable the Taliban’s position is. I put it to Benjamin Hopkins, a professor of history at the George Washington University who has written a [history]( of Afghanistan, who [spoke with us]( shortly after the Taliban takeover in late August. —Michael Bluhm Hopkins: The Taliban position remains very insecure. At best, we can characterize them as controlling Afghanistan—by no means governing Afghanistan. We see the relative weakness of that control with the ongoing attacks that IS-K are mounting. The best example was the attack on the Shiite mosque in Kandahar. The Taliban in its new incarnation is little different than the Taliban of the 1990s. In the 1990s, they were both uninterested in and fundamentally unable to govern Afghanistan. In the past two months, we’ve seen exactly that same thing play out. They can’t do it. They don’t have the know-how; they don’t have the interest. That accounts for their keenness on bringing the international community back in, especially NGOs and the UN, to run the business of governance in the country—but also to get a foreign subsidy, be it from the Gulf, Russia, or China. Going back to the ‘90s, people have often talked about the Taliban in totality—as if it has a unity which it really doesn’t have. The Taliban has different factions which compete for advantage. It’s not a unified front. Al-Qaeda and IS-K continue playing a spoiler role. Their intention is to show that the Taliban is unable to govern, through attempts to create sectarian and ethnic violence. They’ve focused their attacks on Shiite institutions; Shiites tend to be from ethnic minorities like the Hazaras. What is the role of Pakistan here? Pakistan is centrally important in support of the Taliban—in the past, the present, and the future. I’ve always thought that the Taliban is a poison pill for Pakistan, because the potential for blowback is extraordinarily high. We’re starting to see that with the competition between the Taliban and IS-K. Pakistan is starting to realize that there are significant drawbacks in the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. For more from Benjamin Hopkins on the situation in Afghanistan … ——— ——— [The Signal]( is a new digital publication exploring urgent questions in democratic life and the human world—sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: © 2021 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. One, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}]( [Constant Contact Data Notice]( Sent by newsletters@thesgnl.email