How Much Longer Can This Era Of Political Gridlock Last?

Lee Drutman wrote about the long era of "partisan stalemate" for FiveThirtyEight.

It’s possible that voters today are fed up with the two parties, with rising support for a third party and a growing number identifying as independent. But the problem is that independents do not represent a coherent voting bloc capable of forming a third party. There also just isn’t a lot of third-party activity, which has typically foreshadowed a new alignment in American politics — notable third party challenges in 1892, 1924, 1968 and 1992 all revealed fault lines in the existing parties, and their success signaled that large numbers of voters were truly indifferent as to which party controlled power in Washington. But today, even if voters are dissatisfied with the two parties, the vast majority see real differences in them, meaning that a large number of voters are motivated primarily by negative partisanship — or keeping the opposing party out of power. Negative partisanship is a powerful force and can keep together parties that might otherwise fracture, if the stakes of each and every election didn’t always seem so high.

So I’m not convinced a realignment is in the cards anytime soon. The comparison of our current era to the Gilded Age falls short in a number of key ways. For starters, partisanship in that period was fundamentally different. This was not a period in which the parties had many substantive national policy disagreements, as I discussed earlier. At the time, many jobs were patronage government jobs, and partisan machines operated at multiple levels of government. This sustained partisan loyalty, but as I mentioned earlier, partisan loyalties from the Civil War were also weakening — by 1896, the Civil War was a generation in the past. Finally, though partisan voting was consistent from election to election from 1876 to 1896, fewer states voted strictly Democratic or Republican, thus creating more possibilities for Democrats or Republicans to achieve at least some level of national dominance with modest state-level shifts, which lifted Republicans to national dominance following the election of 1896.

Rather, the simple lesson from history might be this: Our current extended period of closely contested national elections atop stable and persistently uncontested state and local elections is truly unprecedented.