Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist who died last week, had keen insights into the rise of Donald Trump, and he helped develop a formula to quantify roll-call votes in Congress and give them a partisan score.
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Whenever a commentator builds a chart showing the polarization of Congress, chances are they are using a system built in part by Howard Rosenthal.
When Howard Rosenthal died last week, he left behind an important body of work that will live on well after he is forgotten.
Rosenthal, a political scientist with distinguished tenures at Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University and New York University, was hardly a household name.
But as my colleague Sam Roberts pointed out in his obituary, Rosenthal was responsible for pioneering, data-driven scholarship on the growing polarization on Capitol Hill, and he provided key insights on what was driving those yawning partisan divisions.
As we begin the sprint to the November midterm elections, with blistering ads beginning to flood the airwaves, Rosenthal’s observations are as relevant as ever. Our divisions don’t seem to be going anywhere, and his early theories for the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism became defining explanations of our politically toxic and dangerously divisive era.
“Howard was the person who started pointing out that the median income of a white man in America hasn’t increased against inflation” since the late 1960s, said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist and sometime collaborator of Rosenthal’s at the University of California, San Diego. “Nobody wants to say that.”
In 2016, Rosenthal tried to explain the Trump phenomenon as the logical byproduct of those declining fortunes — while mincing no words about the racial component of Trump’s appeal.
Writing for The Monkey Cage, an academic blog at The Washington Post, he noted that the incomes of white men had been “virtually stagnant” since 1967. And since 1996, he wrote, “white men today are slightly worse off,” while incomes for white women and Black men and women made “modest progress” over the same period.
The result of these trends, he concluded, “may be a base of white men that is loyally Republican and increasingly attracted to populist appeals such as Trump’s.”
Rosenthal, as Roberts noted, also helped develop a wonky model that sought to quantify roll-call votes in Congress and give them a partisan score. It lives on as Vote View, a website that is now run by U.C.L.A.’s Department of Political Science and Social Science Computing. Whenever a commentator builds a chart showing the polarization of Congress, chances are they are using the system Rosenthal built with Kenneth Poole, another political scientist, who taught for many years at the University of Georgia and is now retired.
“He did pathbreaking work,” Poole said in an interview, as varied as advanced statistical modeling and game theory. The two men wrote 30 academic papers together and published them in major journals, Poole estimated, along with five books. “He was one of the most important scholars of the 21st century.”
An asterisk to the infighting
ImageSenator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, represents West Virginia, which Donald Trump won in a landslide in 2020.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
And yet — perhaps paradoxically — bipartisanship, as measured by laws passed by Congress, has had a bit of a resurgence.
What Rosenthal perhaps didn’t foresee — and who could blame him? — is that Congress has become “surprisingly productive” in recent years, as the Yale political scientist David Mayhew put it in an email, despite the widespread assumption that gridlock is the order of the day in Washington.
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Frances Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, is one of the leading proponents of the argument that Congress is working far more assiduously than commonly understood.
“There seems to be a preference for the gridlock narrative,” Lee said in an interview. “Data don’t show that.”
Her preferred technique for measuring congressional output is a surprisingly simple one: counting the pages of legislation Congress has passed.
By that metric, she said, the last few sessions of Congress have been astonishingly vibrant — and far more bipartisan than most analysts think. For instance, the coronavirus relief and spending bill that Congress passed with the overwhelming support of both parties in December 2020 was the wordiest piece of legislation in American history.
On one level, that’s a sign of congressional dysfunction: Because the normal work (“regular order,” in congressional jargon) of the committees that appropriate taxpayer money has essentially ground to a halt, lawmakers now try to jam huge sums of spending into giant bills that the Senate often must pass by a bare, one-party majority, as it did with the American Rescue Package last year. (Budget reconciliation is the technical term for this process.)
On the other hand, all this action, since roughly 2019, is a sign that Congress is trying to address crises like the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted trillions of dollars in federal spending — an outlay of money not seen since the Great Society or the New Deal.
Scholars of Congress offered multiple theories as to why America’s lawmakers, in both parties, are getting things done. The most convincing explanation? They simply had to.
“Both parties need to believe that action is what the country is demanding,” Lee explained.
There’s a fear among Democrats, too, of the shadow of the next election — and a widespread expectation that they will lose the majority in the House and possibly the Senate, too. That prospect has forced dueling Democratic factions within the House and Senate to put aside their differences and accept the fact that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat who represents a state Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020, gets to decide what will and will not pass.
This is what happened for most of the last two years, until Manchin agreed to support the repackaged Build Back Better Act in a truncated and rebranded form called the Inflation Reduction Act, according to John A. Lawrence, a former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who has written a forthcoming insider account of his time at her side.
The old Capitol Hill adage “Republicans are the opposition, but the Senate is the enemy” led House Democrats to try to jam the upper chamber with their entire wish list, Lawrence said, before progressives eventually conceded that Manchin’s political needs would trump their pet projects.
“Why did they bow to the reality?” asked Lawrence, who now teaches at American University. “Because it is the reality.”
That’s an assessment Rosenthal, who always grounded his analysis in the data, would appreciate.
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What to read
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Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman report that two lawyers for former President Donald Trump are under increased scrutiny after new details about a failure to comply fully with a subpoena. That subpoena relates to documents at Mar-a-Lago that may have been moved and hidden, according to a Justice Department filing. Charlie and Maggie, along with Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, have more details.
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Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, has taunted his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, about his recovery from a stroke, Trip Gabriel reports.
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Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, deftly used Facebook to build a loyal right-wing fan base at the height of the pandemic. Charles Homans looks at whether those voters could be enough for Mastriano to win a competitive general election.
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Source: nytimes.com
