As a political scientist in one of the major universities in the United States of America (USA), Joseph E Uscinski has been trying to understand conspiracy theories for years. Uscinsky, who teaches Political Science at Miami University’s College of Arts and Science, has traced so much so that he jokingly says he does not believe in anything now. Whether he believes in something or not, he understands the American voter psyche well. He is an academic with a clear perspective on how the country's politics has been shaping up in the past few years and how it culminated in the recent presidential election results.
Uscinsky believes that politics in the USA has undergone a ‘vertical’ shift from what it used to be. He thinks that a leader like Trump manages to win when he is out of power because that is when his anti-establishment narrative works.
In this interview with Onmanorama, Uscinsky shares his views on how Trump won back the White House, what the future of the two major political parties in the USA could be like, and much more.
Excerpts:
Has politics in the USA undergone some changes in recent years? If so, how do you look at it?
Normal politics in the US used to be left and right. You have people on the left, centre and on the right, and everything was fought along this singular dimension battleground. Politicians will place themselves somewhere between the left and right, and usually probably here towards the election. They'll move towards the middle because that's where most voters are. That was normal times.
So 2012 and prior, since Trump got into the race, what we see is that there's a second dimension of politics, one that sort of runs vertically separate from the left-right dimension. There we have people who like the system, and then people who hate the system.
And so now we have a two-dimensional playing field where Donald Trump is sort of placed, places himself up here (on the vertical line) with people who don't like the establishment in general but are somewhat on the right. And Harris, Biden and Clinton place themselves in the bottom here. People who like the establishment generally like the system and are somewhat on the left.
What we've seen in elite politics lately is a good example of this: R F Kennedy, a liberal stalwart, is moving into Trump's camp. If there was only one dimension of politics, we would say, "How did that happen?" Tulsi Gabbard moved into Trump's camp. Why would that happen, given the gulf between them only looking at the left and right?
So we've seen some strange bedfellows in politics. They're not congruent left and right, but they are in terms of their disdain for the political establishment, its institutions, and the knowledge that those institutions generate. They don't like that, and that's what unites that coalition.
And I think that explains in some ways why Trump has been able to win when he's outside of government rather than inside of government. Saying that I want to attack the system always makes more sense when you're not the person running the system.
So in 2020, he couldn't really claim, I'm an outsider coming in to fix things and I will make it all great again. Because he was at the end of a four year term where he should have been making everything great again. But in 2016 and in 2024, he was outside and he gets to say, I'm going to come in and fix everything.
And that's where his message sort of resonates the most with people who view themselves as outsiders.
What does this new shift mean to the future of the Republican Party and the Democrats?
We'll see how things turn out with the Republican Party party over time. But I think both parties have to do a reckoning, because even though one has to win, neither of them did really great. Trump's record over the last eight years is not to build or expand the party, only in very minor ways where he's reaching out to people who want to blow it up.
He can get them to turn out, but they are not a reliable group of people. Unless someone is banging that drum that the deep state's out to get us and everything's corrupt, they're less likely to turn out than people who are much more in favour of the system because they trust it.
Why has not been the Democrats or the Left in the US politics able to do anything about this?
The left has to look in the mirror. There's a lot of things they need to blame themselves for.
Whether they do that is another question. I think there are a lot of Americans who don't like the leftward shift. There are people uncomfortable with trans issues even though gay marriage was made legal. There's a lot of people who still don't like it.
Some people feel like those things have been shoved down their throat. The Republicans have done a very good job of exploiting that, particularly in 2022, where they were accusing public school teachers and Disney and all sorts of other people of grooming or otherwise sexually harming children.
Sometimes, the Democrats’ politics feels more designed to impress a sociology major at Smith College, one of the more liberal colleges in the country, than to attract its typical bread-and-butter voters, like union people and working folks, because they're not motivated by many of those things.
The opinion polls all kept predicting a close fight. Why were they unable to predict a Trump win?
A lot of people have been blaming polls for eight years. I think part of the issue is that we expect too much from polls. Polls are predictions, and they have margins of error. If a poll is generally 1000 to 1500 people every 20 or so is going to just be wrong.
Let me just preface this by saying polls are the best thing that we have. If we throw them out, then what are we left with? And there's always a certain number of people who are saying, "I don't know." I'm not sure. I don't know if I'll make it, you know, so depending on whether they turn out, that can be the difference.
But I think one reason is, what I just explained previously is that they're often trying to wait based on Democrat and Republican and other social groups, but they're not picking up on this other dimension that Trump has been tapping into and trying to build his coalition around.
Will there be a chance that the Democratic Party will become the same type of anti-establishment party now that it has nothing else?
No, Bernie Sanders was trying to do that in 2016. But I think it's too late for the Democrats to try and make inroads there. I think the market that's available to them is to chase more establishment people.
Trump is known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Then how do people from immigrant communities like Hispanics and Latins support him?
Most people in the US don't like immigration. When we poll on views towards immigration, it's me and three other people who say open borders or let's have more immigrants. Most people are not like that. Most people are like, keep everyone out.
And it's almost a sign of the human condition. People are naturally adverse to new people coming in, even if they are part of a group that just got here. Everyone likes pulling up the ladder behind them.
You would think it's strange in Miami given that it's very much an immigrant built community, yet a lot of them don't want any more Cubans or Mexicans coming over. Immigration is not a problem, it’s our superpower. But Republicans wanted to make it a big issue and they were playing on something that's sort of guttural, that people have a gut instinct that immigration's a problem and it needs to be slowed down or stopped.
And it's not hard to get video from the border or whatever and say, oh my God, look who's coming here to get us. It's terrorists and this and that.And it gets people frightened.
Are you surprised that Trump did win all those seven swing states?
Yeah, I thought it would have been closer. I don't do projections and the only thing that I sort of make any expectations about is on aggregated polls. really didn't even start looking at them until like a day or two ago because it was just so variable and there was no way to know what's going to happen.
Do you think Trumpism will persist as a trend in US politics?
If it does well, then, you'll have a lot of people who want to pick up the mantle and run with it.
You don't have to be Trump to do what Trump does. And there are already people who want to do what he does with slight variation, like (Florida Governor) Ron Desantis, (Senator) Josh Hawley, (Congress representative) and Marjorie Taylor Greene who see what he's been able to accomplish and want to model themselves after that. Take J D Vance, for example. Here's a person who has become the exact opposite of what he used to be. He has seen Trump's success and he wants a piece of it for him. But there are still a lot of people in the Republican Party who aren't like Trump's. They're only voting for Trump because he's a Republican.
They might have preferred somebody else, perhaps someone who's not so chaotic or someone who wants to throw a grenade at the system. In that sense, they're still there. Maybe they'll move out.
Maybe the Democrats will make some overtures to them.
How do you look at Trump’s governing philosophy?
Trump doesn't have a governing philosophy. He'll do whatever he thinks is going to be right at any given time. And the things that he says are not things that are typically Republican, like, I'm going to do 4,000% tariffs or something crazy. That's not a Republican thing. Nobody thinks that that's good economic policy.
But he'll do whatever he thinks is going to give an advantage to him at any given time. That's sort of the neat position he finds himself in. He doesn't have to be holding to a party dogma because he's never pledged to be a part of it. That's not what he built this coalition around.
What could have caused Kamala Harris’ defeat?
The obvious things that everyone knew Biden was too old to run. He should have announced it much, much earlier. There should have been a primary on the Democratic side. It shouldn't have been done by fiat. Harris was, in a lot of ways, probably not a good candidate for this time.
I mean, what was kind of interesting is they knew who they were running against and I don't think they picked the right candidate to do it. I don't know who that right candidate would have been, but I think somebody other than her.
Do you think America was never prepared or ready to have a female president?
The ingredients of voting for Trump we've known for the last eight years are different than Republicans who don't, in the sense that they have higher levels of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and a host of other things that are typically unsavoury.
But does that mean that they are outright sexist to the point where they could never accept a woman president? I don't know if that's true. I think there would be some subconscious resistance.
But I think a lot of the people who just voted for Trump would have been like ‘yeah that’s great’ if Trump’s daughter Ivanka was going to run. It just depends on who the right woman is. So don't mistake voting against Kamala Harris as I wouldn't vote for a woman.
It looks like Trump is what Trump says. Do you think Trump's language actually helps him win votes?
Sure. I think he could tone it down and probably do justice. But I think that's part of his thing. It's not costing him anymore because everyone knows who he is. So saying one more bad thing isn't going to or one less bad thing isn't going to change anything at this point.
