Why doesn’t Harris walk away with this?

Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June, the race between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then we’ve had a blizzard of major events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started right away and has only gotten closer.

We supposedly live in a country where a large number of voters are independent. You would think that they would behave well, independently and be influenced by events. But no. In our time, the voting figures hardly move.

The second thing that baffles me is: why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had major shifts in the electorate, with college-educated voters moving left and voters without college education moving right. Yet the two sides are almost exactly evenly matched.

Historically speaking, this is not normal. Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision. (In the 1930s, the Democrats dominated with the New Deal, and the Republicans complained. In the 1980s, the Reagan Revolution dominated, and the Democrats tried to adapt.)

But today, neither party has been able to expand its support to create such a majority coalition. As American Enterprise Institute scholars Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin note in a new study, “Politics Without Winners,” we have two parties playing the role of minority parties: “Each party runs campaigns that rely almost entirely on the mistakes of the other, with no serious strategy to significantly increase its electoral reach.”

Teixeira and Levin note that both sides are content with an impasse. The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most committed voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.” Both sides “view narrow victories as landslides and dismiss narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

Trump has spent the last nine years not even trying to expand his base, but playing on the same MAGA grievances over and over again. Kamala Harris refuses to break with Biden on any major issue, positioning herself as an orthodox, paint-by-numbers Democrat. Neither party tolerates much ideological diversity. Neither party has a plausible strategy for building a lasting majority coalition. Why?

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer fulfill the function they used to. Parties used to be political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions to that end. Today, in contrast, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better viewed as religious organizations that exist to provide meaning, membership, and moral sanctification to believers. If that is your goal, then of course you should stick to the existing gospel. You must focus your attention on affirming the creed of today’s true believers. You become so buried within the walls of your own catechism that you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside of it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. As parties become more like quasi-religions, power lies with the priesthood—the scattered group of media figures, podcast hosts, and activists who lead the conversation, define party orthodoxy, and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

Let’s look at the Democratic Party. The Democrats have enormous advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they pose no threat to democracy. Voters trust them on issues like health care and switch sides on issues like abortion. They have an excellent base from which they can potentially expand their coalition and build their majority. All they have to do is address their weaknesses, the places where they are out of step with most Americans.

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there is also the priesthood. The public conversation about the democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives working in academia, the media, activist groups, and so on. These people have a highly developed and confident worldview – a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who do not share the criticism. The more Democrats embrace priesthood orthodoxy, the more working-class voters are lost, including Hispanic and black working-class voters. The Republicans have exactly the same dynamic, except their priesthood is dominated by shock jocks, tech bros and Christian nationalists. Some of them are literally members of the priesthood.

Harris clearly understands the problem. She has tried to run her campaign to show that she agrees with the majority opinion. In a classic 2018 More in Common report, only 45% of the most liberal group in the survey said they were proud to be American. But Harris decorated her convention with patriotic symbols to the rafters. It now explicitly revolves around the theme: country before party.

But in the few months she has had to campaign, Harris has been unable to reverse the entire identity of the Democratic Party. Furthermore, her gestures were all stylistic; it has not challenged democratic orthodoxy on any substantive point. Finally, candidates no longer have ultimate power over what the party stands for. The priesthood – the people who dominate the national conversation – have the power.

The result is that each side has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological life of its believers.

The metaphysics of each side seem to become more rigid and impenetrable as time goes by. At times it seems that Harris is not running for president of the United States, but for president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain, while Trump is running for president of Republican Fantasy Island. Each party has become too narcissistic to get outside its own head and try to build a coalition with people outside the camp of true believers.

The political problem for Harris is that there are far more Americans without a college degree than with one. Class is becoming increasingly important in American life, with Hispanic and black working-class voters steadily moving to the working-class party, the Republican Party.

The problem for Trump is that he is even better at fending off potential converts than the Democrats. He would win landslides if he had tried to get the MAGA Republicans into a coalition with the Bush-McCain Republicans, but he is unable to do that.

The problem for the rest of us is that we’re stuck in this perpetual state of suspended animation where the two sides are stuck and nothing ever changes. I keep coming across people who advocate divided government for the next four years. It will mean that America will be able to do little to solve its problems. They see this as the least bad option.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.