Dan Balz is Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post. He has covered every presidential campaign and midterm election since 1978. He is the author of four books and a regular “Washington Week” panelist on PBS.
Harvard Political Review: What is unique about the divisions the country is facing today from your perspective as a political reporter?
Dan Balz: The divisions today are reflective of much broader changes that are going on in the country. The degree to which we are polarized politically reflects what I would call this division within the country of those who are comfortable with the changes that we are going through and people who are far less comfortable with them; with people who want to embrace a different sense of what America is and people who fear that if we go too far, we lose an essential part of what the character of the country has been. The political divisions reflect that, and as we get through that long period of change — it is technological change, it is economic change, and certainly demographic change — until we get through that, we cannot quite settle some of these differences that we have politically.
HPR: In your recent article on the gubernatorial races, you stated that the GOP dominates state-level politics. What do you think is at the root of this domination?
DB: One of the underreported stories of this period is what has happened to the Democratic Party. In many superficial ways, this should be a time when the Democrats would be prospering. As the country changes, younger voters are more attached to the Democratic Party, [and] there are more young voters. Nonetheless, the Republicans have found a way through skillful campaigns [and] by finding attractive candidates to dominate not just in Washington, but also in the states.
We are at a point today where the Republicans have [33] of the 50 governors. The Democrats are at a low point: [they] took terrible beatings in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections at the congressional level, at the gubernatorial level, [and] at the state legislative level. The notion that the election of President Obama ushered in a new liberal era turned out to be a mistaken assumption on the part of a lot of Democrats, and now they are in a hole and they are going to have to fight their way back.
HPR: Looking ahead to 2020, with the presidential election especially, what kinds of candidates should the Democrats be looking for?
DB: The Democrats are going to have to find a candidate who can, in a couple of ways, stitch together what is a somewhat divided Democratic Party. There is so much focus on the obvious divisions within the Republican Party and yet they have prospered in spite of that. The Democrats think they are very united and yet they have suffered in spite of that.
I expect that in 2020, we are going to see a very, very large field of prospective candidates. I mean, you could draw up a list today of a dozen and a half people who are probably seriously thinking about whether they should run. We may see a field of Democrats in 2020 similar to what we saw in 2016 among the Republicans when they had 16, 17 candidates.
One thing that the Democrats have to decide, that will be decided through the nomination battle, is do they want somebody of my generation, or do they want somebody from a new generation, a fresh generation to lead them forward? That is going to be one big question. Another is: do they go in the direction that Bernie Sanders has charted, which is to move demonstrably to the left, or do they pull it back in some way to what you would call a center-left message?
The third big challenge that they have to meet is to find an overarching vision for the many things they advocate. Secretary Clinton had many, many white papers. She had many things that she wanted to do. She had a programmatic solution to all kinds of problems. But in one way or another, she was unable to put that together in a larger and more positive vision that people could hang onto. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great” slogan was easy to remember. It was harder to remember exactly what it was that Secretary Clinton was standing for. That is always a challenge for a presidential candidate. You can know where you stand on healthcare or education or foreign policy. But how you appeal broadly to the country is a much bigger question.
HPR: Looking back to Bernie Sanders’ impact in 2016, what role do you see him playing moving ahead to 2020, if he plays a role at all in the presidential election?
DB: He is certainly going to play a role. I do not know [whether] that will be as a candidate or not. That is a decision he will be making closer to the time when you have to decide whether you are going to run or not. But in many ways, he is a leading, if not the leading voice within the party in terms of defining the issue terrain. He is the one who has put Medicare-for-all legislation on the table around which there is now going to be a debate within the Democratic Party. Is that the way they want to go? Is that where they want to attach themselves? Or is there some other idea on healthcare that other Democrats may use to compete?
Sanders is laying down a series of markers that in one way or another, everybody who is thinking of running for president is going to have to deal with and respond to, and decide where they stand on that and what unique approach they might have in comparison to that.
HPR: You spoke a little bit about some of Clinton’s failures during the 2016 campaign. What do you think the campaign could have done better, or that could have increased its chances of defeating Donald Trump in 2016?
DB: I do not think there is any one thing. When you lose by as narrowly as she lost Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, you could cite 25 things that might have been done, small things or large things. I would say there were a couple of factors that certainly contributed to it. One is, again, her inability to go beyond a message of “Donald Trump is not qualified to be president,” and to attach something more positive to that.
The other aspect of that is that she struggled to have an authentic voice. People who know her, who have worked with her, think the world of her. They say there is a side to Hillary Clinton that the public never sees; a more relaxed side, a funnier side. She had trouble making that available to people on the campaign trail. That is always a problem for candidates. Candidates in this day and age tend to be very guarded for understandable reasons. [You have to] project that authentic human side in a time when people want to feel and look at a candidate in a personal way.
Now, in [Clinton’s] book, she writes about what the James Comey letter did in terms of changing the dynamic of the campaign in the last 10 days. We are only now beginning to understand, and still do not fully understand, the interference of the Russians in the campaign. But putting those aside, there are things on her campaign that they did not do. There were mechanical issues that they did not do as well as they thought they were going to be able to do.
HPR: What do you mean when you say mechanical issues?
DB: There is a debate within Democratic circles [about] whether they put too much emphasis on data analytics, metrics, and things like that, [and] did not put enough attention into old-fashioned organizing in the way that it had been done prior to this era of analytics and politics. The Obama people brought that to the forefront in ’08 and particularly in 2012. In some ways, it redefined for people how you have to run a national campaign.
But what the Clinton people found and demonstrated was that there are limits to that as well; they probably had put too much trust in a sense [in] that antiseptic notion of how you figure out where you are in a campaign and perhaps not as much on the human side as they needed.
HPR: Given Trump’s low approval ratings, and some of the strife between him and the GOP establishment, do you possibly see a Republican challenger to Trump in the 2020 election?
DB: I certainly do not rule it out. It would be a difficult challenge. Any sitting president has many more assets than a challenger, but what we have learned from a succession of presidential campaigns is that presidents who get a challenge, a primary challenge in their reelection campaign often go into the general election wounded. That happened to George H.W. Bush when Pat Buchanan mounted a challenge. It happened to Jimmy Carter when Senator Kennedy challenged him in 1980. They often prevail in the primary, but they can struggle in the general election.
Donald Trump will have a very difficult reelection campaign. He is a divisive figure; his approval ratings are low. But the one thing we learned about Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 is that he is able to survive situations that most politicians cannot. In that sense, you cannot measure him by traditional measures. His approval rating is historically low, but it does not mean he could not get reelected.
This interview has been edited and condensed.