Reflections on the Aftermath of Election 2016

Maxwell L. Stearns

On September 15, 2016, between the primary season and the general election, the University of Maryland Carey School of Law held its annual Constitution Day program, titled “Election 2016 and the Structural Constitution,” in which I both moderated and participated. I argued that we appeared to be in the midst of a dimensional shift in which the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns had captured an outsider-versus-insider populist wave, one that upended traditional ideological suppositions, typically characterized in right-left ideological terms. I explained that the left-right binary was a feature of our system’s direct election of head of state, one that produced a pure Nash equilibrium of two dominant parties. I also explained why the two-party system is almost certain to remain, but I contended that in response to what we were observing, the parties’ compositions over time were likely to take different forms. I envisioned that at least for a time, one party would comprise the populist wave, and the other would broaden its ideological umbrella to include crossovers who sufficiently valued decent, functional, and competent governance even at the expense of some voters’ conventional ideological priors.