“I think we all know we are living in extraordinary times,” said Jonathan Martin, POLITICO bureau chief and senior political columnist. “And it’s just a fire hose for those of us who are going through this.” Martin delivered the keynote address this week at NAIOP’s Chapter Leadership and Legislative Retreat in Washington, DC, drawing on his wealth of experience as a political journalist reporting from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to the campaign trails across America.
Martin identified two major innovations that have reshaped traditional politics, and life more broadly, over the past twenty years: the advent of smartphones and the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and others. The combination of an easily accessible computer in our pocket and apps designed to capture and hold our attention – and provide the information we want to hear – has had a profound effect on the American elections.
“I don’t think Donald Trump could have existed without this and without the social media apps on this phone,” he said, especially as the algorithms provide more of the content we want, leaving us in silos of information.
“There’s an old saying that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts, and I think what’s happened is that that’s been undermined,” Martin said. “We are living in a moment where politics is much more nationalized, polarized and divisive.”
Most Americans placed lawn signs for their favorite candidate, watched a debate or two, voted in an election and basically moved on, Martin noted. Now politics has become “so tribal and toxic that elections happen every day,” whether it’s a Facebook argument with a high school classmate or heated arguments with extended family around the Thanksgiving table.
People ask, “Why can’t they get anything done in DC? Why is it so gridlocked?” The answer: The incentive structure for politicians has changed, Martin said. Politicians no longer try to cater to the political center. In the past, there was more of a shared experience of pop culture, national events and media, whether watching the same TV shows or listening to popular music on the radio, and both companies and politicians focused on reaching the broad center of the market.
“Instead of trying to appeal to the center, which is what you need to win in the general election, 80% of these people come from House of Representatives districts where elections are held in the spring instead of the fall,” he said. “So if you’re a Democrat, you focus on the left and try to keep the left happy, and if you’re a Republican, it’s the same with the right. You don’t think about the center because your political destiny hangs on the flank, on the base of your political career.” party, because that is where primaries are won and lost.”
The Senate is similar, he said, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) standing out as the only senator from a state in which the opposing party won the state in the presidential election.
As incentive culture pushes politicians to the flanks of their parties, politicians appeal to their bases by being provocative for attention on social media, which then gets invites to cable news, which then leads to them getting more money.
It’s a very different approach than in the past: going to Congress, toiling, eventually ending up on a committee, working across the aisle and maybe, just maybe, getting a bill passed a decade later, Martin said. “I think that explains a lot about why we are where we are.”
“At the same time, the American people have lost their faith,” he said. “They see Washington in lockdown, they see things like the Epstein files, and they think they’re all a bunch of crooks.” This cynicism is not limited to Capitol Hill either, but extends to all major institutions in America, from the media to churches.
“And that cynicism, I think, is the raw material for people to wake people up and say, ‘your problems have to do with some scapegoat x, y and z,’ but that’s the period we’re in,” Martin said. This has enabled the rise of Donald Trump in a way that would have been difficult in previous periods, he said, with more gatekeepers in both the media and the traditional political parties firmly keeping out a political outsider.
“Now the outsiders are in charge, and the outsiders are now the insiders, and we are living in the age of Trump,” Martin said. “Politics has now become identity rather than just preference.”
“You’re in Washington in a week where the government has shut down for the second time in four months, and now they’re opening back up. It was brief, and yet the federal government can’t even keep the lights on,” Martin said, referring to the crowd of NAIOP members from across the country who attended the event to share best practices and meet with their lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “If they can’t keep the government open when they all have power in one party, imagine what it will be like if there is a divided government.”
“I think this is a way to capture the context of where we are now; the big forces that I think have led to this moment and are ushering in the Trump era and the Trump presidency.”
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