Sean Illing
I definitely want to get into some of these structural barriers, but let’s be clear about this point you’re making. A lot of people still think there’s some meaningful connection between policy outcomes and voter decisions, but there’s a good bit of political science research to suggest that’s just a fantasy.

David Faris
Right. People just don’t seem to make the connection between policies and the party in power.

So, for example, the Democrats passed Obamacare and gave millions of people heath care, and yet tons of people who benefited from it have no idea what it is or how they benefited. And it’s like that with a lot of policies — voters simply don’t connect the dots, and so they reward or punish the wrong party.

I think the idea that we’re going to deliver these benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you Jesus, thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things for people, but we’ve got to be serious about how elections are won. And they’re not being won on the basis of policy proposals or policy wins.

Sean Illing
In the book, you say that Democrats are engaged in “policy fights” and Republicans are waging a “procedural war.” What does that mean?

David Faris
The Constitution is a shockingly short document, and it turns out that it’s extremely vague on some key procedures that we rely on to help government function at a basic level. For the government to work, cooperation between parties is needed. But when that cooperation is withdrawn, it creates chaos.

Since the ’90s, when Newt Gingrich took over Congress, we’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas — from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate.

Sean Illing
What the Republicans did to Merrick Garland was one of the most egregious examples I’ve ever seen.

David Faris
Right. They essentially stole a seat on the Supreme Court — a swing seat, no less. But they correctly argued that they had no clear constitutional obligation to consider the president’s nominee for the seat. They didn’t violate the Constitution. They violated the spirit of the Constitution. They violated the norms that have allowed these institutions to function normally for years and years.

This is the sort of maneuvering and procedural warfare I’m talking about, and the Republicans have been escalating it for two decades. And they’ve managed to entrench their power through these dubious procedures.

The result is that the structural environment is biased against Democrats and the Republicans have engineered it that way.

The lack of a “liberal Tea Party” reflects a fundamental and longstanding asymmetry between Republicans and Democrats. The Republican Party is the agent of an ideological movement; most Republican politicians, activists and voters view their party as existing to advance the conservative cause.

Because their goals of reducing the scope of government and reversing cultural change are difficult to achieve in practice, Republican officeholders are vulnerable to accusations of failing to uphold principles. They risk becoming targets of interest groups, media outlets and rival politicians who see their role as enforcing symbolic commitment to conservative orthodoxy.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, is organized as a coalition of social groups. Democratic voters tend to view politics as an arena of intergroup competition rather than a battlefield for opposing philosophies, and the party is dominated by an array of discrete interests that choose candidates on the basis of demographic representation and capacity to deliver policy. Tensions within the party coalition have eased over time — to the benefit of Democratic leaders, who are now better able to satisfy the various demands of their members and avoid facing a mutiny from within.

Democratic voters detest Mr. Trump just as much as Republicans disliked Barack Obama, but they have different ways of expressing their opposition. The Tea Party movement reflected a popular dissatisfaction with cultural change, of which Mr. Obama’s election was a powerful symbol. Politicians, media personalities and interest group leaders on the right encouraged these sentiments but channeled them into opposition to Democratic economic priorities such as the Affordable Care Act by activating broader symbolic conservative predispositions.

Republican critics accused Mr. Obama of imposing socialism and favoring runaway government; Democrats attack Mr. Trump for his mistreatment of vulnerable social groups. The most visible manifestations of Democratic mobilization since Mr. Trump’s election have been a series of protests, each focused on one issue and led by a specific element of the group coalition. Large-scale national events have highlighted the concerns of feminists, racial minorities, young people, environmentalists and unionized public employees. Democrats promote a different cause nearly every week, with each rally promoted as an opportunity to mobilize social groups for elections and a practical policy agenda.

Mr. Trump’s rise has jump-started political activity among Democrats, but this resurgent energy has seldom produced fierce internal battles. Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol, who have studied emerging grass-roots networks of Democratic activists, report that they “hail from across the broad ideological range from center to left” but are “working shoulder-to-shoulder” rather than igniting intraparty squabbles — a pragmatic mobilization, they explained, aimed at winning general elections.

This year, Democratic candidates remain focused on challenging vulnerable Republican-held seats more than purging ideologically impure incumbents. Unlike Republican debates over philosophical fidelity, Democratic primaries produce arguments about who will do a better job addressing the real-world priorities of key constituencies as well as competition to secure endorsements from party-aligned interest groups.