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If an issue comes to be seen as associated with a president, such that that president's performance in office is benchmarked against their ability to resolve that issue, then that sets off that political incentive on the opposing party, which is we can't give the president a win.

Hello, welcome to Mr. Clanchon, the Vox Media Podcast Network. A quick request before we start up today. I'm looking for some good interview ideas on polarization, political identity.

Anybody you'd be interested in hearing on those issues on the show doesn't need to be academics or writers or analysts of it.

Could be somebody you think increases polarization in our polity. Could be somebody you think reduces it.

I'm trying to think through that as I think through the end of my book and often you all have better guest ideas that I do.

So my email is as recline show at Vox.com again as recline show at Vox.com. If you've got some weird ideas there or just some good ideas there, please email me.

My guest today is someone I really wanted to have on around the dawn of a new Congress because her work has influenced me tremendously in how I think about divided government in particular, but Congress and its relationship with the presidency in general is, Francis Lee.

She's a political scientist at the University of Maryland. She just wrote a fascinating new book called insecure majorities, Congress and the perpetual campaign. Her book before that, which is called Beyond Ideology,

is one of like the three or five political science books I recommend most often. And what she's showing in in this new book is that we're in a period that is genuinely different from what most periods in American political life have been like.

We're in a period of competition where control of Congress and the presidency is changing hands constantly where landsides almost never happen.

Certainly presidential landsides have seemed to have stopped happening. We don't have outcomes like we had say in 1984 anymore.

Nobody is quite sure why, but her book is looking at how an era of intense constant competition, how an era where every party is constantly a potential majority and minority, how that changes political behavior.

And I think she makes a very convincing case that it changes it profoundly that this period of competition is behind a lot of what has changed in American politics in a way that we don't always know how to integrate into our models or integrate into our thinking.

It seems like competition is always the order of the day, but it really hasn't been. And I think it's incredible explanatory power here.

And I think it's very tactically important for understanding why Democrats in Congress are going to act like they will in the next couple of years,

my Republicans are going to act like they will in the next couple of years. And also how Donald Trump both will act and should act and could act.

And maybe what he doesn't quite understand about presidential rhetoric and leadership in an era of divided highly competitive government.

This is a very, very helpful episode here is Francis Lee.

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