Julia Azari

I'll say a few things.

First of all, we are in a moment of what the political scientist Julia Azari calls weak parties and strong partisanship.

People are not particularly interested in being members of parties, either Democrat or Republican Party, but they have very strong feelings about the parties and about politics.

One of the things that we see from independent voters is that often they are independent not because they don't like either party, but because they don't really like parties and they really dislike the other party.

infrastructure, like the RNC and the DNC, which at the moment are just totally hollowed out entities.

I mean, Julia Azari has said strong partisanship and weak parties.

And Nobody likes the RNC,

but

And the tendency is to punish whoever is in power and to say, well, these guys aren't getting it done, so we need to try something else.

And that's what leads to this alternation, not wild ideological swings, but um uh and i want to shout out julia azari who's a professor at marquette who's a great political commentator and some of her work is on on mandates about how election results get interpreted and they are certainly being interpreted in ways that assume these kinds of ideological swings and those assumptions really matter you can see all of the not just corporate, but also civil society shifts against DEI that came even before the Trump administration came into office in 2025, January, where they just started abandoning their commitments that they had made in recent years because they felt like the political winds had shifted.

That's an ideological interpretation of the results that really wasn't warranted.

And I should say, you know, when we're talking about getting back to Francesca Hong's.