Where are all the Republican graphic designers?

A symptom of a larger problem

If you look closely at political campaign graphic designs over the last couple of decades, you’ll see that starting in 2008 there’s a pretty big divergence in the quality of graphic communication between the parties.

In my opinion, the imagery on the left is much more memorable and visually striking. Quoting two public communications experts:

The Trump/Pence logo for 2020 is fine, but it feels a little homemade. There is nothing daring or original in it. I would advise against putting a red box around the words and then adding some stars at the top because it seems rote. But the stranger thing, from a design perspective, is the vast amount of tracking—space between the letters in both men’s names. “Pence” especially looks like something you’d see in an eye exam. There is a message about importance being sent in the size of their names, too. Both names have five letters, but Trump dominates Pence in the logo. By comparison, the type in the Biden/Harris logo is justified—both words are in equal measure on the left and right and even though “Harris” has to be smaller than “Biden” because it has more letters, the names feel like a solid unit and give the impression of an equal team. There is nothing particularly clever or daring about the Biden/Harris logo, either, but that may be part of the point. It looks professional and stable, and the implication is that their ticket will be too. — Kristen Smith

…

I have always been struck by the absence of a flag or patriotic motif, aside from four small stars at the top in the Trump-Pence logo, but it is important to remember that the current Trump-Pence logo was adopted after an initial design was widely criticized and abandoned by the campaign. The typeface for both is solid as is the use of the red, white, and blue color palette, but the flag motif for the “e” in Biden makes it much more effective in my estimation. Aesthetically, the Trump-Pence logo is just not as attractive. — Joseph Watson, Jr.

I’m not a snob about art, but comparing these to a collage of past presidential races shows that polarization around artistic ability is a recent phenomenon, as these comparisons show the parties being much closer in graphic design ability:

More than just graphic design

Given that there’s no reason to think that artistic vision needs to be polarized around politics, it’s more likely that this is a part of a greater trend in human capital quality. Doctors, designers, musicians, scientists in general, and many groups of skilled individuals, lean Democratic. Yglesias on this phenomenon:

Republicans keep getting asked to stop playing various songs at Trump rallies because very few top musicians like the GOP. By contrast, during the Democrats’ convention roll call, each state had a signature song, with all songs cleared with the recording artist. Looking at campaign signs and images, it’s also clear that Democrats have access to much higher levels of average skill in areas like typography and graphic design. That sounds trivial, but the problem extends to essentially all skilled professions. Most doctors are Democrats. Among scientists who contribute to political campaigns, only 10 percent to give to Republicans. A lot of academics think of economics as a relatively conservative discipline, which it is, but only in the sense that top colleges’ economics departments have a 5-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans rather than 20 or 100 to one.

I suspect that polarization around seemingly random or unrelated skills is a symptom of ideological polarization around everything from skills to opinions about trade. Given the president’s ability to make everyone change their opinions, this suggests that Trump can fix artistic polarization by just talking about how much he loves graphic designers.¹

Sometimes people say, and I’ve been guilty of this at times too, that the left is smarter than the right. Cofnas points to differences in WORDSUM scores as evidence of this point. While I don’t exactly doubt that there may be minor correlations between political ideology and IQ, the way I prefer to talk about this topic is that there is a polarization about ideas themselves. The left is just interested in ideas, whether they be artistic or scientific, in a way that the right is not. This doesn’t mean there aren’t smart people on the right—just that most of them aren’t interested in ideas (as much), and in absence of an interest in ideas, their skills lead them to focus on higher paying professions such as investment bankers, traders, or surgeons. Glancing at this report from Julie Peasley, you’ll see a tendency for more Democratic-leaning professions to be ideas based as opposed to Republican-leaning professions which seem straightforwardly about money. Not that there aren’t high paying Democratic-leaning professions, particularly in the software space, but outside of those, there’s something of an ideas-compensation tradeoff happening.

This is a bad trend

The tendency for ideas-based fields to be sharply politically polarized is bad. Given that so many Democrats lean into fields like science, research, and journalism, for example, it makes it difficult for them to perform their basic functions. Yglesias again writes:

But I have heard from many policy writers that as their articles go through the editorial process, conservative or centrist points tend to receive heightened scrutiny and pushback relative to progressive ones. Not because any individual in the system is trying to create an imbalanced process — that’s just the natural result of a process in which everyone involved has left-wing priors.

And this seems natural to me. There’s so much haranguing about how terrible and biased left wingers are, but the issue is that the lopsided critiques mentioned in the above quote don’t even have to be the result of malice. This is exactly what you would expect from these institutions even if they were acting completely in good faith. With so few people interested in ideas on the right, right-coded ideas have few defenders in the first place. Part of the reason I place a much higher premium on economics writing is that even their 5-1 Democratic-Republican split is at least enough to ensure that conservative views aren’t being lopsidedly scrutinized.

And this trend has gotten worse since the election. Trump has placed a ton of faith in Peter Navarro, who is a complete and utter crank, to steer America’s economic policy. RFK is a total joke. The people in charge have little in the way of quality expertise and there is a serious risk that in absence of being committed to the ideas themselves, that our leaders will default to chasing money and power. Before the election, there was hope that the tech right would inject much-needed brains into the Trump machine, but with the rapid failures of Vivek and Elon, it looks like we won’t be getting good ideas any time soon.

1. I’m completely serious. I’m genuinely curious about what would happen if he said that.