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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with G. Elliott Morris

(recorded 8/6/26)

Paul Krugman: I am returning for another of multiple conversations with G. Elliott Morris, whom I find the most informative polling and political data analyst out there. And for a couple of reasons: We just had the primary in Michigan, we have a lot of numbers, and the Strength in Numbers midterm model is up. So we have our first reads on best estimates of what’s going to happen. So there’s a lot I’d like to talk about.

G. Elliott Morris: Hey, Paul. Yeah, let’s get real wonky on the forecasting. Good to be back.

Krugman: Yeah, let’s start with the model. You have a first forecast, which is pretty encouraging for Democrats. But why don’t we talk about what the forecast says and then what might be issues to raise around it?

Morris: Sure. The forecast, which people can find at fiftyplusone.news—which is sort of a sister publication to Strength in Numbers that I run with a couple of friends—is just a team effort, so we kind of have a different play sport than just a solo podcast. That forecast, as of recording (Thursday afternoon), says the Democrats have an 87 out of 100 chance to win control of the House. They need 218 seats; they have 215 right now, so it’s a pretty easy get. I can explain why. And that the Democrats have a 54 out of 100 chance to win control of the Senate. So pure toss-up territory there for the Senate. There, they need to win 51 seats; they currently have 47.

Krugman: Now this is, of course, a map on the House that includes the extreme gerrymandering, all of the attempts to tilt it. And so you’re saying that despite that, the Democrats don’t have a lock, obviously. But I assume that without the gerrymandering, it would be even higher gains on the House.

Morris: Yeah. I mean, without the gerrymandering, I would take close to 95 or 96% odds for them to take it. Our best guess is that the gerrymandering cost Democrats 5 or 6 seats in the House. So that combines a pretty good amount of gerrymandering in Texas—that cost them probably three seats there—and then 3 to 4 seats across the other Southern states. Tennessee is one; Louisiana, 1 or 2; Alabama, probably one there. Florida as well—a pretty big hit in Florida. And then, of course, it takes into account some gerrymandering back in the Democrats’ favor in California, and one lucky seat that they got a lucky break with in Utah with some court-mandated redistricting there. Democrats will take a seat from Utah for sure. So, yeah, I think that they’ll get 231 seats on average today, but that number should be close to 237 without the mid-decade cheating.

Krugman: You’d said that they needed something like a four percentage point advantage in the popular vote.

Morris: Yeah, we’ll be writing more about that. I think the number in the forecast now is close to three and a half. It’s a little more optimistic taking into account stuff like how candidate recruitment was really good for Democrats in some places. Their polling numbers and fundraising are looking really good in those competitive districts. So, you know, if the historical patterns are correct, Democrats gain some ground in the generic ballot, and the predictors are as reliable as they typically are in midterms, then it should be a pretty easy victory for them. We would predict a pretty easy, big House majority for them with 230 seats.

Krugman: But just to talk about the Senate—so that’s a much heavier lift, right? I think I know why, but why don’t you give me your version of what it’s about?

Morris: Yeah, well, in the Senate, Democrats currently control 47 seats. They need 51, so they have to find four seats to flip somewhere. The Democrats are very favored to win the seat in North Carolina. Former Governor Roy Cooper is running—a Democrat. He’s running against current Republican National Committee chair Michael Wheatley. And Roy Cooper is just kind of one of those politicians who has a good connection with his state and kind of can outperform those fundamental indicators in the state. So the typical voting pattern of the state is what I really mean there. So they will very likely win that seat—maybe an 85% chance we gave them.

So they need three more. And Democrats are also defending a seat in Michigan, just for whatever that’s worth. So the other three seats the Democrats could get are Maine, Texas, Alaska, and Ohio. All four of those seats are toss-ups, leaning Democrat in Maine, although we lack a lot of data in Maine with the new nominee, the new Democrat nominee. So that’s really the territory. You could argue maybe Iowa looks potentially competitive based on early data, but it’s kind of thin. Georgia Democrats are looking to upset the incumbent Democrat, Jon Ossoff, but I don’t think they really stand a chance there.

Krugman: Yeah. And the thing about the Senate, there’s two things about it structurally, right? First of all, only a third of the seats are up this year, so Democrats have to win a large percentage of the seats that are actually on the table—where they’re actually holding elections this year.

Morris: Right.

Krugman: And then the Senate gives Wyoming—whose population is basically the equivalent of a neighborhood in Brooklyn—and California the same number of senators. And that kind of works in Republicans’ favor, right?

Morris: I mean, if you count them up, there are 6 or 7 competitive seats from the Republican side that Republicans currently hold. And as I mentioned, Democrats need to win four of those. So you’re looking at two-thirds or so of the competitive seats Democrats have to get to pick up the majority if they defend that seat in Michigan—which is not a certainty. I do think the polls are perhaps undercounting, underestimating the Democrats there, but I wouldn’t put money on that. That’s just kind of a hunch based on the polls and other seats.

Krugman: Okay. But let’s talk about Michigan. So we had this extremely contentious primary. And, you know, Charlie Cook shows up in my feed saying Democratic chances of taking the Senate have just evaporated. And then I read you saying that it really doesn’t make a difference or not much of a difference that El-Sayed won. So let’s talk about this. There are interesting methodological differences.

Morris: I guess the great Charlie Cook would have said that, yeah.

Look, I think there’s a real lack of epistemic humility when it comes to Abdul El-Sayed’s chance of winning Michigan. There is a lot of conventional wisdom out there that, you know, let’s just say it: like a Muslim candidate cannot win the US Senate in Michigan, that Medicare for All and other progressive positions are going to drag him down. And frankly, a lot of this punditry comes from those center-left Democrats who should be in favor of those candidates winning. And so there is a sort of shooting-yourself-in-the-foot dynamic there as well. But if you actually look at the polling—and I wrote about this on Strength in Numbers—if you look at those polls pitting Abdul El-Sayed, the current nominee, against Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, and then you compare them to how Haley Stevens would have done in those same horse-race matchup polls, the difference between the two Democratic candidates, or potential Democratic candidates, is statistically indistinguishable from zero. It is, on average, zero. Maybe it’s as big as three in either candidate’s direction. But if you’re Charlie Cook saying Democrats’ chances just evaporated, you are leaning heavily on some other priors or other punditry in saying that and not really the data.

Krugman: So, there’s two aspects to this, one of which I take pretty strong statistical evidence from you and one of which is a kind of “don’t know,” but... One of them is saying El-Sayed is too far to the left, and you basically have said that that’s a dimension that exists in the minds of pundits, but not in the real world or not among voters.

Morris: Yeah, there’s a strategist fallacy here as well. There’s an over-indexing on the perception of Abdul El-Sayed as some radical-left DSA candidate. For the record, he’s not even a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who have been winning so many seats. And there’s a default backlash to the idea that, you know, a more left-than-moderate Democrat could win in Michigan. There’s no similar skepticism, however, about the probability of a far-right Republican winning Michigan—Donald Trump in this case, who just won it. So clearly, this over-indexing on ideology from the pundit class, the strategist class, has, I think, pretty little bearing on the actual electoral outcomes.

Krugman: Yeah. What I take a lot from you is that the idea of, “Well, Medicare for All, that’s kind of a left-wing policy, and people will be against it”—it’s not clear that the public even thinks about it as being a left-wing policy, or even that the public has a left-wing versus right-wing conception except sort of as a caricature vision. So...

Morris: Yeah. A public option for healthcare, if you want to say it that way, polls very well. The 60–65% universal healthcare idea and expanding Medicaid polls at 75–80%. People want more of a government role in health insurance. I just saw a lot of the interviews with younger people in Michigan as well. And, you know, anecdotes are anecdotes, but still, most of the accounts from these young people about why they supported Abdul El-Sayed were healthcare-related—that they wanted some guarantee of health insurance.

So I just think we all carry around a lot of biases in our heads about what’s possible politically. And that has changed a lot over the past decade with rising partisanship and a demand for change from Washington. Just one more statistic, and I’ll wrap up here: In our polling, 60% of people say that the political system needs major structural changes; to be torn down and rebuilt. That is similar to the DSA sentiment about how the economy’s not working, right? So you can imagine why the appeal would be there for the sort of anti-system candidates like Abdul El-Sayed.

Krugman: I’ve always been shocked by polling by the likes of KFF that shows very, very strong public support for Medicaid, very comparable to Medicare. And I’ve always wondered how much of that is because people may not know the difference.

Morris: I couldn’t tell you, but I think your instinct there is the right one. There is a lot of public support for government providing health insurance to people who need it. And then there’s a lot of definition about who needs it from the right, especially in campaigning against these benefits. I know you’ve written a lot about that.

Krugman: Yeah, but it’s interesting. I’d like to say “the public loves Medicaid,” but I’m not entirely sure that people don’t think it’s the same thing as Medicare or, you know, don’t know that one of them is means-tested. But the only thing that gives me pause is I just worry about the idea, “I would have no qualms at all if someone had El-Sayed’s exact same positions, but was named John Smith.”

Morris: Yeah.

Krugman: And no one seems to want to talk about how...

Morris: Yeah, they don’t want to talk about the Muhammad factor of it all. And that seems really relevant to our priors in American politics today. I mean, how many exact same articles were written about how Barack Obama was too far left to become president of the United States? And Barack Obama was not a far-left senator. It should be laughable in hindsight. If he wins and he wins by 5 or 6 points, I think maybe we’ll say a lot of this was all for naught. On the other hand, if he loses, people will point to his ethnicity and name as a reason, and as something Democrats should avoid in the future. I’m sure of that.

Krugman: Yeah. You know, Obama was, in fact, very centrist, very restrained. I sometimes worried that because of his name, he felt that he had to be and that he was too cautious on some of the policy stuff.

Morris: Well, I don’t know the guy.

Krugman: Well, I did, though not a lot. But there were some meetings with economists wanting him to take a harder line on Wall Street, and bankers telling him he mustn’t. And the bankers won all the arguments.

Morris: What else is new?

Krugman: But yeah. And so you actually said, basically, that Stevens vs. El-Sayed makes no difference at all to your probability of the Senate.

Morris: No. And that’s the other thing: If you are really splitting hairs about the probability of winning Michigan, then there is an on-average effect of Abdul El-Sayed winning. It’s on the order of 4 or 5 percentage points. So to spell that out, our current forecast, including Abdul El-Sayed, is for Democrats having a 64 or 65% chance of winning the seat in Michigan. Whereas if you replace the quantitative indicators for El-Sayed, such as the polls and some other factors, with those that you would have in a hypothetical election with Stevens, Stevens has a 69% chance of winning. So there is a five-point difference there.

If, however, what you care about is the chance of controlling the Senate, this is negligible; it is less than one percentage point. Democrats in our forecast have a 55% chance of winning the chamber today. They had a 55% chance of winning the chamber on Monday [before the primary]. And, frankly, according to the quantitative data that we have right now, it just doesn’t matter who that nominee is. But maybe that’ll change, right? Democrats have gotten in some trouble recently nominating candidates who have not been vetted before, not run for office. We don’t know what will happen in the future. But as of right now, it doesn’t seem to matter who that nominee is in Michigan.

Krugman: Okay. So the backdrop to all of this is the unpopularity of Trump and his policies. That’s what makes this a reality. I think that there’s been a noticeable further downleg in Trump’s approval. Is that right?

Morris: Yeah.

Krugman: Is that basically post-Iran, or is there more going on than that?

Morris: Well, the war in Iran definitely eroded support for Trump at the beginning, which I guess was March 1st of this year, where in our average, we had him at a 37% approval rating. Then over the next month, his approval rating fell to the low 36’s. And on the other side, his disapproval rating increased from 55–56% up to 60%. So there was some consolidation, especially in opposition to Trump among those sort of, you know, maybe Trump-skeptical or unsure voters. There has been further degradation since then. I mean, Donald Trump’s approval rating was almost in the 35s a couple of days ago, and his disapproval rating was approaching 62%. It’s since bounced around a little; there’s some noise in the polling data, so the average bounces around a little. But his approval rating is at an all-time low—net of something like -25 or -24.

But what we do is we compare Trump’s approval rating on the issues to whatever Donald Trump’s overall approval rating is on the day the issue surveys are released. And then as Trump’s overall approval rating changes, we predict what an issue approval rating would be given, you know, whatever his approval rating is on that day in the average. So what we’re actually doing is looking at the difference between his issue approval rating on something like prices and his overall rating, and then predicting that, until there’s new issue approval rating data. I mean, at this point, there is issue approval rating data like every couple of days; pollsters have started asking for it. Maybe it seems to get them a lot of attention to publish a really bad number on inflation, for example. So there’s plenty of data, at least on the big issues.

Krugman: Okay, but there’s a kind of ranking of issues which are really bad for Trump and issues which are—at this point, I guess there are none that are really good, but there are degrees of badness. I think anybody can look at your site or at fiftyplusone.news, but tell me what’s kind of worst and best, and what do we know about those.

Morris: Yeah, the “degrees of badness” is a fun way of putting it. You know, I was interviewed by WNYC a couple of hours ago so the numbers are fresh in my head. Trump’s approval rating is somewhere between what Richard Nixon’s was literally the week that he resigned the presidency in disgrace (around 32%) and George W. Bush’s in 2006, the middle of the Iraq War—I think just after the Abu Ghraib scandal—where he was around 38%. So Donald Trump’s ratings today, even with the amount of political polarization we have and the amount of partisan sorting that we’ve had over the past 20 years, has, you know, the approval rating of some of the darkest periods of American history in terms of the evaluations of the president. So it is very bad. I mean, despite what he wants to say on social media about having the best polls ever, he has an almost worst-ever approval rating for any point in a presidency.

Krugman: By the way, the political polarization thing is something not everybody will understand. I mean, what you’re saying is basically that when Richard Nixon was president, people could actually be persuaded—Republicans could actually be persuaded that a Republican president might be bad. And, well, we were thinking that we weren’t in that kind of world anymore. But you’re saying that despite that, we’re kind of getting into there?

Morris: Yeah. The approval rating and Gallup’s tracking for the out-party of the president—so the other party than the president’s party, in this case for Nixon, the Democrats—used to be able to get up as high as 50, 60%. The American voter was just more ideologically flexible and more willing to give credit to presidents of the other party, especially at the beginning of their term when there’s a so-called honeymoon effect for that president right when they start out. Comparatively today, you never see a poll with the out-party of the president approving more than 15%, even at the beginning. And now it’s closer to five. About 5% of Democrats say they approve of how Donald Trump is handling the presidency. I imagine a lot of that, by the way, is like measurement error in identifying who a Democrat is. So...

But the point is, that makes it really hard for a president to have high approval. The president has a higher floor and a much lower ceiling. So it’s really hard to persuade members of the other party to approve of them. Equally, their party members tend to approve of them pretty much regardless of what they do. So the fact that Trump’s approval rating is as low as it was for some of these really dark times in American history—for the presidency, at least—really says something about numbers that low.

Krugman: He started out pretty positive, despite all of this, with immigration, deportations, all of that. And that’s gone negative. Is that just part of the general decline, or is there something special going on with the deportations?

Morris: You know, it is impossible for me to say with the data that we have now whether or not someone would say they disapprove of Trump on immigration now purely because of immigration policy. So I don’t want to overstate the case here, but the fact of the matter is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party had, I think, a 15 percentage point lead on trust to handle immigration and deportations in the 2024 election. And now they’re even or underwater. So, you know, you might want to adjust in your head for the fact that this number is affecting the Republican Party as well; it’s not just Trump overall. It’s probably not just a factor, I would say, of Trump’s approval rating going down overall, because there’s been this other observed trend downward in trust for Republicans. I mean, you’ve been writing a lot about...

Krugman: Trump’s net negative, -25 or so on approval. And the generic ballot is a much narrower spread in favor of Democrats. And that’s from what?

Morris: It’s mostly Republicans who say they disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency—you know, his approval rating overall. But these people are still Republicans, right? Most of them call themselves Republicans and conservatives. The vast majority of those people who say that they will vote for Republicans on the generic ballot, but disapprove of Trump, voted for Trump in 2024. In a couple of columns I’ve called them “closet Republicans.” The fact of the matter is they’re really just Republicans; they may not even be closeted. They say they’ll vote for Republicans again. So we can’t expect every person who disapproves of the president to change how they would vote in a congressional election.

Krugman: It was true for Biden and Democrats, too, in 2022.

Morris: That’s right.

Krugman: Actually, the Democrats did kind of okay in the 2022 midterms.

Morris: Right.

Krugman: Or better than you might have expected, given how unpopular Biden was.

Morris: Yes, yeah.

Krugman: Someone—and I think it’s YouGov—actually breaks Republicans into MAGA and non-MAGA. It’s pretty striking. Basically, the non-MAGA Republicans, which might be something like the group you’re talking about, are in many ways a lot closer in views to independents and Democrats.

Morris: Well, since you’ve mentioned this: In their most recent poll release, either this week or last week, actually, they’ve broken down Trump’s approval rating among Republicans who call themselves MAGA—if you ask them, “Do you identify with the MAGA movement?” I think that’s the wording of the question—and those who don’t. And Trump’s approval rating among non-MAGA Republicans has really degraded. I mean, that is probably responsible for much of, if not most of his degradation in his overall approval rating. But if you look at Trump’s approval rating among non-MAGA Republicans at the beginning of his term, it is almost identical to his approval rating among Republicans who call themselves MAGA. Now today it’s underwater by, I think, 5 or 10 percentage points. So he’s just really lost a lot of ground among that group who doesn’t identify with his movement.

Krugman: You had a map that really caught my eye, and I’m planning to do a little statistics on it myself, where again, this kind of synthetic approach where you try to produce an estimate of what net approval is on deportations—I think it was specifically deportations by state. How is that done? How do you do that?

Morris: In brief, these maps of opinion—so statewide approval rating for this case of deportations—is generated with a statistical model that is called multilevel regression and post-stratification. What we do is we take our national polling data—in this case, ours is Strength in Numbers and my polling partner’s site. And this national polling data is 20,000 people or so. And we look at their demographic characteristics and who they voted for in the last election. And then we predict how every person in a given state—so let’s just say, like Texas—would answer our survey if we had interviewed them instead. And we know the demographic characteristics of Texas from the Census, and we know the political characteristics of Texas by past voting behavior from the last election. So we know that these estimates are rooted in demography and politics. We just balance by congressional district as well, not just at the state level. We actually get a little fancier than that; like, we have local-level knowledge about where these people live and what the political characteristics are in their state. But [talking about] that would be getting pretty weedsy.

Krugman: But if you look at the map, the places where there is still positive approval on deportations is what I think of as—I’m patenting this—”the ICE belt,” which is sort of from Louisiana through West Virginia. If you know anything about the geography of immigration in the United States, these all happen to be places where there are very few immigrants.

But I guess the way you construct it, you aren’t actually directly asking people their views on deportation, so I’m not sure this actually provides an independent check on the hypothesis that people are really hostile to immigration if they’ve never seen an immigrant.

Morris: I will provide you some studies. I was at Pew Research Center in 2017, and someone there was publishing an analysis of whether or not, controlling for all their demographic and political factors, you were more pro-immigrant if you had been around immigrants more. And in this case, they were actually looking at support for building the border wall. And they found that proximity to the border wall actually decreased your support of the border wall. The most pro-border-wall states were Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota—the states furthest away from the US–Mexico border. So that might provide some suggestive evidence for you, Paul.

Krugman: Yeah, because I realized I actually can’t use your data for this, but okay, that would be helpful. I mean, I have my two favorite kinds of email that I do get. One of them is from people, typically actually in the Southwest, not too far from the border, who are very anti-immigration. And I get letters saying, “How would you feel if New York City was full of immigrants?”

Morris: Have they been to New York City?

Krugman: I guess a surprising number of people have not. But the other one is—and this is a little more esoteric, but—”How would you feel if lots of professorship jobs were going to immigrants?” And if you ever looked at the listing of a well-known economics department...

Morris: ...and definitely don’t look at the computer science department of your local public university.

Krugman: Yeah. So it is kind of a funny thing. But I’d like to believe that the familiarity makes you see immigrants as people, but that may be a little too romantic.

Morris: Yeah, might be a little too optimistic, Paul.

Krugman: Okay. What everybody is wondering about is: If the midterms were held today, we can be reasonably sure that Democrats would take the House. Then the Senate is a much harder climb and also more quirky. How much can things change, or how much do the things that we know might change affect it? Historically, how locked in are midterms by this point? I actually don’t know the answer to that.

Morris: I’ll have to do a blog post on that one, because I don’t know the answer to the question in terms of, like, how often does the party that’s ahead end up losing in terms of binary? But the reason that we do these forecasts, at least at Fifty Plus One, is to really contextualize the polls and, along with that, the other information we have about the election. So those fundamental indicators—by which I mean, like, the way a state typically votes and whether or not an incumbent is running—contextualize the expert race ratings from the race raters, people like Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. And the forecast probability on our website takes into account the usual amount of change in the election, or rather, the upper bounds of historical change in the election. That is what our confidence interval, our uncertainty, is for. I mean, the whole reason we really do it is to measure uncertainty in the polls and the other indicators today to see what could happen if they change or are wrong by the amount that the polls have typically changed or been wrong by.

Krugman: Right. So when you say 87%, that’s not 87% Democratic control of the House if the election were held today, right?

Morris: Right. But it does also include that sort of normal further movement against the party holding the White House, but also the uncertainty of events. Our forecast, which is different from some other forecasts out there that you might see, projects the amount of change that there typically is in the generic ballot. So the advantage that the Democrats in this case would get over the course of the election—usually the party out of power gains about a point to two points in the polls between now and November. And that makes a big difference in your estimated probability that in this case the Democrats would win the House and the position that they would have in the Senate by the time November comes around. But that’s just the right way to do it.

There is a chart on our methodology page that shows the trend of the generic ballot over the course of the election year for every midterm going back to 2006. And it is quite stark: at about the 60-day-out mark—so Labor Day—there has always been a 1 to 2 percentage point increase in the polls. Again, patterns break down over time, but that is a pretty safe bet that as people tune into the election, they come to the conclusion that the party that is in charge of the White House does not deserve to be in control of the House. And that’s just typically what has happened.

Krugman: Okay. And my specific concern—you know, people have no idea which party I want to see win! But anyway, my specific concern here is, okay, it’s possible that essentially the US has surrendered and that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen on Iran’s terms and that gasoline prices will come down and all of that. And the question is whether that can really make a big difference in the time remaining before the midterms.

Morris: Well, it would take some amount of time for oil to be shipped back to America if there were refining capacity left.

Krugman: That’s my alley, so I’ve definitely done that one. But, you know, imagine that somehow gas prices were to tumble by $0.50 over the next two months, something like that—which is certainly in the realm of possibility, though might not be the most likely forecast. How much difference could that make to the election?

Morris: Yeah, I wrote about this last Friday. If you game out a return to $3-a-gallon national gas, it looks like that’s worth about ten points in Trump’s net approval on prices, and about a point, maybe two points if you’re really stretching it, in his overall approval rating. And that forecast is based on the change in gas prices that we witnessed through much of June and the change in approval rating that Trump saw in June. He did get a bit of a bounce back in June as the price of gas receded. He did not go all the way back to where he was when gas was whatever price it was at the end of June—I’m just not remembering the exact price of gas at the end of June. Forgive me, forgive me.

Krugman: No, that’s all right. Now I’ll ask you what a gallon of milk costs and we’ll rule the U.S. forever on $1.99, I think.

Morris: Okay, there we go.

Krugman: No, but we’ve had a back and forth—both face-to-face and in sort of interacting blog posts—about public views on the economy generally and what it takes. And I look a little bit at the Biden years, obviously. We had $5 gas for a little while there in 2022, and then the price of gas came way down. Inflation came way down by late 2023. You could have said, “Well, this looks like an okay situation on inflation and gas prices.” But Biden’s approval on the economy never really recovered. And that’s what suggests really long lags here, right?

Morris: Yeah, I think that was the second chart of my blog post from last Friday as well. If you look at how Joe Biden’s approval rating went up by ten points from -20 to -10 from peak inflation, which was I think July 2022, through the next spring in 2023. And then it of course went back down and he had—yeah, he effectively resigned the presidency, right?

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, I think that in some sense the narrative is probably baked in already. People think of Trump as somebody who drove up their cost of living.

Morris: Yeah. You wouldn’t bet that a president would get credit for inflation easing, whether or not it would be CPI or gas prices. Even if I’m oversimplifying our interlocking blog post chains… But what people seem to be reacting to is the pain. And then they remember the pain, even if prices stopped going up by as much as they were going up or indeed go back down. That creates a negative impression in the public’s mind of the person in charge of preventing the bad stuff from happening in the first place.

Krugman: I think you haven’t exactly said this will be a wave election, but you said it sure looks like a wave election. What do you mean by that?

Morris: You can make the title of this podcast, “G. Elliott Morris Says It’s a Wave Election,” and I will back that up statistically.

Krugman: Okay.

You know, we rerun our forecast historically in a backtesting where our forecast predicts, in this case 2018, using only the data that was available to it through the previous election cycle—so 2016—to gauge how our model would have reacted historically on out-of-sample data, the way that it’s reacting or the way it should be reacting this year. When we do that, we predict at this point in the election that Democrats would have had around a 70-75% chance to take the House and no chance to take the Senate in 2018. The map was too far tilted against them back then. Democrats ended up losing, I believe, two seats in the Senate in 2018. Comparatively, we think Democrats have about an 85 to 87% chance of taking the House, and they could very well win back the Senate. So I think that qualifies as a big blue wave, really.

Krugman: Okay, but there’s a world of difference between taking and not taking the Senate.

Morris: Well, and you know, one thing we don’t take into account, to be fair, is Pennsylvania Senator Fetterman changing his party identity—something like that. A sort of real black swan moment without any historical precedents. We just kind of have to caveat that one away; we can’t assign a statistical probability to that. Although, hey, that’s a good blog post idea! Let me see what the forecast would be if you assign a 50% chance to Fetterman changing his party ID if Democrats win. We can run that math.

Krugman: Yeah, again, although that’s something where the difference between 51 and 52 Democratic senators is, you know—sorry, but my own nerdishness says that’s an endogenous variable there.

Morris: Yeah, right. And there’s some weird game theory whether or not he would change his party ID if it meant deciding control of the Senate, right? Perhaps he would be much less likely to do that. He does still mostly vote on Democratic bills, even though he doesn’t necessarily vote against Republican nominees. For example, sometimes he blocks very important cloture motions. But for the most part, he does vote against Donald Trump, I think 90, 95% of the time.

Krugman: Okay, that’s something I didn’t know. That’s interesting, yeah.

Morris: They don’t want to lose a Democratic senator, even if he goes on Fox News every day and creates bad headlines.

Krugman: Okay. There’s a bunch more that I could ask. But actually, just one last thing—I thought that was the last question, but just coming back to Michigan: There was an awful lot of money... the campaign financing was very heavily weighted against El-Sayed, which seems to have made no real difference, right? Is that telling us something about this year? I mean, should we not be worried at all about Elon Musk and Ken Griffin?

Morris: I hate to be the bearer of bad news to you on this front. Money does really seem to matter. At least in primary elections, it really seems to matter, because in primary elections, we as voters don’t have as many partisan or ideological heuristics to fall back on. All right, Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed are both liberal Democrats. Maybe one is more moderate than the other, but you don’t have a conservative running in that race for you to use your ideological identity as a proxy. So money and exposure to advertisements—and especially negative advertisements against the other candidate—can really have an impact.

And I would hazard the guess that the—whatever it was—$55 million spent on Haley Stevens’ campaign, especially in the last week or last two weeks of the campaign, may have even been a reason that the polls so dramatically underestimated her, because they were old by the time the election came around. It costs a couple hundred dollars to change a vote in a Senate election, essentially. So Elon Musk is spending $150 million out there—you can do the math on that. If he’s changing a couple hundred thousand votes in the right places that could really matter if there’s no countervailing spending. Now, in a general election, people have their partisan identities to fall back on, and money is less important. But unfortunately, billionaires spending hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns does seem to matter, and that’s a problem that the Supreme Court has declined to deal with.

Krugman: All right. So I guess our bottom line is Democrats heavily favored to take the House, Senate in play, and we should still be afraid of billionaires.

Morris: Yeah. Democrats favored to take the House. Elon Musk might be kingmaker via his ad spending.

Krugman: Oh dear. Well, could be worse, but all right. Good to know. And thanks for keeping us up to date.

This is the first half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, in particular exploring the principle that armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield. Last time we looked at the importance of generating cohesion in these armies and the ways cohesion could come either organically from the underlying society or be manufactured as part of training (or not be produced at all, resulting in less effective armies).

To close out this week, I wanted to provide some examples – each relatively brief – pulling the factors we’ve discussed (recruitment principles, mobilization methods, dealing with costs, leadership and cohesion sources) into coherent military systems that emerge organically from their underlying civilian society. And since this series was always intended as ‘one for the world-builders,’ I figured the best way to do this would be to take some fictional militaries, examine them along the lines above and see what (if anything) is necessary to fix them so that the underlying civilian society and the military it generates ‘matches.’

In a lot of cases, these are going to be fictional militaries we’ve looked at before, so a lot of this will be overlapping with more detailed treatments (which I’ll link) but also we’ll get some new stuff.

In the end, I had enough examples I wanted to work through that I opted to split this last part in two. So in this part we’re going to be taking apart some examples of matching up (or struggling to do so) army and society in literature (namely my perennials, A Song of Ice and Fire and The Lord of the Rings). Then in the second half, we’ll break some new ground and look at some examples out of video games that deviate from some of the classic ‘medieval fantasy’ patterns: the standing legions of the Empire of Cyrodiil, the oddly (but interestingly) bifurcated urban defense force of Baldur’s Gate and finally some private enterprise war in the Deadfire Archipelago.

I want to be clear, the goal here is not to praise or tear down any of these examples, but to explore them, to practice thinking about how the fiction armies and societies do and don’t match. I’ve tried to avoid here picking any example that is actively really bad (thus a preference for A Song of Ice and Fire (the books), for instance, over Game of Thrones (the show)).

But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to ~~recruits~~ readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Westeros and Fragmented Vassalage-Based Polities

So my critiques of some of the ‘realistic’ worldbuilding of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones (and spinoffs) are not new. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with enjoying these stories; rather my critiques emerged in a period – now largely passed, thankfully – where it was common to claim that George R.R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities. But that era is largely passed and my sense is that the ASoIaF/GoT community largely now understands that Westeros is not necessarily the gold-standard for ‘realistic’ medieval fantasy societies. So I don’t bring this up first to bash GRRM, but rather because (unlike Middle Earth, as we’ll see) it represents close to a ‘pure’ example (notionally) of a fragmented, vassalage-based polity.

The Lannister army from the show in the field. If the books are a little off the mark, this depiction is **wildly** off the mark: this army, with neat regular blocks of men in uniform equipment marching in neat order with a heavy emphasis on heavy infantry over cavalry or light infantry, **this is the army of a wealthy, well-administered, urban state**: all things we are **explicitly** told Westeros in general and the Lannister westerlands in particular are not (remember: in the show, at least, Lannister gold ran out some time ago).

So first we should begin with the underlying society. Westeros as we see it is a complex agrarian society – that is there is quite a lot of specialization, but this is a distinctly pre-modern society in which the vast majority of the population is still engaged in agriculture or pastoralism. Now I find that Martin’s depiction of the ‘smallfolk’ – ably summed up by the Wiki – is a bit frustrating as it is mostly a collection of aristocratic stereotypes about peasants, but nevertheless this is clearly a society where the bulk of the population is a largely demilitarized peasantry. In short, it is supposed to resemble high or late medieval Europe. Above the smallfolk is a hereditary landed aristocracy which fashions itself a ‘knightly’ (mounted military) warrior aristocracy, structured through vassalage. The social distance between these two groups is yawning: Westerosi aristocrats have more in common with other aristocrats half a continent away than they do with the peasants out of their front door.¹ That social distance is not a worldbuilding problem, mind you; we see that kind of ‘trans-national’ elite (keeping in mind these aren’t nation-states so we’re using the word ‘national’ rather loosely) in a number of pre-modern societies. A French nobleman often did have more culturally in common with an English nobleman than he did with his own peasants and indeed in some cases a mounted Christian European military aristocrat might find he had more in common with a mounted Muslim military aristocrat from the Middle East than either had with their own peasants too.

So far, so good. But – as I’ve noted a few times before – when we see the armies of these polities, both in the books and in the show, they do not derive organically from this society at all. Westeros produces very large, surprisingly uniform armies which are not obviously organized into the retinues of smaller lords but rather function as large field armies tied explicitly to the largest vassals of the crown. Moreover, very large proportions of these armies are infantry (especially in the show, where the Lannister, Tyrell and Stark armies are almost entirely infantry!), composed of massed peasant soldiers. They’re also broadly uniformly equipped, often with recognizable liveries.

Likewise from the show, the Tyrell house guard. This (except for the very silly helmets) is a bit easier to talk around because the unit we see is so small, one might explain it as a small standing unit of retainers or mercenaries (but then why use that instead of the large numbers of military aristocrats one spends so much time retaining?). But I think we’re meant to take this too as indicative of what House Tyrell’s army looks like – neatly identical soldiers in identical equipment (and **heavy** armor). Again, at scale this is a kind of army House Tyrell is structurally incapable of producing: it doesn’t have the administration or revenues to build or buy it and it doesn’t have a large wealthy yeoman freeholder class to devolve the cost onto Roman-Republic-style.

In short, these resemble the armies we would expect of large, extensively administered state-based societies.

But, and I have to stress this extremely strongly, Westeros does not have a state. It was not a state under the Targaryens (they make no effort to consolidate control of the various House armies) and it sure as heck isn’t a state under the Baratheons who are even weaker in terms of central power.

So what ought we see? Well, let’s return to that underlying society.

The core of these armies are going to be that mounted military aristocracy. It’s possible in some regions (the north, perhaps?) the aristocrats might also fight on foot, but we’re still looking at the aristocracy. Now the core landed aristocracy is going to be really small, but what is going to expand out this class are two kinds of soldier that GRRM has largely neglected: unlanded knights bachelor and non-aristocratic ‘men at arms’ (men who fight like knights but do not have the social status of knights). GRRM has some unlanded knights, but not many – but in this sort of society, such men are going to be ubiquitous in the households of those landed elites.

After all, most of the wealth in this society is held by a landed military aristocracy (the lords) who want to develop private military force and lack a state, so they’re going to do so in their household, by retaining (as retainers) full time warriors. And in this society, we see very clearly that full time warriors are almost invariably mounted heavy cavalrymen. So while the number of lords and their families is small, they can retain a bunch of non-noble heavy cavalrymen as part of the retinues, though we’re still dealing with armies that are likely much smaller than the massive armies Martin reports: whereas Martin has armies reaching the upper tens of thousands, we might instead expect the armies of the most powerful houses to at best be fielding a few thousand to perhaps 10,000 or so mounted men at arms.

The new House of the Dragon series **keeps doing this**: here is the Hightower Army and again it is a long line of uniformly equipped heavy infantry, a kind of army this society is incapable of producing. While the books are not always better than the show, when it comes to understanding what kinds of armies can exist in this world…the books are generally better than the show.

In short, to use our typology, our first component here is a retainer-based army composed of a warrior class, recruited on a vocational principle, with military costs largely devolved (these guys or their lords purchase their horses and armor as a private expense). Cohesion is provided through a mix of warrior-class cohesion, probably combined with collective training in small cavalry units within those noble households. We probably ought to expect these men to perform quite well on the battlefield, given how strong that cohesive bond is likely to be.

Now, below this, every army needs infantry, especially because – as noted above – the cavalry components of these armies are still small. But those major Houses didn’t just become states when it was time to equip their infantry, so the infantry – drawn from the commons – is going to be recruited also using non-state structures. That means that equipment and wage costs also have to be substantially devolved, because none of these polities has the administrative infrastructure to handle the complexity of these costs (note that this is as much or more a question of complexity as about raw revenues!).

That leaves the warlords of Westeros essentially two options and we might expect them to use both: they can raise their own peasants or they can hire mercenaries.

If they raise their own peasants, this is going to be clientage principle recruitment, because the administration isn’t there for an employment-based system and the smallfolk don’t have any political entitlements to tie to military service anyway (notably Westeros lacks enfranchised little urban republics to provide urban militias). We should thus expect costs to be devolved, probably using a brigaded household model simply because the smallfolk seem too poor to expect individual households to furnish a man with his equipment. Nevertheless, the equipment that results from this is going to be both poor and non-standard (it would be hard to tell a Tyrell peasant-soldier from a Lannister peasant-soldier if you saw one on the road). And the cohesion principle is pretty obviously weak: these guys don’t have a strong corporate identity and their masters cannot afford to keep them under arms long enough to drill them. They’ll get to the battlefield, but often perform poorly. And because we have to brigade a bunch of households to get a soldier, we should still expect the numbers here to be smaller: low tens of thousands, not mid- or high- tens of thousands.

Ok, credit where due: **I actually can buy that the North might produce an army that looks like this**. The North doesn’t seem to share the same martial culture as southern Westeros (though to judge by Ned Stark’s children, by *ASoIaF*, some of the mythology around that kind of warfare is filtering in) and so I can imagine that it might have a military aristocracy that fights on foot. Notably **their equipment is not uniform** because we’re still devolving equipment costs and so each fellow has acquired his own armor, though that’s enough similarity between them that we get some sense that they are all thinking about the same heavy infantry tactical system.
The real problem is how **drab** they are. These are men of importance and station! They’re wearing **expensive** equipment! They would want to look nice!

The alternative would be mercenary infantrymen, recruited en bloc (likely via contractors) using an employment principle and paid in cash. Since these houses don’t have a lot of revenue because they have very limited state capacity, their ability to engage these fellows is also going to be quite limited, but it isn’t hard to imagine how valuable they’d be, especially for providing specific military skills that aren’t ‘mounted military aristocrat,’ which obviously the peasant levies will also generally lack. If there were polities in Westeros that produced good infantry – because they had tight civic militias or other strong communal structures – we should expect them to be in heavy demand as mercenaries, just as Greek hoplites or Swiss pikemen were in their day. Good infantry, after all, is nice to have, but the Great Houses of Westeros are structurally largely incapable of producing good infantry at scale.

In short the military that flows from Westeros social organization is meaningfully different than the one Martin imagines. It is much smaller (no 100,000 man strong Tyrell armies!), more fragmented and much less ‘regular.’ Not only does the king have to care what Tywin Lannister thinks, but Twyin Lannister has to care what Lord Broom thinks and Lord Broom has to care what his retainers think and so on. Tywin’s Lannister army would likely be broken up into dozens of irregularly sized and structured retinues (of which his own would be the largest). Notably, ‘landless knights’ would be a key commodity in this system, an essential military resource that everyone with land and money is trying to attract (which in turn means those retainers have some bargaining power too), in part because none of these fellows will have a lot of faith in their poorly and irregularly equipped, weakly motivated infantry.

Crucially, this is a society defined by low state capacity (because it is, in fact a non-state society), which limits what the king and his lords can do at almost every turn.

Now to be clear, I don’t want to make it sound like Westeros – particularly the Westeros of the books – is a complete failure here. I think we could actually bring the armies of Westeros into line with their underlying society with fairly modest changes: shrink both the world size and the armies to a scale that fits a personalistic, vassalage based mobilization system and acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale (lacking the revenues to recruit mercenaries or the social systems to effectively mobilize their peasantry), so they’re going to rely on their cavalry, which is in turn going to put sharp limits on the kind of warfare they wage. Finally, we’d want to flesh out the class of mounted man-at-arms and landless knight – present in Martin’s writing, but less common perhaps than they ought to be.² The resulting world would feel smaller (it would be smaller) but that makes sense: these sorts of polities and their military systems do not durably scale.

Infantry and Cavalry in Rohan

I’d argue we can see a ‘heavy cavalry culture’ done a bit better with the Lord of the Rings‘ Rohirrim, although with the caveat that Tolkien is developing something closer to an early medieval society which still retains a relatively strong (perhaps fading) infantry tradition, as opposed to Westeros’ distinctively late medieval (or really early modern) sense; these are as we’ll see fundamentally quite different societies and as a result they produce different armies (albeit I think the armies of Rohan are more tightly fitted to their society).

Once again, we should sketch out Rohan’s society first. This is also a complex agrarian society, albeit less complex than Westeros and seemingly with a fair bit more pastoralism (in the form of ranching or fairly short-range transhumance, given that this society still lives in villages, rather than nomadic pastoralism). Military power is still somewhat fragmented in this society – men like Éomer and Erkenbrand appear to have some independent access to military force (they have their own retinues)³ but this is both a smaller and ironically more centralized kingdom than Westeros, but what make sit similar in a lot of ways is that state capacity remains low.

What I mean by that is that while on the one hand Théoden’s authority over his subordinates remains notionally higher (Tywin Lannister is a more independent figure than Erkenbrand, by custom and general understanding), Théoden still lacks anything like an administrative apparatus or bureaucracy and instead has to rule through his aristocracy. What’s different and thus what makes Rohan a bit more centralized in its structure is that Théoden has more latitude to hand-pick the top level of that organization chart, the three Marshals of the Mark (he initially picks himself, his son and his nephew, with his son being replaced by Erkenbrand after Théodred was killed), rather than being stuck with a specific local mega-aristocrat (like Tywin Lannister, Mace Tyrell, etc. etc.). Those commands (which historically are what will evolve into the highest reaches of the ‘feudal’ European nobility) are not yet wholly hereditary, though the fact that command in the Westmark immediately devolves to Erkenbrand Lord of the Westfold (the largest chunk of the Westmark)⁴ may suggest that, in the absence of a suitable member of the royal house, there’s a strong expectation that overall leadership ought to fall to a major local aristocrat.

As an aside, the fact that Rohan, resembling an early medieval kingdom is more effectively centralized than Westeros, which resembles a late medieval kingdom, should serve as a useful reminder that historical processes like centralization do not proceed only in one direction. It is not always the case that later societies have more centralization or administrative capacity.

We also need to talk about the situation of common folk of the Rohirrim. We don’t see much of them, but there are some assumptions I think we can make (which largely conform to Tolkien’s own pretty obvious Anglo-Saxon inspiration for these fellows). First, the Rohirrim aristocracy strikingly present themselves as having more culturally in common with their commonfolk than with neighboring aristocrats: they have their own language (that is, the aristocracy has not abandoned Rohanese for Westron) and their own internal term for themselves (an endonym) as Eorlingas, ‘people of Eorl’ which appears to include the commonfolk. Notably, the aristocracy, while clearly large landowners, do not appear to be titled: apart from Théoden King himself no one gets hereditary titles appended to their names (the Marshals being appointed positions). They also have a muster of all able-bodied men, implying a tradition of universal military service and thus a peasantry (I’m including their shepherds here) that hasn’t been entirely demilitarized. That last point matters a lot and signals, I think, quite a different underlying social structure than the one we see in Westeros.

This arming scene is a major emotional point in Peter Jackson’s film and it makes sense that in the context of a siege, the lord’s (in this case, the unseen Erkenbrand) armory is being emptied out to equip as many men as possible, but we ought probably to have seen a lot of these fellows show up with equipment. We know that Rohirrim armies regularly include infantry (even if their strength is in cavalry) and that infantry must come from somewhere – given the limited administration, the only real option is a self-equipping yeomanry.
We might then, in a desperate moment like this, not only see the lord’s armory emptied out, but individual middling-peasant households passing around old or surplus equipment to friends and relatives (pulling old arms and armor out of temple storerooms where they had been dedicated for last-ditch defenses was a standard trope of ancient Greek and Roman warfare, for instance).

Taken together, what I think we’re looking at is a landholder aristocracy governing a society mostly of free peasants rather than serfs. In something akin to the Carolingian system, there is probably a property line which makes a landowner liable for cavalry service (which thus defined the lower bound of the aristocracy), while landowners below that level are liable for infantry service (a ‘select levy’) and landowners much above that level are expected to furnish not only themselves but a larger retinue (thus we hear of the ‘knights of the king’s house’ and Marshals of the Mark having an Éored (120 mounted men) as part of their household). We should probably also assume a substantial number of farmers or herders who are simply considered too poor to serve (possibly expected to supply men for garrison service on a brigaded household model or as part of a ‘general levy’ in a local crisis).

Now as with the example above, Peter Jackson’s adaptation is not a one-to-one reproduction of the armies of the books (as we’ll see with his use of plate armor for Gondor), but I think this shot actually captures the sense the books give of Rohan’s society really well because we have a mix of all three of our fighting social strata here. In the back, around Théoden we have some military aristocrats in quite fine armor – full time combatants who would normally be on horseback. Farther forward, we see some fellows in less resplendent but still fairly heavy scale armor, with helmets and I would guess these are our ‘select levy’ of well-to-do peasants who might have been infantry as part of a field army. And then finally, towards the center, we have some fellows who lack cuirasses or helmets, who probably represent our ‘general levy’ of all able-bodied men.

The military organization then flows that social structure. The aristocracy fight at mounted heavy cavalry and are organized into retinues around the major magnates who on the one hand derive their wealth from large landholding but on the other hand owe their official positions to the king.⁵ We meet a fair number of these magnates (Erkenbrand, Grimbold, Elfhelm, along with of course Éomer and Théodred). There is a clear preference in these appointments, when not granted to a man of the king’s family, to use someone local: Erkenbrand commands in the West-mark because he is from the West-mark. Éomer will end up making Elfhelm command in the East-mark and by all indications Elfhelm is from the East-mark as well, given that he was in Éomer’s retinue as Third Marshal of the Riddermark with that geographic area of command.

Via the still amazing LOTR Project’s Map of Middle Earth, a map of Rohan. Note that the Westfold is only a smaller subunit of the West-mark which seems to have included all of the lands west of the Entwash except those around Edoras itself (while the East-mark seems to have covered the eastern part of the kingdom).

Meanwhile, as I noted back in the Helm’s Deep series, we get a better sense of what we might term the ‘select levy’ of Rohan (the infantry force kept in the field by Erkenbrand) as well as the ‘general levy’ of all able-bodied men who have fled to Helm’s Deep. We’re pretty clearly told that the levies of Rohan are raised geographically (Erkenbrand has the Westfold’s men, who have a distinct sub-regional identity as ‘Westfolders’ and the ‘musters’ are by region); we don’t see the lower levels of command but there’s no reason to assume they’re not like the higher levels: local magnates lead the levies from their home area. That in turn explains the cohesive principle we see: when the Rohirrim get into trouble – common infantry and aristocratic cavalry alike – they invariably ‘clump up’ around the magnates, which suggest pretty close civilian ties. It makes sense: where do the regular infantrymen go when things are bad? The men of their village clump up together around their village leader (the local Big Man) who is also their unit commander and who they know fairly well. The comparative lack of social distance – implied by the common culture, language and lack of titles above – matters here for making this kind of cohesion work.

So my read on Rohan is that it is a complex, non-state agrarian/pastoralist polity, with a freeholding farmer class (a yeomanry) recruited regionally under a cultural norm of universal military service (at least for landholders), with an elite class that understands itself as a mounted military aristocracy (recruited as a warrior class, defined by wealth), where the cohesive principle is probably tight clientage ties between the infantry and their magnates and then horizontal ties between the magnates and each other. But that works because these fellows seem to actually know each other (in contrast, for instance, to the far more insulated noble class in Westeros).⁶ In terms of cost, this is clearly a system where costs are devolved, but the sense we get, given the performance of Rohan’s infantry against Saruman, has to be that the infantry class has preserved a bit more of their wealth against the aristocracy, again leading to somewhat better infantry, although it is worth noting that outside of the king’s immediate retinue, Rohan’s army is not uniform in its equipment.

Men of Gondor

Unsurprisingly, I think that Gondor – particularly book!Gondor in The Lord of the Rings is also an effective example of matching a military to its underlying society, but it is particularly interesting here because it is a composite force: different components are recruited under different principles, equipped differently, probably paid differently and so on. For large states, composite forces were very common.

And Gondor (at least under the last steward, Denethor II), is a composite polity and has a composite army to match. Gondor is also a complex, agrarian society, but a fair bit more complex than Rohan, with quite a few proper cities (Minas Tirith, of course, but also Pelargir, Dol Amroth and others) and evidently a fair bit of specialization. If the model for Rohan seems to have been Anglo-Saxon England, the model for Gondor seems to me fairly clearly to be the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, complete with a beacon system, and something like the tagmata and theme systems. Given the level of organization we see – Denethor is capable of large-scale building projects (like the repair of the Rammas Echor), substantial mobilizations (including the orderly evacuation of the Pelennor Fields) and maintaining a standing military force – I tend to conclude that Gondor is a state society, albeit that state power has frayed quite a bit around the edges (and of course part of the story is that it will be reasserted by Aragorn as king). Though we never see them, I think we ought to safely assume Denethor has some bureaucracy in addition to his military command structure, which lets him direct Gondor’s efforts from his high hall.

In particular, Gondor is split between the core territory around its capital and its subordinate regions, described as ‘fiefs’ and evidently entrusted to the control of a particular lord. Frustratingly, of these lords, the only one for which we can be sure we know how lordship is assigned is that of Belfalas, governed by the hereditary Prince of Dol Amroth (Prince Imrahil at the time of the War of the Ring), who has a different title from all of the other regional leaders but we do get references to these fellows equipping men out of their households, so I think we should understand them as local rulers who are vassals to Minas Tirith rather than appointed officials. So we have a core state with autonomous vassals making up its periphery; in this case the core state is geographically fairly small but clearly makes up the bulk of the military power: despite Minas Tirith’s long decline, it is a major population and economic center.

And lo! the military system basically follows from that political structure.

Because Gondor has a state at the core of its polity with the resources to manage massive construction projects and the like, he has a substantially wider range of options for the kind of military it will have. And it ends up having a bit of everything: a standing military centered on Minas Tirith but also a mix of other military systems drawn from its constituent regions.

First, the core of Gondor’s armies seem pretty clearly to be a standing, professional force, albeit perhaps not a very large one. The two components we see very clearly are the Guards of the Citadel and the Rangers of Ithilien. The Guards of the Citadel are pretty explicitly a professional force: Beregond is explicit that he is not any kind of aristocrat, but is still a full-time soldier in the Third Company of the Citadel (RotK 42). Given the fact that they are left effectively permanently deployed, it seems like the Rangers of Ithilien are similarly a professional force. To reach a little father, in Unfinished Tales (260 fn. 17) we get a title, “ohtar” for a “fully trained and experienced” footsoldier who was not, however, a knight, which also suggests to me (alongside Beregond’s use of the phrase ‘man at arms’ to seemingly mean the same: a man for whom war was a profession) that Minas Tirith has a substantial body of professional infantry at the core of its armies. We’re quite explicitly told that at least the Guards of the Citadel are equipped at state expensive, for they have a unique livery, but honestly it seems likely to me that the whole of this professional force was state-equipped, which is why we’re told that the livery is unique (in design and materials), rather than being told that these men were unique by having an issued livery at all.

Doubtless in an emergency this would be supplemented by drawing up the rest of the able-bodied male populace, but we’re not given a clear sense for the city of what that would look like. I find myself wondering if under normal circumstances, since Gondor is almost always in some kind of low-intensity conflict with Mordor, if the professional core wasn’t always supplemented by rotating conscription or some kind of reserve among the men of the city.

Peter Jackson has taken some larger liberties with Gondor’s infantry. For one, he’s made them almost entirely uniform (except for the Guards of the Citadel), when we’re told in the books quite explicitly they are not. But he’s also put them in plate armor, which is effectively unknown in Middle Earth, as Tolkien resolutely sticks to an early medieval military material culture milieu where scale and mail represent the best available armor.
That said, I can believe that Gondor does have some professional, state-equipped heavy infantry – indeed, we’re told they have at least three companies of it in the Guards of the Citadels and presumably more ‘regular’ soldiers beyond those.

Then we have the forces of Gondor’s fiefs and here it is useful to just reproduce the passage in which they show up:

The men of Ringló Vale behind the son of their lord, Dervorin striding on foot: three hundreds. From the uplands of Morthond, the great Blackroot Vale, tall Duinhir with his sons, Duilin and Derufin, and five hundred bowmen. From the Anfalas, the Langstrand far away, a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen without a captain. Fisher-folk of the Ethir, some hundred or more spared from the ships. Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. And last a proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with […] a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came. (RotK, 46)

I should note that, in a slightly earlier passage, we also get Forlong the Fat, Lord of Lossarnach, with “a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes.”

What I love about this passage is that it not only applies our principle of militaries reflecting their civilian societies to Gondor itself – a composite kingdom has a composite army – but it also applies it to the component parts! One gets the sense that Belfalas (with its big city at Dol Amroth) are the most state-like of the fiefs and so they have an army that looks at lot like Minas Tirith’s army: a company (about a hundred) mounted knights, matched by seven hundred men-at-arms which – given their contrast between the other groups, I think we ought to understand as also being professionals, or at least well-trained in addition to well-equipped. By contrast, from the hill country of Morthond, we get five hundred bowmen led by what is evidently a ‘family affair’ of rule there, given that it is Duinhir with his two sons commanding them: a smaller, poorer community that fights in a way that fits with coming from a hard-scrabble kind of place.

Via the still amazing LOTR Project’s Map of Middle Earth, a map of Gondor with many of the component ‘regions ‘fiefs’ labeled.

We get some class-divisions too, particularly from Anfalas, where the great mass of men – presumably a poor peasant levy – are poorly armed saved for the household guard of their lord. Of course that strongly suggests that outside of Minas Tirith, Belfalas and perhaps Lossarnach (which seem to have fairly uniform equipment and perhaps represent the remains of the decaying Gondorian ‘state’ with professional troops and state-issued arms), these fellows are equipping themselves and that most of the costs of their service have likely been devolved either onto the men themselves or their lords (and quite evidently Golasgil has opted to spend those resources on his household guard and not on the rest of his troops; one wonders how that decision will play with the newly crowned King Elessar).

Notably, this is very clearly an infantry-focused force. That makes quite a bit of sense too, because Gondor is substantially more urban than Rohan or, for that matter, Westeros.⁷ The more urban societies get, the more infantry-focused they tend to be, for the obvious reason that raising horses requires a lot of space. Even though it is clear that Gondor’s population has declined, its military tradition still remains infantry focused (with cavalry support) and that too is a product of its economic and cultural structures (urban and state-based).

And again, because the infantry matter, this society can develop cohesion in them: for the professional core, that is probably a professional cohesion. One imagines the Guards of the Citadel are quite stubborn on the battlefield given that we see how intense their professional ethos of obedience to orders goes. On the other-hand, for many of the men of the fiefs, they arrive at Minas Tirith in fairly small, relatively tight groups, organized around leaders that are quite evidently familiar to them. One imagines that the bowmen of Morthond, for instance, probably all know each other and are tightly connected by bonds of clientage to their lord and his sons (notice that he doesn’t have a household guard – this militia is his army).

So we have a range of components, each with its own likely methods of recruitment and supply. We have a core of professionals, equipped by the state, housed and presumably trained together, with an appropriately professional cohesive principle, supported by levies recruited locally, with their costs devolved onto local lords and relying on organic cohesion arising out of their common communal bonds.

The result is something of a messy composite army rather than a ‘cookie-cutter’ army that is unrealistically uniform. And that’s probably more or less right: even the Romans, close to the gold-standard for pre-modern military organization west of the Ganges were never perfectly uniform and always made use of the forces of allies, client kings and subject peoples, creating composite forces.

Next time, we’ll keep this going by turning to look at some societies and armies from video games that, as noted, deviate a bit more from the ‘standard’ medieval fantasy pattern and think a bit about standing professional armies, urban militias and military contractors in substantially more complex state societies.