Hard as it can be to define the best strategies for one’s party, it’s also imporant–and fun–to mock the other party’s strategic thinking. I had a chance to do that this week at New York:
Hanging over all the audacious steps taken so far this year by Donald Trump and his Republican Party has been the fact that voters will get a chance to respond in 2026. The midterm elections could deny the GOP its governing trifecta and thus many of its tools for imposing Trump’s will on the country. Indeed, one reason congressional Republicans ultimately united around Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was the sense that they needed to get all the policy victories they could in one fell swoop before the tough uphill slog to a likely midterm defeat began. No one had to be reminded that midterm House losses by the president’s party are a rule with rare exceptions. With Republicans holding a bare two-seat majority (temporarily three due to vacancies created by deaths), the gavel of Speaker Mike Johnson must feel mighty slippery in his hands.
But if only to keep their own spirits high, and to encourage fundraising, Republican voices have been talking about how they might pull off a midterm miracle and hang on to the trifecta. A particularly high-profile example is from former RNC political director Curt Anderson, writing at the Washington Post. Anderson notes the unhappy precedents and professes to have a new idea in order to “defy history.” First, however, he builds a big straw man:
“[I]t’s always the same story. And the same conventional campaign wisdom prevails: Every candidate in the president’s party is encouraged by Washington pundits and campaign consultants to run away from the national narrative. They are urged to follow instead House Speaker Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill Jr.’s famous axiom that ‘all politics is local’ and to think small and focus on homegrown issues.”
Actually, nobody who was really paying attention has said that since ol’ Tip’s retirement and death. As Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution has explained, presidential and congressional electoral trends made a decisive turn toward convergence in 1994, mostly because the ideological sorting out of both parties was beginning to reduce reasons for ticket splitting. And so, returning to a pattern that was also common in the 19th century, 21st-century congressional elections typically follow national trends even in midterms with no presidential candidates offering “coattails.” So in making the following prescription, Anderson is pushing on a wide-open door:
“[T]o maintain or build on its current narrow margin in the House, the Republican Party will have to defy historical gravity.
“The way to do that is not to shun Trump and concentrate on bills passed and pork delivered to the locals, but to think counterintuitively. Republicans should nationalize the midterms and run as if they were a general election in a presidential year. They should run it back, attempting to make 2026 a repeat of 2024, with high turnout.”
Aside from the fact that they have no choice but to do exactly that (until the day he leaves the White House and perhaps beyond, no one and nothing will define the GOP other than Donald Trump), there are some significant obstacles to “rerunning” 2024 in 2026.
There’s a lazy tendency to treat variations in presidential and midterm turnout as attributable to the strength or weakness of presidential candidates. Thus we often hear that a sizable number of MAGA folk “won’t bother” to vote if their hero isn’t on the ballot. Truth is, there is always a falloff in midterm turnout, and it isn’t small. The 2018 midterms (during Trump’s first term) saw the highest turnout percentages (50.1 percent) since 1914. But that was still far below the 60.1 percent of eligible voters who turned out in 2016, much less the 66.4 percent who voted in 2020. Reminding voters of the identity of the president’s name and party ID isn’t necessary and won’t make much difference.
What Anderson seems focused on is the fact that in 2024, for the first time in living memory, it was the Republican ticket that benefited from participation by marginal voters. So it’s understandable he thinks the higher the turnout, the better the odds for the GOP in 2026; that may even be true, though a single election does not constitute a long-term trend, and there’s some evidence Trump is losing support from these same low-propensity voters at a pretty good clip. At any rate, the message Anderson urges on Republicans puts a good spin on a dubious proposition:
“The GOP should define the 2026 campaign as a great national battle between Trump’s bright America First future and its continuing promise of secure borders and prosperity, versus the left-wing radicalism — open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests and biological men competing in women’s sports — that Democrats still champion. Make it a referendum on the perceived new leaders of the Democratic Party, such as far-left Reps. Jasmine Crockett (Texas) or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York).”
Without admitting it, Anderson points to the single biggest problem for Republicans: They don’t have a Democratic incumbent president or a Democratic Congress to run against. Jasmine Crockett is not, in fact, running in Pennsylvania, where she is likely unknown, and even AOC is a distant figure in Arizona. Democrats aren’t going to be running on “open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests or biological men competing in women’s sports” at all. And Republicans aren’t going to be running on “Trump’s bright America First future” either; they’ll be running on the currently unpopular Trump megabill and on economic and global conditions as they exist in 2026. Democrats could benefit from a final surge of Trump fatigue in the electorate and will almost certainly do well with wrong-track voters (including the notoriously unhappy Gen-Z cohort) who will oppose any incumbent party.
Whatever happens, it won’t be a 2024 rerun, and the best bet is that the precedents will bear out and Republicans will lose the House. A relatively small group of competitive races may hold down Democratic gains a bit, but unless an unlikely massive wave of prosperity breaks out, Hakeem Jeffries is your next Speaker and Republicans can worry about what they’ll do when Trump is gone for good.
I agree with the above comments. They are pragmatic and realistic given the current political landscape.
I think the party can moderate some of its views and more importantly, its image, on abortion, guns, and gay marriage while still maintiaining New Deal principles, such as fiscal conservatism,social security and coherent internationalism. Also, we need to distance ourselves from the Hollywood set. It only confirms suspicions that Dems are a bunch of hedonists out to destroy family values. Again, these are image issues, but frankly, image is what sells politics to most voters.
Some call it Republican lite, I call it winning for a change.
Agreed Gabby.
And what I find particularly galling is that even many of the left’s otherwise fairly eloquent theorists and pundits are extremely quick to criticize the Democrats if they diverge even in the slightest way from the New Deal orthodoxy.
Thomas Frank’s book on cultural conservatism makes many good points (particularly about the conservatives’ persecutorial paranoia), but he seems, quite honestly, to be committing the same fallacy he accuses the Kansas Republicans of committing in reverse: he refuses to consider that any person might honestly decide that economics matters less to him than other issues. In Mr Frank’s perfect world, all the rich are Republicans, and all the poor are Democrats.
But this ignores a very basic fact: that it is possible to see the world in terms other than your own advancement. By his logic, I should be a Republican. After all, I’m from a well-to-do neighborhood and would benefit (in the short term anyway) from Bush’s tax cuts. But I’m not a Republican, because to be a Republican I would have to ignore the fact that what’s good for me is actually bad for the rest of the country. While the conservatives’ state of “perpetual victimhood” indeed makes no sense, he refuses to admit that a rational choice may in fact be taking place, albeit in a very strange, prejudicial way.
He also has also been seduced by the far-left myth that the DLC is the Republican Fifth Column in the Democratic party. He seems to blame the DLC for the decline of unions, rather than noting the increasing dissapearance of manufacturing jobs, where unions were most common. He claims the DLC hungers only for the vast soft money in the pockets of the social moderates, despite the fact that McCain-Feingold outlawed this practice even as he wrote the book. He also claims, strangely, that Democrats have backed deregulation and privatization, but offers no examples to prove this assertion. I for one cannot think of a single instance in which Republican deregulation or privatization plans found many friends on the other side of the aisle. Al Gore, if I remember correctly, called the Republican Social Security privatization racket “much too risky.” Hardly the words of a “pawn of business.” Frank also seems content to ignore the failed Clinton health care proposals of 1994, and the Kerry health care proposals of 2004, whose focus on egalitarian access runs strongly counter to the typical corporate line of social Darwinism.
Labor unions were, and still are, an extremely useful engine for progressive change, but to blame their decline on the DLC is simply silly. More likely, it was the oft-repeated right-wing myth of their ties to the Mafia and their corruption that convinced some workers to abandon the unions that had given them so much. The task for the future will be to introduce unions to the service sector, where the vast majority of the working poor are now employed. If this is done, a resurgent labor movement could perhaps wrest some of those blue-collar conservatives from their cultural fears.
I find it rather dissapointing. A brilliant dissection of the far-right’s victimhood fantasies coupled with an inability to see the Democrats as anything but the “union party.” His willfull blindness to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs (coupled with Republican whisper campaigns about unions’ alleged corruption) allows him to blame the “right-wing” DLC for unions’ decline.
The Democrats never left the unions, the union workers just got fired or laid off (manufacturing jobs declined every year after 1960), and the labor movement never really tried to court the new working poor (service workers). That’s changing, thank goodness, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him say that my party abandoned unions. It’s just not true.
Unfortunately, in the age of television, the cult of personality rules. Anyone who is interesting and good on TV has a shot at being president, provided they have the credentials to be president.
I firmly believe that we do not need to change our policies. We do need to change marketing firms, and we need a new spokesman.
Would Joe Biden have won this race? I don’t know, but I know that if a yellow dog Democrat like me could barely stand to listen to Kerry speak, how terrible must he have been to the middle?
We need the left, we’ve always needed the left, but many of us have been the left. And you know why they call it LEFT? Because you always get LEFT at election time.
Liberals ultimately reject democracy in favor of the elitism which Hannity and Limbaugh allege. That elitism is evident when libs implore that we go left instead of right.
The party has had a Kamakazi wing for decades. That is what we call them. Kamakazi liberals. Always going out in a blaze of moralistic glory.
I’m with Gabby on this one.
Now I grant that I am fairly young (this was my first presidential election), but frankly I think it’s safe to say that purist ultra-liberalism is not a winner in this country. If we stuck to such dogma, we would run the risk of becoming merely mirrors of the Republicans, who blindly trumpet tax cuts and repeal of government aid, even when there is evidence that the tax cuts do nothing constructive, and when the government programs they want to cut are effective.
We should not be about dogma, but rather about what works to get the things we want. The older welfare systems weren’t actually fixing poverty, so we reformed them. The various groups that declare the Democrats aren’t doing enough for them should stop and think: are their interests necessarily those of the whole nation? We should strive for the national interest. My parents, for example, actually would get their taxes raised by the Kerry plan, but voted for him anyway becasue it would be better for the country.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, we need to tweak the message, and that’s all. Ideologically, I think we’re right where we should be. It should be mentioned, also, that with the exception of his anti-war rhetoric Howard Dean was a pragmatic centrist. Just look at his Vermont record. I don’t know how the myth of him as “McGovern II” got started (probably by a right-winger) but it makes no sense.
I don’t recall who it was that said it, but it might have been LBJ.
“To be a politician you have to be able to count.”
It’s a simple thought, and always true. If you don’t have the votes for something, you don’t have the votes for it.
LBJ understood that elections could be stolen, and he also understood that elections could be won, and he did some of both.
To all the young bucks of the party who think the DLC way is selling out, I would remind you that those of us who back the DLC learned our lessons in 1972 and 1984, when we thought we knew better, too. We created the DLC for that reason, because we realized the party had won 1976 by default, meaning in 1984 we really hadn’t won the presidency in 20 years.
We did 1988 your way, and it got us Dukakis.
We did 1992 our way, and it got us Clinton.
Your choice is not DLC or the liberal wing. It is DLC or RNC.
Better wise up and smell the Senate losses.
And don’t talk to me about bona fides. I was a McGovern delegate, and I campaigned with Fritz Mondale. For 20 years now we have fought this battle in the party, and the more the left demands of the party, the further it sinks.
It makes it more depressing in that there is no one to blame like Nader in 2000. We threw everything we had at this and we still lost, and lost solidly.
If this keeps democrats together well I hope thats a good thing because that will mean that the DLC and such types will actually be listening to the new blood once in a while.
I read the article.
So we adopt a right wing Democrat of our own, in order to win. I think this needs to be about presenting the values that Kerry and other traditional, New Deal type Democrats expound rather than putting our tails between our legs and crawling right.
Again…instead of flailing around begging for help from the right of this party, hammer, hammer hammer at the difference between the Republicans and us, as we go through this insane Bush II administration.
If we cannot make our point as Bush takes down the economy, Social Security, the environment, the criminal justice system–not to mention presides over what is turning into an ongoing guerrilla war in Iraq, we are not worth acquiring the office. The point is to embrace the core values of our party, not turn to Republican light, and look at the South as our only hope.