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.
Just a few comments on the Ohio vote, and the
exurban/small metro issue. It was interesting to read your comment about Kerry not doing as well in the metro areas of Ohio. When reading the analysis I did not notice any comment about the 20 percent reduction in polling places in Lucas, Stark, Cuyahoga, and Franklin counties. This is part of what led to the long voting lines in these areas. Also there were additional voting machines placed in the exurban and rural counties where Bush was strongest. These are external issues that must be taken into consideration when comparing votes to 1996 and 2000.
I am familiar with a lot of exurban voters and I can say that they did not become Republican after they moved to those areas or soley because of 9/11.
The citizens who reside in these counties moved
away from the urban/suburban area because of their families. They were tired of the crime, traffic, constant redistricing of their schools, wanted larger homes for expanding families that were less expensive in the outlying areas, and finally wanted to escape the city property taxes. When looking at the logic behind their concerns, a lot of it is contradictory, like better schools and lower taxes. But the fear used by the Bush campaign from 9/11 resonated with these voters. The Democratic Party must find a common sense message that will resonate with these voters. The Republicans have been far to successful at introducing wedge issues that put Democrats on the defensive. These wedge
issues sometimes do not even fit on the national stage, but our candidates spend time defending these issues. Issues like Gay Marriage, Abortion, Guns, School Prayer etc…. In my opinion we need a candidate ( governor) who has a background in business etc… who understands how middle class Americans live and can develop a message to resonate with the voters. If our candidate has a message and plan to take the country forward, then the wedge issues will not stick. The party cannot rely on Washington insiders who have voted on these issues to lead the party.
By saying this I am not advocating that we change
our postition on issues or tack to the right. It is not necessary to make those changes. Our last two candidates for President have come to the voters with a plan for every problem and end up looking like snake oil salesmen. The emphasis has to be on the direction for the country. The plans can be brought up when necessary, but not in every speech.
Actually, Bush made big gains in NYC, especially Staten Island (which went from 54-46 Gore to 57-43 Bush). In Brooklyn, Bush gained by 9 points (from 16% to 25%). As Ruy said awhile ago, Bush gained a little bit everywhere- but more in some urban communities but exurbs.
As to the broader point: Crewes’s view is supported by the gradual meltdown of GOP support in big cities (which indicates that people who were already Republicans have been moving away). In the first half of the century, even after the New Deal, Republicans were dominant in some big cities (Philadelphia) and competitive in others (St Louis). From the 50s to the 70s or so, Republicans were the minority party in cities but dominated most suburbs. Now, Republicans have lost inner suburbs as well, are are competitive only in outer suburbs (which matter a lot) and rural areas (which have flipped massively to Bush in the past two elections). If rural areas were as Democratic as they had been a decade or two ago, Bush would have been clobbered.
ttcrewes, you might want to look up the series on “The Great Divide” that was done by a couple of writers for the Austin American-Statesman this summer.
Basically, the writers looked at county-level election data going back over the past 30 years or so and found that the percentage of Americans living in “landslide” counties– that is, counties won by either the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate by a margin of 20 points or more– has steadily increased over time. In other words, there seems to be some sort of geographic-level sorting-out of political preferences going on.
Here’s a link to the series:
http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/content/specialreports/greatdivide/index.html
I have observed the growth of an exurb (Dutchess and Ulster Counties, NY) over a twenty-year period and I think the idea that Bush carrying such areas has significance is ludicrous.
The people who have moved to the exurbs from the suburbs and the cities are those who can afford the commutation and the 5-acre zoned homes. They are the bedrock of the Republican Party and always have been. The only thing they changed was their zip code.
Furthermore, the areas they moved to were often heavily Republican anyhow. Most rural areas outside of the South always were, and the ones in the South have been turning red for years anyhow in reaction to the civil rights movement. Dutchess County, lifetime home of Franklin Roosevelt, voted 2-1 for his Republican opponent in all four elections.
So to note that a fast-growing exurb county went for Bush is to note that the kind of people who like Republicans haven’t changed their minds. We already knew that. What we NEED to know is why the sons and daughters of the unionized workers of Canton and Youngstown failed to vote for Kerry in sufficient numbers.
So, assuming that the medium sized city hypothesis is correct, then some of the gnashing of the teeth on organizational matters and logistical difficulties of GOTV can be canned to some degree because the population density is still high enough that traditional Democratic GOTV methodologies can stay pay off if we can find the correct message/presentation to appeal to people? Correct?
What is missing from the discussion of the exurban new communities is whether when someone moves, say from Staten Island, which is part of NYC to Orange County, which is 40 miles away, does their political viewpoint actually changed? Were they a democrat in Staten Island and then change to a Republican in Orange County? Or are the Republicans in Staten Island just segmenting out to Orange County so that NYC is now MORE Democratic and there is no net gain for Republicans. Is this just a permutation of the evolutionary phenomenon of the Reagan Democrats, whose parents were Roosevelt Democrats, having Republican children who are who are now clustering in places where they can afford to live? I doubt that the exurban environment is exuding some weird influence on this demograph that morphs them into republicans. They were repubs already. Which is not to say Republicans have not made inroads in the last generation among upwardly mobile state college educated whites. It is just to say that such people, like most Americans, are choosing to live in economically lateral communities, which is no surprise. The problem for Democrats is not the rise of the exurbs. The problem for Democrats is the alienation of socially conservative middle class whites that started in the 1960’s in the South and has gradually moved Northward. On this particular issue, I’m with George Eliot, “Breed tells more than pasture.”