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 that this is unacceptable, yet it is not surprising. The old Democratic establishment does not want to reform its party “from the grassroots down” because they would loose power. The people would be in control, not the McAuliffes.
More here: http://www.politicalthought.net
With his habit of hurling epithets like “Republican lite,” Howard Dean is the best prime example of somebody who (in Nick’s words) “is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights” and would therefore be part of what Nick calls “the rump establishment.”
Dean has done much at the grassroots level and has much to contribute to the party, but he is far too polarizing a figure to be a plausible candidate for DNC chair.
It’s not a left-right thing really … what does that mean anyway? There are probably some “right” things that I could get behind. From where I am, a blue area in what once was a blue state, the party needs to remember its real roots — the people. Those inside the Beltway haven’t a clue, and because of that all they manage to do is try to emulate Republicans. Well, I’m not a Republican. And if someone doesn’t take this party away, far away, from that, I’d say it’s time for a true third party. Read Adam Werbach’s Nov. 3rd Theses (http://www.3nov.com/images/Nov3Theses_letter.pdf) for an idea about that. And forget about any nudges to the center. The party has gone too far in that direction already. And you know what it says to voters when one party keeps trying to look like the other party? That the other party’s right. And it’s not.
To me it’s completely about wresting the party away from the corporate/beltway leadership and building a grassroots party. That’s why I think Dean, Ickes and Rosenberg are the only acceptable candidates.
But really, I don’t think that there is any question that it should be Dean.
Except for being prematurely right about Iraq and bold about his criticisms of the Bush administration, Dean is not particularly liberal. He was part of the DLC at one point. It was however, his strong criticisms of Bush that got the Dems back in the race.
In this last election most of the volunteers on the Kerry campaign started in the Dean campaign. When his candicacy tanked, Dean started DFA, the organization raised $5 million contributed to over 700 candidates up and down the ballot and made a difference in some long shot and pivotal races.
What did Leo Hindery do in ’04? What did Wellington Webb do?
Moving left or right could pull in some swing voters is the classic political theory. But it’s wrong, most people are just not ideological. More important to the vast majority of people is: Does this party or candidate really stand for something? And that’s what Bush succeeded on making the election about: And more people thought they knew where Bush was coming from.
What the Democrats failed to do is to position the central question as simply: Does this guy have any clue about what he’s doing?
Those are the simple things that most people vote about, not ideological tests. And focusing too much on ideological tests detracts from the clear message on other items.
So definitely the most important thing is to stand up for something. That to me is the core problem right now – can one point at anything which the Democrats have stood their ground on in the past 4 years?
First , Kerry did not lose…the election was stolen through frudulent manipulation of the electronic voting system.
That said, Howard Dean is the only possible person to lead the Democratic Party.
We do not need to move ANYMORE to the center. The Democratic Party is already Republican lite!!!
It has to be Howard Dean…there is no one else articulate, passionate or honest enough. All this pontificating is diplomatic and appeasing but too corporate!
I agree with Nick Confessore that this is more a battle between an entrenched establishment and reform forces, with both sides having their fair share of both liberals, moderates and even a few conservatives.
Where I disagree with Confessore’s opinion is his suggestion that it is the OUTSIDERS, the REFORMERS who want to make this a battle about ideology. That may have been true a few years back, but my experience in the Dean campaign has taught me that the #1 reason people got involved in that effort was because they were sick and tired of Democrats rolling over every time the Republicans or the establishment media barked.
It had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with testicular fortitude.
On the other hand, we have people like Al From and Peter Beinert who continue to frame the debate as one about ideology, as if they are the great defenders of the Democratic big tent against the crowd of pitchfork wielding radical lefties.
I suspect this may have something to do with where both Confessore and I are coming from. He is closer to the insiders than I am, so he can’t see what is so painfully obvious to us out here in the “heartland”.
“Pretty much anyone who is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights is by definition part of this rump establishment, since the distinction of vision between Democratic centrists and liberals pale next to the differences between the Democratic average and the Bush-era conservatives.”
I disagree. There a fundamental differences between DLC and progressive Democrats over, for want of a better term, economic populism that goes to the core of the party’s beliefs. While I would not dispute the need to shake up the party’s beltway establishment, that pales in the face of resolving what the party stands for.
I also thought the TAP piece presented a caricature of progressive Democrats, then and now. Gee, I remember when TAP wasn’t trying to emulate TNR’s rush rightward. Now with such items as this Tapped piece and the presence of people like Matthew Yglesias, I’m beginning to wonder.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. From where I was working (for the first time ever, in a very red Florida county) all of the leadership and most of the effort came from DFA and MoveOn. I am shocked and infuriated that Kerry lost, that the entire national slate was beaten so badly, with a few brilliant exceptions. When someone suggests Joe Lockhart for chair, I want to scream.
. Top-Down or Bottom-Up .
I think that in addition to the Liberal/Dino conflict and the Washington/Heartland struggles there is the Top/Bottom struggle.
In the past the parties have been lead by the people on top, but with the Dean/Trippi group there was the start of a leadership from the Bottom. Many of us in the Virtual community are starting to suggest that it is possible to have a party that interacts with us rather than just uses the WEB as a way to gather money and foot soldiers.
It may be that this time the struggle for the DLC leadership is between those who want a classical party structure and those who whould like to explore if the party can really be organized as a Bottom-Up representative group.
If the Bottom-up’ers are represented then perhals we can develop the tools, community, etc. so that we can really separate the CORE democratic/progressive/populist… issues from those that are desirable or wedge issues, and then ofcourse proceed to properly frame/communicate these to the people who also believe in them.
It is hard not to come across as a sychophant, great post Ruy, I wish this could be fed into an amplifying circut.
I can’t say I agree. Since we live in an age where just a slight nudge to the center on a few key issues (partial-birth abortion? terrorism? gay marriage?) could mean the difference between getting a Democrat elected–both as President and to Congress–those small policy differences between Democratic centrists and liberals become very much personified, though they pale materially in comparison to the average Democratic views the Bush-era conservatives. Love the site and the book. thanks.