Don’t know if you watched the Democratic presidential debate from South Carolina, but I did, and I’ll get kicked out of the blogger union if I don’t pass on some impressions.The format was unusual, with lots of questions demanding (unsuccessfully) short answers, with lots of jumping around on topics, and virtually no candidate interaction, other than that randomly forced by the questions. The two candidates that got occasionally annoying in defying the rules and talking too long were Bill Richardson and (this year’s ultimate protest candidate) Mike Gravel.And speaking of questions, they were occasionally framed and followed-up in ways that betrayed even the “gotcha” instincts of debate moderators. Joe Biden got a question on the Supreme Court’s decision on the congressional “Partial-Birth Abortion” ban that didn’t mention he voted for the ban in the Senate. Bill Richardson offered Whizzer White as a model for the nominees he’d put on the Supreme Court, and nobody noted that (aside from White’s status as something less than a constitutional giant) the Whizzer was a dissenter in the original abortion rights decision, Roe v. Wade. And John Edwards was asked about his attitude towards hedge funds (a subject that most viewers probably knew little or nothing about) without any reference to his own employment by a hedge fund between his presidential runs.The post-debate punditry on the sponsoring network, MSNBC, seemed to endorse the obvious impression that nobody really won or lost, but also suggested that Hillary Clinton did the best job of meeting her goals. She was calm, reasonable, relatively responsive, and occasionally self-deprecating. And on a question that will probably be replayed a lot tomorrow, involving how they’d react to a second 9/11 where al Qaeda’s responsibility was clear, she used the muscle verbs “retaliate” and “destroy,” satisfying those who somehow think female candidates aren’t credible on the use of force (Richardson actually preceded her in immediately mentioning the use of force as a response, while Obama conspicuously omitted it).Obama had some of the most interesting moments. He initially flubbed a “gotcha” question about America’s “three top allies,” and didn’t mention Israel, but nicely handled the follow-up. He was more specific about health care than in past debates. And he did a solid job of answering questions about his position on Iraq.Edwards was subdued and wonky (I personally consider the latter a compliment). He gamely dealt with the inevitable and impossible questions about his expensive haircut. Casual watchers might have been struck by his answer to the question on Iraq, and his implicit challenge to Hillary, but he used almost exactly the same language as in past debates, so pundits and activists probably weren’t impressed.Biden had his classic sound-bite moment, answering a question about his ability to exercise verbal discipline with one word, “Yes.” Dodd went with his counter-intuitive but what-the-hell pitch about his experience. And Dennis Kucinich, partly thanks to losing his protest role to Mike Gravel, was more relaxed and reasonable sounding than I’ve ever heard him, both in the debate and in the post-debate interview.A quick review of the reaction in the progressive blogosphere shows a subdued take on the event. At DailyKos, a reader poll about “who won” shows (as of this moment) Edwards at 20%, Obama at 17%, Clinton at 11%, Gravel at 9%, Richardson at 6%, and the rest scattered, with 11% saying “nobody.” The main outliers here are HRC’s double-digit showing (she inevitably finishes at around 3%, well below Denny the K., in assessments of actual support), and Richardson’s pallid performance. I suspect the latter may have reflected the pub the debate gave to Richardson’s NRA support, and his reluctance to call for Alberto Gonzales’ resignation.So the debate probably moved few votes, but may slightly shift the future landscape. And I hope the formatters of future debates noticed what didn’t work tonight, and try to elicit longer, more substantive, and more interactive answers next time the donkeys gather.UPDATE 1: Richardson’s shout-out to the ghost of Byron White got noticed elsewhere. Scott Lemieux at TAPPED jumped on it before I did. And my buddy Armando at Talk Left went right out and said it disqualified Big Bill from the nomination. If this sort of buzz escalates, we’ll probably see some statement from Richardson’s campaign explaining where their candidate was going with that, before Brian Williamson told him to name someone actually still living. Maybe it was a Western Thing, since the Whizzer was from Colorado. But then William O. Douglas, a much safer liberal role model, was from Washington State. UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias picked up on my reference to the question Obama got about our “three most important allies.” So naturally, I got kicked around some in Matt’s comment thread, based on the apparent belief that I was lecturing Obama about Israel’s value to the U.S. Actually, all I was doing was pointing to the silly “gotcha” by Williamson, who was clearly hoping Obama would forget to mention Israel (a bad idea in Democratic politics), as evidenced by his immediate follow-up with an Obama quote about the suffering of the Palestinians. Obama turned that around by replying that he was talking about the folly of the Palestinian leadership, and then said the appropriate things about Israel as a U.S. ally. For the record, like Matt, I think this was a ridiculous question. Ranking allies–or, as reflected in yet another dumb question posed to Biden–enemies, is not something any potential president ought to be doing in public.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 10: Nope, Republicans Can’t Rerun 2024 in 2026
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.