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 Bernie. Part of the reason Obama has ended up with an intra-party fight over a public option is due to the fact he didn’t mobilize any intensity around anything else. I’m no health care policy wonk, and I’m not wed to any particular policy mechanism–just to outcomes. But, I can sense when vigorous reform is in play, and I’ve had no sense of it in recent weeks. No one on the left was selling me any outcome worth fighting for, so I was forced to fall back in support of the public option bubbling back up from the grass roots. At least it was something that someone cared about! When Reich notified us that Obama had promised not to press pharma on prices, most of us who are politically active assumed he was knuckling under to special interests and we’d better do something quick. A robust public option was the only piece of policy driftwood available for us to grab on short notice. Obama’s coolness can be read as nonchalance.
Ed
Thanks for that bit of history which I had not known.
I’d argue that there is also another significant element in the mix for many of us supporting a robust public option. As Paul Krugman suggested in a recent column (or blog?) it will not prove a happy outcome if the tactics being utilized presently to kill reform and damage the President are seen to be successful. The public option has become a strong symbol of the contest between things as they have been and the hope for an era of progressive resurgence.
The power of such symbols (and the power of the victor/loser dichotomy) seem well appreciated on the right.
Obviously, we put ourselves at some risk merely in defining a concrete goal, the attainment of which is uncertain, and in acknowledging that if we aren’t successful in achieving it, then that will constitute a loss of significance.
But I suspect that is the functional reality here.