I have been very involved in warning Democrats about the strong possibility of another attempted Trump election coup In 2024, and wrote up my latest advice on the subject at New York:

As someone who spent months before the 2020 election warning that Trump was planning an election coup, then had to watch and write about his efforts that were finally foiled on January 6, 2021, I felt the anniversary of that day brought back in sharp relief bad memories that had never really faded. I realized that the fire we avoided last time might in future require more than a beefed-up Capitol police corps or resolute judges or a smattering of responsible Republicans. Like my colleague Errol Louis, I accepted that we might each need more of a personal commitment to democracy than just a willingness to vote and hope for the best.

But the most galvanizing January 6 meditation yet came in a New York Times op-ed by election-law expert Rick Hasen. This sober analyst of developments threatening the right to vote and subverting impartial election administration is clearly convinced that one of our two major political parties has sufficiently abandoned the causes he holds dear that they have gained a veto power over any remedial action in Washington and many crucial states. This leaves Democrats and the remaining responsible Republicans with few options going forward, particularly since the power they do hold in Washington and in the states may soon be significantly diminished.

Paradoxically, that means Democrats cannot afford to spurn any Republican efforts to help them prevent a 2024 coup. Hasen writes:

“A coalition with the minority of Republicans willing to stand up for the rule of law is the best way to try to erect barriers to a stolen election in 2024, even if those Republicans do not stand with Democrats on voting rights or other issues. Remember it took Republican election officials, elected officials, and judges to stand up against an attempted coup in 2020.”

It’s understandable that Democrats distrust the feelers some Republicans are putting out for cooperation on legislation to fix the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the hazy and confusing law that Team Trump tried to exploit to overturn Biden’s victory with the help of a mob. If the offer comes with the precondition of Democratic abandonment of voting-rights legislation, it may rightly be rejected. But at some point, accepting just enough Senate Republican help to close off one avenue to a stolen 2024 presidential election may be vital for Democrats, unfair is it may seem from a partisan point of view.

A more vexing problem, however, is what happens if the stolen election attempt occurs not in Washington but in the states. That’s where Trump is busily working to install loyalists in key election offices and where he may expect better and quicker complicity from Republican state legislators who could be in a position to control the certification of presidential electors. Hasen offers a specific scenario:

“What happens if a Democratic presidential candidate wins in, say, Wisconsin in 2024, according to a fair count of the vote, but the Wisconsin legislature stands ready to send in an alternative slate of electors for Mr. Trump or another Republican based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud or other irregularities?”

In that contingency, he argues, “widespread public protests made up of people of good faith from across the political spectrum” may be the only effective recourse. Indeed, says Hasen: “If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes.”

That last resort of labor protests, the general strike (a work stoppage not confined to any one industry or segment of the population), is not something that has ever been successfully deployed as a political weapon in the United States. The potential need to attempt one — even if it’s confined to a single locale like a state capital where a legislature is engaged in subverting a democratic election result — shows the gravity of the situation we may face in 2024 based not on paranoid fears but on what we witnessed this time last year and what we can see happening in MAGA-land right now.

One of the more important expected developments of 2022 caught my eye, and I wrote about it at New York:

Assuming Nancy Pelosi keeps her earlier pledge to step down as Democratic House leader after the 2022 midterms, there will be a jockeying for party-leadership positions that already has aficionados of the “Democrats in Disarray” meme excited. The Washington Post is positively salivating:

“House Democrats are bracing for a turnover in leadership next year that would amount to a seismic event for the party — one that could empower a new, diverse generation of members while also exacerbating tensions over the direction of the caucus and the policies it should pursue.”

To be fair, it isn’t just the usual progressives-versus-moderates battle fueling this “seismic event”; there’s also generational change. Word is that Pelosi may be heading to the exits with company from her other octogenarian leadership colleagues, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, and even if they don’t retire from the leadership or from Congress, they could be bypassed by a Democratic Caucus wanting some fresh blood. The front-runner to succeed Pelosi is the fourth-leading member of the leadership, Brooklyn’s Hakeem Jeffries, a mere lad, at the age of 51, who would represent both continuity and change.

As the change of command grows nigh, we will hear a lot from the chattering classes about Jeffries’s ties to House Democratic moderates and how he can mend fences with progressives, including his Gotham frenemy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the bigger issue for House Democrats in and out of leadership is the context in which they will serve after the midterms, when many of today’s much-discussed factional conflicts could change or even fade. Let’s look at a few likely upcoming scenarios:

Life in the minority

The enormous pressure Pelosi dealt with every day last year as she discharged the responsibility of shepherding Joe Biden’s agenda through the House may not be a problem for her 2023 successor. Odds are very high (per both history and such leading indicators as Biden’s job-approval ratings) that the party controlling the White House will lose House seats in the midterms. This will likely flip control of the House given Democrats’ very narrow margin of control along with other discouraging factors like retirements and redistricting. If so, then Jeffries (assuming he is the Pelosi successor) won’t have to worry about how to wield the Speaker’s gavel, and Democratic divisions will probably fade in significance (just as the House Freedom Caucus lost its leverage among Republicans when they lost the chamber in 2018, becoming simply a noisy auxiliary to the MAGA movement).

Given the gulf between the two parties and the lack of interest Republicans have in bipartisanship these days, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep moderates and progressives in harness in opposing Republican-sponsored legislation. They will lose the headaches associated with the need to coordinate and reconcile legislation with Senate Democrats. It really won’t matter much if Republicans enjoy a veto via control of the House (and the GOP could, of course, control the upper chamber as well if 2022 trends go south).

Life without a trifecta

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Democrats lose the House in 2022 but regain it in 2024 along with a Biden reelection victory, an entirely plausible scenario. Trouble is, the 2024 Senate landscape is bad for the Donkey Party, so even if Democrats reflip the House and maintain the presidency, they could easily fall short of what they’d need to reconstruct a trifecta. If so, House Democrats will be in the position of having to regularly advance the president’s legislative initiatives with little or no hope that they will actually become law.

This sort of legislating without consequences has its own challenges but shouldn’t strain party unity all that much and is certainly easier than preconferencing every bill with the other chamber.

Life without an iron hand

Pelosi is regarded as one of recent history’s most effective Speakers and congressional party leaders in part because of her exceptional legislative and vote-counting skills. But her effectiveness is also owed a lot to the respect and — yes — fear she was able to rely on in dealing with fractious members of her caucus. This is a form of political capital it takes time to build, and no Pelosi successor will have it from the get-go. Indeed, if Jeffries or any rival for the House leadership tries to play badass prematurely, it could backfire. There won’t be an iron hand at the controls for a good while.

Life with a broad party coalition

One thing that won’t soon change for House Democratic leaders is the simple fact that their party remains a broad coalition as compared to the more ideologically rigid GOP (reflecting a more ideologically rigid activist base in the electorate). In historic terms, of course, the House Democratic Caucus is far more united than it has been, well, maybe ever (certainly more than it was when a significant number of self-described conservatives were around). But there are still factions and individual members willing to take advantage of whatever leverage they can muster without much fear of primary challenges or grassroots fury.

Congressional Democrats in both chambers also typically experience more tensions over the influence of moneyed interests than do Republicans. At some point, Democrats may need to unilaterally implement long-stalled initiatives aimed at reducing the power of lobbyists and the shadowy forces they represent, who have all along constituted a faction as powerful as moderates or progressives.

But in any event, the distinctive problems and opportunities that House Democrats are experiencing in the final two years of the Pelosi era will simply not be extended beyond 2022. However new or old, and left or center, the party’s future leadership turns out to be, the outlook for House Democrats will change significantly from cycle to cycle. It would be nice if House-watchers also adjust accordingly.

When looking back over the last year, I noticed some familiar data points, and wrote about them at New York:

There was a year not very long ago when Democrats spent January not only feeling their oats but believing they had turned a corner in the direction of a sustainable and perhaps even transformative majority. But that year ended in doldrums, with the party’s situation rapidly growing worse. It was 2009, though the description certainly applies to 2021 as well. During Barack Obama’s first year in office, his party experienced a fall from grace that felt a lot like the year that just ended (minus the pandemic and the persistent presence of former president Donald Trump, of course).

What happens in the coming year will soon determine whether we’re really moving in a predictable political cycle, but for now, let’s consider some of the similarities between 2009 and 2021 and what they might portend:

The 2008 elections produced a huge Democratic win

The sense of deliverance that accompanied the 2020 election results for most Democrats was an echo of how they felt 12 years earlier. I was in Washington on Election Night and will never forget walking out of the restaurant where I had heard the Obama victory announced into what looked like a citywide street party. Part of that euphoria, of course, stemmed from the unlikely election of the first Black president. But it was a partisan Democratic event as well: 2008 produced the first governing trifecta (control of the White House and both congressional chambers) since the Republican landslide of 1994, with a particularly impressive Senate majority of 59, soon to become 60 (a supermajority that could in theory override any filibuster) when Republican Arlen Specter flipped.

The Obama-Biden win was by a comfortably large margin (of more than 7 percent in the popular vote and 192 in the electoral one) after photo finishes in 2000 and 2004. Obama, for all his later demonization by Republicans, won 20 percent of all self-identified conservatives and 60 percent of moderates. It felt, at the time, like an era of gridlock might have come to an end — not quite as dramatic as the ejection of Donald Trump from the White House in 2020 and the Democrats’ picking up two Senate seats in Georgia, but a big deal nonetheless. Or so it seemed initially.

Democrats entered 2009 with an ambitious agenda and hopes of bipartisan traction

While there was no pandemic-induced economic collapse in 2009, there was an even stronger sense of economic malaise in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 and the intensification of what had already become known as the Great Recession (which, according to economic indicators, ended in June 2009). The new Obama administration came into office with an ambitious agenda that included both short-term economic relief and stimulus, and its much-discussed campaign platform planks including health-care reform and an attack on climate change. Obama had talked a lot about bipartisanship during his short career in the Senate and then his run for the presidency, so he made an effort to secure Republican input and buy-in for all of his legislative agenda but had very little success (thanks to a GOP strategy of total obstruction designed by Mitch McConnell, who is running the same plays today).

Like Biden’s Democrats in 2021, Obama’s in 2009 compiled a record of partial success combined with frustration and failure. A stimulus package wound up smaller and less effective than originally planned thanks to concessions needed to bring a few Republicans onboard. Senate Democratic moderates vetoed key provisions of the president’s signature health-care initiative, including a “public option” for insurance in areas when private insurance was unavailable or unaffordable and a Medicare “buy-in” program for near-seniors. The entire Affordable Care Act legislation nearly crashed and burned when Republicans won an upset special Senate election in Massachusetts at the beginning of 2010; Democrats resorted to the budget-reconciliation process to avoid a fatal filibuster. Greenhouse-gas-emissions legislation got through the House but never gained traction in the Senate.

Hostility to Obama rapidly mounted as the anti-government tea-party movement spread, launched by furious conservatives who claimed that Democrats were socialistically redistributing wealth to undeserving minorities — claims similar to the those lobbed at Biden’s Build Back Better agenda these days. There was no precise equivalent to “Let’s Go, Brandon,” in part because Obama haters saw little need for euphemism.

Democrats were facing a 2010 midterm fiasco

The first midterm elections after the Democratic triumph of 2008 were a disaster for the Donkey Party. Republicans made net gains of 63 House seats (winning control of the chamber), six Senate seats, six governorships, and 19 state legislative chambers. The enormousness of the state victories for Republicans was magnified by the timing, with decennial congressional and state legislative redistricting immediately on tap in 2011. While midterm House losses for the party controlling the White House are normal, the top-to-bottom wipeout of 2010 was not. A major factor in the results was a big drop-off in Democratic turnout, some of it probably reflecting the higher-than-normal youth-and-minority turnout when Obama was on the ballot in 2008.

Republicans are currently expected to make solid gains in 2022, including a reconquest of the House. However, the landscape is not really ripe for a 2010-style landslide. For one thing, polarization has limited wins and losses alike for both parties. For another, the disappointing 2020 performance by House Democrats has made them less exposed to losses in marginal districts. And for still another thing, the Senate landscape for Democrats in 2022 is significantly better than it was in 2010.

Big state legislative losses for Democrats in 2022 are also far less likely; their party controlled 27 state legislatures going into 2010 and shared power in eight others. Now Republicans control 30 legislatures and share power in another. Even if Democratic losses do occur, they will be less consequential, since redistricting will have been completed by the fall of 2022.

Obama’s future looked iffy (but he bounced back)

In a period when today’s partisan polarization was still under construction, Obama posted a 67 percent job approval rating (per Gallup) at the beginning of his presidency; his job approval had dropped into the 40s by the end of 2009, and remained there throughout 2010. After Democrats were trounced in the 2010 midterms, the odds of a second term for Obama looked pretty slim

But just like Bill Clinton after the previous Democratic midterm disaster of 1994, Obama executed a slow but steady comeback. His job-approval rating was even lower in 2011 than in the previous year, but it gradually rose, reaching 50 percent just before the 2012 elections. And even though Republican Mitt Romney improved on McCain’s performance, he ultimately lost the popular vote by 3.9 percent — a bit less than Donald Trump’s 4.4 percent popular-vote loss in 2020.

We are obviously a long way from the 2024 elections and have no way of knowing if Biden — whose approval rating has taken a dive — can reprise Obama’s comeback. One variable, of course, is whether Trump will again be his opponent. Only three major-party presidential losers have won their party’s nomination in the next election, and only one, Grover Cleveland, went on to retake the White House. But Cleveland’s party had won one of the biggest midterm landslides ever two years before his final presidential victory. So Republicans may have an uphill climb to recover the White House even if they do well in next year’s midterms, particularly if they insist on renominating the most divisive president ever.

 

I am an inveterate student of the Iowa Caucuses, so news this week about the 2024 presidential nominating processes fascinated me, as I explained at New York:

On February 4, 2020, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses suffered a meltdown when results could not be tabulated and reported on Caucus Night. This perfect storm of dysfunction fed a lot of preexisting discontent about the privileged position of the not-terribly-diverse states of Iowa and New Hampshire in the Democratic presidential-nominating process. It looked like a change in the process, or at least a toppling of Iowa, was inevitable.

As late as this past autumn, that was still the prevailing mood in the Democratic Party, as the Washington Post reported:

“President Biden is not a big fan. Former Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez is openly opposed. And elsewhere in the Democratic inner sanctum, disdain for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus has been rising for years.

“Now the day of reckoning for Iowa Democrats is fast approaching, as the national party starts to create a new calendar for the 2024 presidential nomination that could remove Iowa from its privileged position for the first time since 1972, when candidates started flocking to the state for an early jump on the race to the White House.”

But now, as a disappointing year for Democrats comes to an end, Politico explains that the impetus for changing the nominating process has ground to a near halt:

“Democrats, including in the White House, suddenly have more pressing problems. And as party leaders gathered in recent days for year-end meetings here, interest in what was once a red-hot effort to overhaul the order of the early nominating states had all but vanished.

“Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic National Committee members, state party chairs and strategists laid bare widespread desire to avoid a divisive, intraparty dispute in 2022 — and skepticism that any change enacted after the midterm elections could be done in time for the next presidential campaign.”

Even if DNC members were strongly in favor of changing the nominating process, there are a lot of obstacles to wholesale reforms. For one thing, the national parties do not control what individual states decide to do; there isn’t a “system” in place but rather an interlocking set of decisions by state parties and legislatures. The most common form of nominating contest is a state-funded primary, which typically requires bipartisan cooperation in state legislatures and usually involves a common date for both parties (anything else would be deemed an inefficient waste of tax dollars).

If Democratic Iowa critics had their way, the state would replace the caucuses with a primary that would be held later in the year. But the Republican-controlled Iowa legislature is perfectly happy with the status quo, and, in fact, there is no evident interest among Republicans anywhere (including the party’s 2024 front-runner, Donald Trump) in a “reformed” nominating process. This is evidenced by the fact that Iowa’s GOP chair has been designated to lead the national-party committee that sets the calendar. And if Iowa did try to stay first but shift to a primary, New Hampshire has a state law that empowers and requires the secretary of state to move the Granite State’s election date back perpetually to head off any rivals for the first primary. Nevada has already bid for first place (it is currently third) in the process by junking its caucuses for a primary and scheduling it ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire. But New Hampshire will fight for its primacy, and it’s unclear if the national party really wants to adjudicate fights between the states.

It’s possible that residual anger at Iowa among Democrats over its non-diversity or its 2020 meltdown could lead to a simple national-party veto on Iowa going first. Short of creating a state-funded primary, Iowa Republican legislators would have no leverage over that sort of decision. The national party could also try to force Iowa Democrats to abandon caucuses, though in the absence of legislative action, the only option would be a party-funded so-called firehouse primary, so named because financial considerations usually mean that polling places would be limited to inexpensive public facilities like firehouses.

Iowa Democrats could also take some of the heat off themselves by simplifying the caucus process to make a recurrence of the 2020 fiasco far less likely. Iowa Republicans, after all, just show up, hear a few announcements, eat some cookies, and vote for their favorite presidential candidate before going home. Moving to that sort of process instead of the complex system of candidate thresholds and affinity groups and “votes” measured in multiple ways might boost participation while making the results much easier to tabulate and report.

In the end, the decision to stand pat or try to change the system may come down to how interested Joe Biden is in changing the calendar or the procedures by which particular states elect national-convention delegates. Biden is famously not invested in the Iowa–New Hampshire duopoly; he finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire in 2020 and then began his comeback with second place in Nevada and a big landslide win in South Carolina. Some of his closest party allies are those who think more diverse states should weigh in first.

Biden, however, obviously has other fish to fry and doesn’t need any additional intraparty drama at present. If he runs again in 2024, he will almost certainly win the nomination no matter which state goes first, second, third, or 35th.

An alarming bit of news you might have missed is the subject of a piece I wrote this last week at New York:

Been wondering what former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been up to when he wasn’t dodging subpoenas and questions from the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6? Turns out he’s spending some time helping his old friends in the House Freedom Caucus to spread their noxious activities from Washington to state capitals around the country, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

“Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is making headlines in Washington today, but he’s also looking to make a mark on state legislatures, including Georgia’s, with the launch of the State Freedom Caucus Network.

“The network will be an extension of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative House members that Meadows once chaired, which has successfully moved the House GOP agenda to the right since it was founded in 2015.

“The network will be supported by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington-based non-profit founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint, where Meadows has been a senior partner since leaving the White House earlier this year.

“Also on the CPI staff with Meadows is Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican attorney who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.”

Meadows and Mitchell, the AJC notes, were both on the infamous Trump call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when the former president asked for a little help rustling up enough votes to overturn Biden’s win in the Peach State. DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and Heritage Foundation president, is probably best known in politics for his espousal of “constitutional conservatism,” that absolutist precursor to Trumpism which held that any means were justified to preserve the eternal policy preferences of the divinely inspired Founders.

The State Freedom Caucus Network will start initially with affiliates in 22 states from Connecticut to Alaska, with representatives attending a gala kickoff dinner in Atlanta. Its stated purpose is to organize “principled, America-First conservatives” to focus on “election integrity, critical race theory, school choice, vaccine mandates, and police reform,” issues where “our nation’s most important battles are taking place in state legislatures.” An unstated purpose is to encourage such pain-in-the-ass tactics as legislative hostage-taking, disruption of routine governing practices, and shakedowns of the “Republican establishment,” while serving as outposts for Trump’s efforts to get back to the White House by book or by crook.

This new organization, which will likely spread to other states soon, will help ensure that Republican state elected officials can’t get away with simply tugging the forelock to Trump and then getting along with their regular business back home. MAGA agitation is a permanent revolution with foot soldiers wherever cultural resentment and political opportunism meet.