2020 – Into the Disreality
Only 21 months prior to the November 2020 election, the Democratic primary field – minus a few big names – is already taking shape. And it is undeniably clear that these Presidential hopefuls, at least on policy issues, intend to take and support some of the most liberal positions in several generations. From Medicare for All to the Green New Deal to even reparations to descendants of slaves, the shift leftward among Democrats with Presidential aspirations is occurring at a blistering pace.
And then there is the “conservative” option, one President Donald J. Trump. He of the tenuous grasp of the truth, the White House in constant chaos, the confused and dubious executive actions on tariffs and the border wall, and the perpetual investigations. That Donald Trump.
To say the least, these are unappetizing options. A gaggle of wild-eyed liberals hoping to take down a President so unpopular that he led his party to a more than 40 seat loss in the House of Representatives despite a great economy and a signature policy achievement of a tax cut for roughly 90% of Americans. Future Abraham Lincolns – or even future Ronald Reagans – these are not.
However, there is some hope for Americans who believe their options for the likely chaotic campaign of 2020 range from bad to even worse – divided government. From the perspective of a conservative not invested in expanding the “legacy” of a man who parlayed his reality TV show fame into the rehabilitation of his prior reputation as a bankrupt business failure, the best of the bad options likely involves … moving on from Donald Trump … and blocking the pipe dreams of the left by maintaining GOP control of the US Senate.
Presently, with Democratic control of the House of Representatives relatively unlikely to shift following the 2020 elections, the parties will likely focus their efforts on winning the Presidency and the United States Senate, where Republicans presently hold a 53-47 edge. Accordingly, Democrats can only take control of the Senate with 50 votes (plus a Vice Presidential tiebreaker should their party win the Presidency) or 51 votes should Donald Trump be reelected. However, based on the key races in play, it would be near impossible for a Trump reelection to result in the four seat gain required for Dems to win 51 seats and take back the Senate.
Thus, Democratic hopes for unified control of government rest upon a Presidential win and a pickup of at least three Senate seats. For Dems, this three-seat pickup – in anything but a Presidential race blowout – constitutes a perilous slog. First, Dems are almost certain to lose the Alabama Senate seat held by Judge Roy Moore-slayer Doug Jones, as it seems almost beyond comprehension that Alabama Republicans could nominate another candidate similar to Moore, who spent the better part of his 2017 special election run working to make Donald Trump look downright normal. While the other potentially competitive races (excepting the possibility of a Democratic seat in New Hampshire) are Democratic pickup opportunities, only two take place in states Trump lost in 2016 (the Colorado seat held by Republican Cory Gardner and the Maine seat held by Susan Collins). To net a three seat gain (assuming an Alabama loss), Dems would need to beat Gardner (easily their best pickup opportunity, yet still not a “sure thing”) and defeat three additional Republican incumbents in Maine (where Collins has previously been an electoral force at times when the GOP was less popular than it currently is in her state), Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, and/or Georgia. Put simply, in all but a best case scenario for Dems, a 2020 Trump loss by any non-devastating margin would likely maintain GOP Senate control and continue divided government.
Moreover, as the voting public has seen in recent American elections, midterms heavily favor the party out of Presidential power. Accordingly, in the event that a GOP-controlled Senate can thwart the first two-year agenda of a Democratic President, the GOP would likely find itself in a very strong position come the 2022 midterms. However, should Trump be reelected, while House losses (a body where Republicans have already eaten most of their worst case scenario losses) could be limited, the 2022 Senatorial races would shape up as a massive bloodbath for the right. A six-year itch (of Republican Presidential control) would generate substantial vulnerability in at least seven GOP-held seats (and possibly several more) shrinking the GOP Senate numbers into or even below the mid-40s.
For Trump skeptics who disfavor the leftist agenda in vogue among activist Democrats, a reasonably competitive loss by Trump in 2020 might be the best near term electoral outcome, allowing the party to use continued control of the Senate to block liberal legislation and setting up a potentially favorable 2022 for the right.
About The Author
Douglas
Now 44-year-old with a great deal to say on a wide array of topics!
I’ve just barnstormed through all eleven posts (articles?) on your blog, which I discovered in the past hour in Twitter purgatory.¹
I was initially under the impression that you were a conservative Democrat concerned with the electability of the party’s leftward-shifting platform after you pointed out that Mr. Shahid’s (arguably divisive and naïve) suggestion that an elected Democratic caucus made up of more nonwhite constituents would actually result in the party moving towards the center, which you cited as a positive. (Polling data on Democratic ideological identifications by ethnicity appear to lend support to this theory, although the picture may be more complex with more levels of sophistication.²)
However, your twin articles on Senator Harris’s purported demagoguery, on what you see as the Falwellian characteristics of many contemporary social liberals, and your initial article identifying yourself, in two words, as a libertarian conservative (presumably not identifying with but leaning towards the Never–Sometimes Trump wings of the GOP), have corrected my initial impression.
I’ll admit I was a little disappointed when I realized this, since there appear to be increasingly few Democratic voters to the right of myself these days,³ and it would have been nice to encounter fellow ideological traveler who was clearly acutely intelligent, well-written, and expansively knowledgeable to boot.
Nevertheless, while I certainly do not agree with everything in the several thousand words of your work — that term seems appropriate for your level of commentary and analysis — I have thus far read, I suspect that I’ll be coming back before long.
We need more voices like yourself on both sides of the aisle, Douglas. (Although personally, I’d prefer a 70–30 split in favor of the center-left.⁴ ?)
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¹ I have screenshots! I was suspended for a week after calling someone “stupid” and an “ignorant moron” for repeatedly refusing to understand the difference between the federal debt and deficit in a discussion about each metrics under President Obama. I suspect the accusations that Twitter administrators are censoring conservatives for their views are getting to them.
² Consider, for one, that elected white Democratic officials are on average likely more moderate than their mean constituent with the same broad ethnic background, while the opposite may be true for nonwhite elected Democrats, especially younger ones such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley.
³ I now consider myself a moderate Democrat, almost exclusively due to the shift of the Democratic base around me, as my views have scarcely shifted any closer to the center since the 2016 Democratic primary. Theoretically, a gay, minority, post-Millennial like myself who voted for the first time last November “should” be head-over-heels for the likes of Senator Sanders, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, and a 70 percent top marginal tax rate — but as we all intuitively know, broad demographic patterns generalize poorly to individuals.
⁴ This shouldn’t be too hard, if my side of the aisle ultimately learns to balance its leftmost voices — who tend to be younger and louder, but by no means always ? — with our more seasoned hands. After all, the current president has accelerated the movement of college-educated white voters to Democratic ranks while pulling their non-college counterparts towards the Republican Party.)
With regards to your commentary on the 2020 landscape specifically, I would say that it is as good an early evaluation as any, particularly given the currently sparse empirical data on which to base any such analysis on.
I too believe that Democratic (or perhaps more accurately, liberal and leftist) voters, some like myself, are too short-sighted. The current highest official in the Republican Party is perhaps the weakest incumbent in the modern political era,¹ and wrangling over who should be the one to defeat Donald Trump will only give traditional, small-government conservatives (now largely known as “establishment” “RINOs” in the Republican Party of Trump²) like yourself the return to the party of Romney, McCain, the Bushes, and even — could it be? — Reagan, and as early as November 2022.
For a staunch (if moderate) Democratic voters like myself, that would obviously be an undesirable result. ?
I personally love Kamala Harris and think that the behavior on her part that you argue warrants charges of demagoguery pales in comparison to, say, that of Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, or the standard-bearer of the Republican Party (Exhibit A: wapo.st/2EfsTVt).
And yet, I agree that a Harris (or Sanders or Warren) nomination may well result in another competitive general election where President Trump instead loses, but to a narrow-enough degree for Senate Republicans downballot to survive the mild coattail effects and hang on to a 51- or 52-seat majority with little change in the House breakdown.
So my hope is that a moderate Democrat like Biden, Beto, or Klobuchar (the latter two of whom vastly outperformed the partisan leans of their respective states, and Beto ran against an incumbent who was actually reasonably popular in his home state [bit.ly/2DC9qN2] despite being largely reviled nationwide) gets the nod instead, and proceeds to run up the score on Mr. Trump. In our extremely nationalized electoral landscape, incumbent Republicans such as Gardner, MsSally, Collins, Ernst, Tillis, and Perdue — and the former three in particular — as a result, while Sen. Jones survives (more on that below).
To be sure, it’s all too early to make many substantial predictions without half them falling flat on their face by the end of this election cycle, and reasonable and intelligent people can disagree, even strongly, about almost every one of the countless possible electoral outcomes in November of 2020.³
(By the way: I apologize for my habit of employing copiuous volumes of footnotes, even in Internet comments. I simply find it difficult to cram all my thoughts into the main text without making the already dense passages virtually unreadable.)
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¹ And who was elected with narrow pluraties in Upper Midwestern tipping-point states with a number of factors — the most notable being that he ran against the second-least popular major-party nominee in modern American history.
² Why yes, I do have some qualms with your piece titled “A Sign of Weakness,” the very first one being that the younger Bush’s almost maximally high second-year approval rating among Republicans was due to a rally event unlike any in the history of politics anywhere in the globe (one that even skyrocketed Democratic approval into the mid-80s, with opposite-party support only falling below majority level full year later: bit.ly/2Tc9V9k).
³ For example, I suspect that Sen. Jones, now an incumbent with a demonstrated centrist record (bit.ly/2SWsEqc), has a fighting if not ≥50 percent chance of keeping his seat in a reasonably Democratic year. This is not least because the national GOP helped polarize the 2017 special election by continuing to raise money for Judge Moore, sending President Trump down to campaign for him, and allowing the base to deny the mountain of evidence against him, while keeping his incredible (bit.ly/2CL3UFl) racial views mostly on the down-low.
Also, Deep South Republicans seem to have a habit of badly sucking, being the ideological descendants of Wallace Dixiecrats. For example: the alternative to Senator Hyde-Smith — who came within 7.2 percentage points of losing a second Deep South Senate seat in statewide race as an incumbent Republican in Mississippi just last November — would have been State Senator Chris McDaniel, who views on the Confederacy were far more Moore-ian (bit.ly/2ty8Yto) than “merely” joking about voter suppression and public hangings, while on the campaign trail, in the state of Mississippi.
Laurence,
So much to unpack here so I won’t try to be too voluminous. Thank you so much for reading my articles (the word I would use), as I doubt that many have. I hope people enjoy them. And to say the least from your extensive comments, you are an insightful, articulate fellow.
Yes, I am a libertarian conservative. I am also a suburban Republican (despite never living a day in an actual suburb), much further to the right on economics than social issues. But like yourself, I believe the gaping hole in the middle of our political system is a major problem. If this continues, an independent candidate could win the Presidency down the line, though we aren’t there yet.
I was a NeverTrumper in 2016, and while I’m glad he has governed like a more traditional R, I remain deeply skeptical of Trump. Like you pointed out, a Trump 2020 loss may see a reversion to more typical Republicanism fairly quickly. Of course, that’s no guarantee.
Any which way, I really appreciate you coming here to comment and thank you for your kind words and interesting thoughts. I am trying to write an article a week, though that may be optimistic long term. I post on Facebook (feel free to friend me) and Twitter every time I post. I look forward to any comments you may have.