This election is a contest to see which party can do its best to lose. Looking forward from mid-September, President Donald Trump’s Republicans seem to be well ahead at this. But the Resistance (or don’t they call themselves that any more?) Democrats are putting up a contest.
Second-term presidents tend to make political mistakes by doing things they think are right. Franklin Roosevelt and court-packing, Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, George W. Bush and the Iraq surge. You can see two examples of this in the second Trump term.
One is his insistence on haphazardly imposing tariffs. It is an example of providing a plentiful quantity of something for which there is no demand among the electorate.
That’s been true for a long time. President William McKinley, cited by Trump as a tariff advocate, called for switching from protective to reciprocal tariffs in his last public speech in 1901. Over the next half-century, as economist Douglas Irwin points out in his definitive book Clashing Over Commerce, Republican presidents were leery of tariffs, which were supported by congressional leaders as a way of holding their majorities together: you vote for a tariff that helps my local industry and I’ll vote for one that helps yours.
The definitive moment may have been when, as Jude Wanniski argued years ago, a proposal for a tariff on the dairy product casein got the progressive Wisconsin delegation to join the legislative mob that passed Smoot-Hawley in 1930. Over 1,000 economists signed a petition begging President Herbert Hoover to veto the bill, but he signed it anyway, and the Great Depression followed.
Almost no one without a lobbyist wants tariffs now. And voters don’t have to read Irwin to realize that Trump’s tariffs raise prices for consumers and many manufacturers as well.
Trump stands on sounder ground, in my view, in attacking the regime in Iran which has preached and practiced “death to America” since 1979. But, apparently believing that he could compel a surrender as he had against the Chavista gangsters in Venezuela, he launched a devastating assault without preparing the public for it and promising a speedy resolution.
That hasn’t happened; wars turn out to be hard to predict. But it has brought higher gasoline prices and continued inflation and has destroyed Republicans’ previous edge on the economy.
Meanwhile, the president, in childish self-aggrandizement, is devoting political capital to his beloved ballroom, to renaming the lowest-altitude Great Lake “Lake America,” to Hunter Biden-style enrichment of his family members, to closing the Kennedy Center if he can’t put his name on it. “An extraordinary number of dumba** political takes,” as elections handicapper Nate Silver notes.
Just to make sure that voters don’t forget these things, the Trump political command has opened up its nine-digit war chest and is spending ads centered on the president despite his 40% job approval and 58% disapproval. It looks like the strengths, maybe even the identities, of actual Republican candidates will get minimal airing.
If Republicans’ weakness is the self-indulgence of a second-term president, Democrats’ weakness is their propensity to embrace the wildest and least popular impulses of their political left.
There’s abundant videotape back from the left-wing craze that followed the death of a Minneapolis fentanyl user in May 2020 of Democrats’ demands for defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and abandoning enforcement of immigration laws. Which is exactly what the Biden administration did, raising the number of foreign-born by 8.3 million in four years, 30% more than the Obama administration did in eight years.
That was five times as many as the foreign-born increase in the first Trump administration, and in the 20 months of Trump 2.0, the Census Bureau reports, the foreign-born population was declined by 2.8 million.
Democrats’ no-enemies-to-the-left posture is most obvious, perhaps, in Democrats’ reluctance to oppose boys playing in girls’ sports, their support for government-paid transgender surgeries for prison inmates and illegal immigrants, and their policy in states they govern removing teenagers professing gender dysphoria from the custody of their parents.
As the most effective pro-Trump ad of the 2024 campaign cycle put it, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
That still could be a lively issue. So is the reluctance of Michigan Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed to distance himself from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, the internet personality who campaigned by his side in the Democratic primary. Piker has said “America deserved 9/11,” and that Hamas was justified in its Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
Piker has also been a prominent supporter of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Reporters and analysts who have been eager to ask Republican candidates whether they renounce extremist Republicans, even those from faraway venues, have rarely asked Democrats to renounce extremist Democrats.
But surely it’s far to ask el Sayed, and Democrats campaigning for him, whether he stands by the man he was pleased to summon to his side earlier this year.
Democrats, like most parties not controlling the White House, have no clear leader, and they are also more likely than some opposition parties to sign up for any new-fangled initiative. And particularly, given the contempt so many of their partisans feel for those who honor traditional lifestyles, for ideas and causes that seem exotic or repulsive to denizens of Middle America.
Politicians of both parties, including centrist demeanor governors like Democrat Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Republican Greg Abbott of Texas, have been quick in recent weeks to switch and oppose AI data centers, and many officeholders are giving serious consideration to AI regulation.
The danger for Republicans is that imposing regulation may seem at odds with traditional party beliefs and, at least at the moment, is directly contrary to the stand of Trump. The danger for Democrats is that they may seem to be switching too readily from one cause to another.
In the process they may seem unserious about everything. “The nuclear doomers become the climate doomers become the AI doomers,” as the Georgia-based radio talk show host Erick Erickson put it. “It is always the same apocalyptic crowd moving from one issue to the next,” in the words of the Kentucky Republican partisan Scott Jennings.
The general trend in off-year elections, the Trump slump in job approval, and Republicans’ continuing weakness in generic polls make Democrats the favorites to gain House and maybe Senate majorities this year. Their leads in the South — big in North Carolina and Georgia and narrow in Texas — are good news for them.
HEY GERMANY, IT’S LEGITIMATE TO LIMIT IMMIGRATION
But voters’ continuing low regard for the Democratic Party, and Republicans’ poll showings in three Northern states which seemed earlier this year to be gimmes for the opposition — Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota — suggest there may be surprises.
Which may be what you should expect in a year when both sides seem to be trying their hardest to lose.