Haven’t we seen this movie before? Voters, weary of a Republican president whose foreign or domestic policies don’t seem to be delivering as promised, seem on the verge of a massive rejection of his party.
Polls show Democrats surging. The generic ballot — which party’s candidates would you favor for the House of Representatives? —shows Democrats far ahead of Republicans. Statewide polls show Democrats ahead in large states that had voted Republican for president and threatening incumbents in historically Republican states such as Kansas and Nebraska.
That’s pretty much the picture today. Donald Trump’s job approval has slipped below 40%, below his numbers at the end of September 2018 and similar to George W. Bush’s in September 2006.
Republicans trail in the generic vote by about as much as in 2018 and by wider margins in 2006.
All of which provides a strong basis for the professional prognosticators’ predictions that Democrats will overturn the Republicans’ current narrow majority in the House and some justification for those who say they have a majority chance of gaining the four seats that would give them a majority in the Senate.
But there are a couple of caveats here. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini points out that polls in the last four congressional elections have understated Republicans’ actual election performance by wide margins in the summer, then narrowed in the fall. But this year, there is little sign of such narrowing yet.
But perhaps the polls are consistently understating Republican support, as analyst Nate Silver says they have in the last three presidential elections. Many pollsters report it’s much harder to reach Republican respondents, who tend to mistrust media pollsters.
And this year, many Republicans seem unhappy with the president and his party. Does that mean they’re just unwilling to be polled or that they will skip voting as well? No one knows the answer.
And no one knows the answer to the question posed by Robert Redford’s character in the movie The Candidate when he wins the election: “What do we do now?” No one seems to know for sure what Democrats will do if they win majorities in both houses. A Democratic Senate is unlikely to confirm any Trump appointee to the Supreme Court and probably to any federal court, and would likely extract concessions from any nominee to a high policy position — unless Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman denies Democrats their 51st vote.
MICHAEL BARONE: TOWARDS A POST-TRUMP POLITICS
Democratic majorities might try to cabin in Donald Trump’s power to set tariffs, but they won’t be able to change underlying trade statutes and must depend on the courts to decide, as they have already in some cases, that those laws don’t justify Trump’s actions.
Democrats may also try to end U.S. military operations against Iran, which, in any case, have been erratic. But they may not be able to. George W. Bush was able to execute his successful surge strategy in Iraq, despite majority opposition in both houses after Democrats’ victories in the off-year elections in 2006.
One gets little sense from the campaign dialogue what Democratic majorities would aim to do on other policies. Their candidates decry high gas prices and inflation generally. But they’re unlikely to revert to the Biden administration’s policy, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, of vastly expanding federal spending, which resulted in 9% inflation in 2022 and remained a continuing liability for Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024.
There’s a general impulse in the Democratic Party to see the working class as its core constituency and to respond to its presumed needs with economic redistribution. That’s the lesson Democrats take from Franklin Roosevelt and the rich literature inspired by his New Deal.
But the impulse is outdated. The white college graduate voters who now dominate Democratic primaries and fundraising may indulge the Marxist and progressive presumption that the working class is especially morally worthy, but can hardly help observing that blue-collar workers have been voting increasingly Republican even before Trump rode down his escalator.
Indeed, as economist and former Sen. Phil Gramm has shown, the United States already has economic redistribution policies locked into place, so that the bottom 60% of income earners are eligible for government transfer payments, raising them to average income levels.
In those circumstances, Joe Biden’s major push toward redistribution was his frequent proposals (sometimes overruled, like Trump’s tariffs, by the courts) for forgiveness of college and graduate student loans. The beneficiaries of those loans were not only the gender studies majors looking for adjunct work but also the gaggles of college and university administrators subsidized by those programs.
It’s interesting that the Biden administration, staffed not only at the top but throughout with Obama administration veterans, did not seek a highly visible overhaul of healthcare financing.
They surely remember the political price they paid for Obamacare. Passed only by parliamentary legerdemain in the face of adverse polling, it saw Republicans gain 64 House seats in the 2010 off-year election. That was the biggest off-year gain for either party since Bill Clinton broke Republicans’ lock on the presidency in 1992 and Newt Gingrich broke Democrats’ lock on the House in 1994.
Defenders of Obamacare may respond that Republicans’ attempts to repeal it were unpopular and were defeated by John McCain’s vote in 2018. But tying together the broad opposition to Obamacare during Barack Obama’s tenure with the broad opposition to Obamacare repeal during Donald Trump’s is the fact that large majorities of the public, for all their grumblings, are content with their current healthcare financing and oppose any attempts to take it away.
That’s something Democrats may want to consider when they see young Democratic Socialists of America support Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal. By definition, it would eliminate the arrangements most Americans have made and are content with. Lots of voters are not going to like that.
American voters generally, and Democratic politicians in particular, tend to look to government to cure various ills. In that perspective, you can argue — and certainly public opinion polls would suggest most people would — that the nation’s performance in this first quarter of the 21st century has been suboptimal.
But the mostly unanticipated performance of the private sector has been better, in technological devices and communication and in fracking technology, which has made the U.S. once again the world’s greatest oil producer as it was at the outset of World War II. Elon Musk has outperformed the heavily regulated Detroit Three in making a profitable business of building electric cars and has outperformed government-run NASA at producing reusable space rockets.
MICHAEL BARONE: BOTH PARTIES AIMING TO LOSE THE OFF-YEAR ELECTIONS
Looking back over the century so far, the historian Niall Ferguson admits, “My prophetic vision of decline and fall 25 years ago clearly has not been fulfilled. In relative terms, America is still Number One by any measure except maybe the number of robots.” That despite the disappointments and demerits of successive administrations and Congresses. Whether the Democrats sweep the off-year elections next month or the Republicans once again outpoll the polls, the winners — and losers — might want to keep that perspective in mind.