is it all an illusion?
Susan Glasser at the New Yorker takes a look at the newfound optimism among Democrats that they may not be destined to have a wipeout in November. She notes that Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP through this season and that some people like Amy Walter of the Cook Report says Dems are smoking “hopium” if they think they have a shot in hell.
I’m not allowing myself to get too excited about this but there is another side to the story and it’s worth looking at:
The conventional wisdom in Washington would indicate that the Democrats are all but certain to lose the House in 2022, and very likely the Senate, too. The yearlong collapse in Joe Biden’s approval ratings has been seen as a virtual guarantee of this outcome. Biden has become the most politically unpopular leader at this point in a Presidency since the advent of modern polling—even more unpopular than Trump was during the “blue wave” election of 2018. That and a worst-in-four-decades inflation outbreak on Biden’s watch have convinced almost all political observers that the elections this fall are a sure thing for Republicans.
But, over the summer, a new school of what might be called “Trumptimism” has taken hold among some Democratic strategists and independent analysts. In the mess of our current politics, they discern a case for optimism—history-defying, experience-flouting optimism that maybe things won’t work out so badly after all in November. “In the age of Trump, nothing is normal,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of the liberal think tank the New Democrat Network and a veteran strategist, told me, on Thursday. “Nothing is following traditional physics and rules, so why would this midterm?”
Rosenberg, a staunchly public proponent of this view for the past few months, argues that Trump’s continued hold over the Republican Party is actually good news for Democrats this fall—and beyond. Trump, he posits, is not so much killing off his political enemies as he is destroying his own host organism, the G.O.P. itself.
Recent events, according to Rosenberg, have started to prove his case, including what appears to be the easing of inflation, lower gas prices, and Congress’s passage of Biden’s long-stalled signature climate-change-and-health-care legislation. The horrific school-shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas, upset pro-gun-control Democratic voters across the country, and the Supreme Court’s decision to toss out Roe v. Wade is giving millions of Americans a reason to vote in November. “It’s a new, bluer election,” Rosenberg tweeted, on Thursday, as part of a long thread of upbeat-for-Democrats data points. Or, as he put it when we spoke: “There was never really a red wave.”
The Trump factor, according to Rosenberg, is key. For the past several election cycles, nothing has united Democratic voters more than the chance to vote against him. And all summer Trump has been back in the news, thanks to revelations from testimony in the House’s January 6th hearings; the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents improperly taken from the White House; and endless speculation about whether Trump will be indicted or run again for President—or both. “It awakened the anti-maga majority in the country,” Rosenberg insisted.
Rosenberg sees this fall as a genuinely competitive election, not a foregone conclusion. And his predictions for the long-term fate of the Trumpified G.O.P. are bleak. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight Presidential elections, and Trump was the first incumbent President running for reëlection since Herbert Hoover to have his party lose the White House, Senate, and House in just four years. Rosenberg said he remained convinced that divisive primaries, such as the Wyoming election this week, are disastrous for the Republican Party in general elections—even if pro-Trump candidates beat out the few Liz Cheneys every time. “The Republican coalition,” he asserted flatly, “is cracking.” At this rate, he insisted, the Trump party could even become just as much of a “noncompetitive national entity” as the post-Hoover G.O.P. of the nineteen-thirties and forties.
Abortion and Trump are both factors as is the assault on democracy and the batshit crazy candidates the Republicans have foisted on the country.
As I said, I’m not smoking any “hopium.” But I do think there is good reason to believe that all the “metrics” and “fundamentals” may not be operative in this cycle. There’s a lot going on and the Big Argument is being engaged.