The Trump Stink Doesn't Spread

The fallout for Democrats from Virginia and New Jersey

Democrats are bed-wetters by nature, so you can imagine all the soiled sheets on Tuesday night—especially after it became clear that New Jersey, which Joe Biden won by 16 points in 2020, was much closer than anyone expected. Governor Phil Murphy’s extremely narrow victory there is cold comfort. The New Jersey and Virginia results are ominous for Democrats.

But omens are shifting prophecies, not fate. In retrospect, they may foretell something quite different than we assumed at the time. One of the things I love about politics is that it’s a constantly moving target. Predicting far-off election returns is a little like forecasting the stock market or the winner of next year’s pennant — a fool’s errand.

With those caveats out of the way, here are my main takeaways:

Kevin McCarthy will likely be Speaker of the House

“Political science” is an oxymoron, but certain action-reaction laws of physics are nonetheless at work. Only twice in the last century has the party that just took the presidency picked up House seats in the midterms—that’s two out of 16 elections. The first was 1934, when FDR and the New Deal were so popular that Democrats added seats; the second was 2002, when the rally-around-the-flag feeling post-9/11 helped George W. Bush and the GOP. The average loss is more than 20 seats.

The chances of 2022 joining those anomalies took a dive downward on Tuesday. Yes, the economy is headed upward and Covid, the resurgence of which hurt Democrats on Tuesday, will be increasingly under control, which could help Democrats, especially if Fed Chair Jerome Powell is right and inflation eases. But even with a vigorous, surprisingly successful campaign next year, it seems unlikely that Democrats--who have a slim five-vote margin-- will hang onto the House. That’s why Democrats are so anxious to get BBB done ASAP. "Democrats Deliver" is their only hope.

The Senate is a different story. It is largely independent of national trends and could go either way in 2020.

It would help if Democrats spent the next two years demonizing Mitch McConnell, who is already the least popular politician in the country. I’m old enough to remember a terrific GOP ad from 1980, when long gas lines were a recent memory. It featured a Tip O’Neill lookalike driving down a road, oblivious to his sputtering car. The tag line: “The Democrats Are Running Out of Gas.”

I’ve already argued here that Democrats need to grow a pair. It’s not enough to communicate better about what’s in their huge budget package. That’s necessary but not sufficient. They need to end or amend the filibuster to make sure their voting rights bills pass—so the election isn’t rigged. And they need a new approach that connects party leaders to their supporters in the creative community. Those folks should develop dozens of inexpensive hard-hitting ads and see which ones go viral. Even now, the Lincoln Project (former Republicans) and author Don Winslow are the only ones doing this. Where are the Democrats who understand this is a contact sport?

Democratic get-out-the-vote failed

Because turnout was up sharply from 2017, the media reported that it was “surging” in both parties. But compared to 2020, it was mostly down, especially on the Democratic side.

Virginia has about six million registered voters and only about one million of them voted early or by mail, which is where Democrats are strongest. As we all know, Republicans generally do better with Election Day in-person voters. Even with 55 percent overall turnout, Democrats were far short of their mail-in and early-voting targets.

In New Jersey, where I live, election eve polling showed Murphy up by 11 points; he won by one. In-person election equipment was all new this year, which caused confusion and led to machinery being impounded in Essex County, home to Newark. You can bet Republicans will spend the rest of the year claiming the election was stolen from Jack Ciatterelli there. If Democrats had  a better on-the-ground GOTV effort, we wouldn't have to deal with that.

Dangerous transposition

In genetics, a mutation often occurs when two chromosomes are “transposed”—they exchange places. One of my favorite movies is Trading Places where aristocratic Dan Ackroyd falls into the gutter and homeless Eddie Murphy moves into Ackroyd’s mansion.

The greatest political transposition of the late 20th century was the change from a (nearly) solid Democratic South to a (nearly) solid Republican South. At the same time, the demise of moderate Republicanism has turned New England and the mid-Atlantic states into Democratic strongholds. Vermont used to be the most Republican state in the country. Imagine.

Our era’s great transposition is working-class non college-educated whites moving from blue to red, and wealthier college-educated whites moving from red to blue. The danger for Democrats is that there seem to be more of the former than the latter.

To keep suburbanites, Democrats cannot move too far left on cultural issues like bathrooms and making white people feel like they’re irredeemably racist. And to win back blue-collar workers, they have to deliver tangible progressive benefits instead of just promising to do so.

That’s why Democrats need to stop leading with their chins and start passing bills. Then they need a new and imaginative communications strategy. As James Carville puts it, it's time for Democrats to move out of policy and into sales.

Democrats must put Woke to sleep

Two pieces of good news from this election: New York City elected a moderate Black mayor, Eric Adams, who can use his perch to help tamp down woke nonsense. And Minneapolis, a progressive town with a troubled police department, nonetheless voted against a referendum to defund it. With any luck, this might put the single most self-destructive slogan in recent memory—“defund the police”—in the circular file.

Now we'll see if Democrats can separate themselves from people who think proper pronouns and virtue signaling are more urgent than winning elections.

In the meantime, Republicans are licking their chops over their successful lying about critical race theory in Virginia, where it is not taught at all. CRT has become a now-classic dog whistle, just as intended by Christopher Rufo, the cynic who developed it.

It works because it evokes a whole range of ideas and buzzwords—“inclusion,” “equity,” “anti-racism”—that make many people (including a fair number of Democrats) uncomfortable in their own skin, as if something will be taken away from them or they will be put on the defensive because they are white. “Critical race theory”—which we will hear incessantly until it stops working— is the demagogic descendant of “forced busing,” a major dog whistle of the early 1970s.

But there’s an important difference. Busing children many miles from home was a bad idea, even if Senator Joe Biden went too far in 1977 when he introduced federal legislation to prevent judges from imposing it. (President Carter told him it was flatly unconstitutional and he backed off). Critical race theory, like so much in the shameless Trump era, is more baldly racist.

And that’s why it may be less durable than code words of the past, especially with suburban women who don’t like to be thought of as racist. At least “busing” and “banning school prayer” were real things, not the flat-out lies of political operatives and cable hosts. As we've learned, lies have plenty of staying power within the GOP but they may whither faster with swing voters.

School politics are not as treacherous for congressional candidates as they are in state and local races. But Democrats should heed the Virginia lesson: Glenn Youngkin twisted Terry McAuliffe’s debate comment about parents not determining curriculum out of context, but McAuliffe gave him the ammo to do it. From the PTA to the White House, parents must be pandered to; it’s an iron law of politics. As a practical matter, that means not siding with the teachers unions on charter schools. And Youngkin offered a good line on education: “Children should be taught how to think, not what to think.” If Democrats say that kind of thing in 2022, they’d be ahead of the game.

The Trump stink doesn’t spread down-ballot

We should have known this from 2020, when Biden won by seven million votes and the Democrats almost lost the House. Given the utter moral bankruptcy of the GOP—whose pro-Trump leaders have overwhelmingly failed the supreme political character test of our time—one would have hoped for severe brand damage. It’s not happening.

Democrats are banking on Trump’s lack of discipline—that in 2022 he’ll forget that he stayed out of Virginia and New Jersey and act as he did in Georgia in January 2021, where his clownish intervention in the campaign helped cost the GOP two Senate seats and control of the chamber. Trump won’t be able to resist imposing himself on Arizona and Pennsylvania, which could help Democratic candidates there. But the only way to make him more broadly toxic is to prosecute the case against him—literally.

In recent weeks, we’ve learned rock-solid details of Trump’s coup attempt. Instead of worrying about the MAGA reaction, which is a political calculation unworthy of the constitutional stakes, the Justice Department must hold him accountable.

Trump could lose the nomination.

I know that’s heresy but hear me out. In 2020, many down-ballot Republicans ran a couple points ahead of their standard-bearer. This year, Republican candidates ran nine and six points ahead of him, in New Jersey and Virginia, respectively. That’s a ton.

Youngkin has shown that it’s possible to hold Trump’s base without embracing him. This will be helpful to the GOP in 2022, of course, but it also opens intriguing possibilities for 2024.

Polls show Trump with 86 percent support among Republicans and crushing any potential GOP rivals. But if history is any indication, polls are nearly meaningless at this stage. Imagine Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie and even Glenn Youngkin jump into the race, and one emerges in early primaries to go head-to-head with Trump. At first glance, it looks like a replay of 2016, where his rivals treated Trump gingerly and he rolled right over them.

But that’s not accounting for the millions of suburban women who have now shown that they loathe Trump but still like Republicans. Having won back so many suburbanites, it would be suicidal for the GOP to risk losing them again in 2024 with Trump as the nominee. And in the 16 states with open Republican primaries, you can bet that plenty of independents and even Democrats voters will vote in Republican primaries just to stop him.

The landscape is littered with prohibitive favorites who ended up not winning the nomination. Yes, MAGA is a cult. But Trump’s relative unpopularity was on vivid display on Tuesday and his stranglehold on the party might not be as permanent as we’ve all assumed. Remember, the vast majority of the 75 million people (gulp!) who voted for him last year were not hard-core. And plenty have told pollsters that after January 6, they will not vote for him again.

Finally, voters generally prefer fresh faces, which helped outsider Youngkin against Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton-era retread and former governor. In 2024, when Trump will be 78, unsentimental Republicans may figure that the best way to beat a resurgent Biden and “own the libs” (their first priority) is with a younger candidate. Stranger things have happened.