Ed Kilgore looks at the polling data and the landscape for the 2018 congressional elections and makes the point that Trump isn’t as unpopular as you might like to believe and that, even if he were, the Republicans are not yet vulnerable to a 2010-like shellacking in the next midterms.
Ed’s right.
I wrote about this in a very pessimistic piece we published on February 10th. My conclusion was that we’ve arrived at a point where the Democrats can win the popular vote and lose the presidency, win the popular vote and lose seats in the Senate, and win the popular vote and not gain control of the House. The first of those just happened for the second time in the last five presidential elections, and the latter two are more likely than not to happen in 2018.
As a result, the Republicans don’t fear accountability as much as they should, and certainly are less subject to external pressure than the Democrats.
The concern I expressed is that “the Republicans’ advantages are currently so great that we cannot get any accountability… and, soon, there’s a real risk of a breakdown in public order when people finally realize that our country is no longer even passingly representative.”
For now, disgruntled Americans are marching peacefully and gently trolling town hall meetings, but this strikes me as energy that needs to see results. They haven’t yet realized what they’re up against, and if they ever do realize it there will be less peace and gentleness to their approach.
A lot of people woke up from a slumber on election day, and more people are getting mobilized against Trump every day, but the system is rigged so heavily against them that they can win the elections by millions of votes and wind up with less power than when they began, or, at least, not enough additional power to make any meaningful difference.
I don’t see how we can maintain faith in a political system like this.
As for the Democrats, they need to break out of their urban comfort zones because they’ll never win back the House or State legislatures with the geographic base that they have now. The situation was barely tolerable when it seemed like they had a lock on the White House, but it’s plainly not acceptable now.
I don’t blame the Republicans for liking this system, since it so greatly favors them, but they shouldn’t be complacent about the country’s willingness to accept their right to lead. For now, people are frustrated and fearful but they still have hope. When they realize that that hope is unfounded, there is going to be trouble.
This is true of the Democrats as well, which is why all this lazy impeachment talk, like the talk of the Hamilton Electors, self destructive in the end.
Trump is going to be President until 2021. Creating the impression he is not is a way to engender disappointment.
I am very worried that over the next 4 – 6 months as Democrats get hit with one defeat after another our party our base is simply going to lose hope.
The shifts we saw at the higher end of the income scale may be harder to hold if Trump delivers tax cuts.
I have some hope the GOP will screw the pooch on HCR – Clinton did after all.
But it is going to be a grim year and half until mid-terms which are going to be fought GOP ground.
Yeah, and if we’d had the 2010 election with Obama’s late February approval ratings the Democrats never would have lost the House. Trump’s ratings will certainly go down further, most especially because of the corner the Republicans have backed themselves into on Obamacare. If they do make substantive changes they’ll get punished for the harm they do (they’ll never make any of the possible good changes) and if they don’t they’ll get punished by the true believers for not repealing evul soshalist Obamacare. Almost anything else on the Republican legislative agenda will have the same effects. Trump’s thicket of scandals and Republican Congressmen fleeing from town halls like roaches when you turn on the lights will make it even worse for them.
They punishment will not translate into anything commensurate with the will of the people. That’s the point. Are we going to win Senate elections in Utah and Wyoming and Alabama?
If not, we’re losing seats in the Senate no matter how many million more people vote for our Senate candidates.
The House is similar, although at least possible.
Yeah, but is there any serious path to breaking out of our ‘urban comfort zones’ such that we’re competitive in Utah and Wyoming and Alabama that doesn’t involve becoming the Confederate Party?
Is this more a clash of political philosophies or a clash of ethnic identities?
we better hope so.
The Senate is a big lift, but it’s not those states we need to flip. The “miracle state” to get the Senate, assuming we could keep all our seats, is actually Texas – which doesn’t look impossible like those do.
Also, the Senate 2018 map is not at all representative of the Senate in general. 2020 is far more favorable.
I do agree we’re unlikely to take the Senate but I don’t think the House is an enormous stretch. I’m expecting a backlash comparable to those in 2010 and 2014. A 2014 swing would be right near the edge of control and a 2010 swing would definitely bring a Democratic House.
You’re speaking of the possibility of a second civil war. Scary stuff. But you’re correct that gerrymandering and unintentional imbalances, plus a degree of voter suppression, have placed us in a position where Democrats can only win with overwhelming support.
Would love to see people roused out of their complacency and a huge up welling of outrage, so strong that even Republicans will have to pay attention. But I’ve no confidence that this will happen. So many are so complacent and so uninformed. Give them a football team to root for, pizza and beer, recreational activities, a mall — and they’ll accept pretty much anything.
Bread and Circuses, a time-honored strategy…
Well they must be feeling some pressure
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pro-ryan-group-spends-2.2-million-more-on-anti-obamacare-ads/artic
le/2615437
I may be in dreamland, but I keep hoping that Schumer, behind the scenes, is working to get a few fed up Senators to switch to IND or DEM and caucus with the Dems. What a mind-f*ck that would be. Collins? Murkowski? Flake? I can always hope that someone will stand up. I even hold out for folks like Corker or McCain. Promise them anything, Chuck!!!!
Agreed. Must be attempted.
This strategy is one of the only plausible “parliamentary” maneuvers that could put a brake on the HOR. But this can only be possible if Trump gets even worse – much worse – in his behavior than he is now or if he fails to address any foreign or domestic crisis and puts the country in danger. We know Chaffetz will never address corruption and incompetence when the president has an (R) after his name so that leaves your slim reed of a Senate switcheroo. Of course, none of the Republican senators you mentioned is facing elections in 2018 so it would have to be a matter of principle. Modern GOP is not known for its moral principles.
They may not be up for re-election. That would be a negative. The impetus would be patriotism, principle, and retirement ahead after their current term… and goodies from Chuck.
Not holding by breath. When has Collins ever flipped on anything the party really wants?
Never. At least if her vote actually would make or break the issue.
She always votes with the tribe. Always. Anything else is just posturing to the Beltway Press Corpse so she can continue to feed them her “moderate” bona fides.
It is deeply troubling to have a constitutional system that can give us a government that is so far out of whack with the wishes of the majority. It’s also deeply unfortunate that Trump was elected, something that I think that even in retrospect was a black swan event (i.e. the election happened to occur at one of the points in the fall when his polling was closest to Clinton’s; even so he didn’t win a majority; given that he didn’t win a majority he had to get very lucky to get just the number of votes to put him over the top in WI, MI, PA).
Looking forward, I expect that at lot will depend on the state of the economy in 2018. If it’s still relatively good, then the combination of partisanship and Republican advantages will make 2018 very difficult for us. If it isn’t good, then I could easily see the Repubs getting tarred with a “failed” Trump presidency, and losing both houses.
The state of the economy used to be a reliable yardstick for gauging the fortunes of the dominant party, especially in mid-term elections but that just isn’t the case anymore with most GOP voters really living in a closed off partisan political bubble. We would need to see a pretty much catastrophic situation like 2008 repeat for there to be any real threat to GOP dominance. The GOP hold all the powerful mass media strings and know how to manipulate the public for their own destructive ends.
I definitely agree with you that the economy is not as important as it once was. We are talking about much smaller shifts. But…if Trump is at 40% with a good economy, he might be at 30% with a bad economy. That’s the difference between taking the House or not taking it.
Wait until the full force of deportations begins to hit. Areas dependent on agriculture (produce, fruit, etc.), tourism (hotels and restaurants) or construction will be clobbered.
The Democratic Party is now a regional party. Or bi-regional. You hold the West Coast and the Northeast. Everywhere else has given up on you and the false promises of Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton/Bill Clinton.
You have a majority of the country only because of huge urban majorities in CA and NY. Some day these people will realize that you don’t represent them either and are willing to throw them under the bus for the 1% also.
And, “No”, the Republican Party is not the answer either. It is even more poisonous. So more and more people don’t vote at all. Not because it’s difficult to vote, but because there is no one worth voting for as both parties are addicted to Wall Street cash.
It was the Comey letter that did it. Plus the month long Russian wikileaks. Combined that with year long MSM microscopic email coverage(nothing similar with Trump-coverage was all over the place) and Bernie Busters bashing Hillary throughout campaign and then many not voting or voting 3rd party, and that’s it.
This really is the critical political issue of 21st century America–our 18th century constitution has well and truly failed, the norms that allowed it to wheeze along for a couple centuries were destroyed by the Repubs beginning with Newt Turdrich in 1994, and now the termites have thoroughly eaten through the structure. New wood is unobtainable, and a new compact cannot be created with the heartlands of TrumpAmerica.
The people are only beginning to be dimly aware of the problem, and there is certainly no voice that utters such heresies on the national stage. Perhaps as the failures mount someone will begin to address the structural political calamity now being cemented by Repubs.
It is difficult to see how the hapless Dems can make the argument, as the obvious reactionary response is “sore losers whining again!” and “our Glorious Constitution cannot fail!”, which of course has been the civic religion of the nation for over two centuries. Hell, Dems hardly uttered a peep as we inaugurated the second (Repub) popular vote loser in the past 5 prez elections! Nor can one see a statesman figure like Gore or Kerry effectively making the argument. Sanders?
But one would think there has to be some response to the growing understanding that heretofore effective political norms and behavior by a majority of citizens can no longer result in a commensurate political course change. When that becomes clear the only answer is political rebellion/revolution or moral collapse.
Perhaps some sort of strategy for a political “rebellion” by the Blue cities needs to be gamed out. Does it begin with overwhelming civil disobedience such as withholding tax revenue from the failed (Repub) central government? Efforts to economically boycott either Trumpland and/or the massive entities that make up our Corpocracy and that wrecked the constitution and brought the “conservative” scourge upon the country? Attempts to proclaim new political units such as West Coastia? Unfortunately the cities’ power is largely economic, and they are generally in a terrible geographic and logistical position(s).
There are no obvious answers anywhere one looks.
“West Coastia” is in a near perfect geographic, logistical, economic, social and political position. More than enough money to survive anything, and too far away for the east coasters to make any difference. What are they going to do–send an army over the Rockies? LOL. The folks on the east coast still think they have some political power, but at the end of the day that’s dependent on economic power, and that’s all on the west coast now. All of the fastest growing and most profitable companies in the country are here now. Take CA and WA companies like Apple, Google, Disney, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, HP, Intel and so many more out of the NY markets and they’d be pretty weak.
Heh. The army and the navy are already in Cali, bruh. Any rebellion would be short lived.
Maybe Camp Pendleton could become the west coast Guantanamo. Or Miramar, or North Island. Or the Point Loma Naval Base…where the nuclear subs are based.
And that’s just San Diego County.
When we worked on the bay at Point Loma we used to joke that when the fleet was in we were surrounded by about a thousand warheads, what with the subs right down Nimitz Blvd, and the fleet right across the bay.
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Booman writes:
How can you…or Ed Kilgore or anyone else…refer to “polls” as if they represent some sort of reality other than paid propaganda when they were so fucking wrong in the runup to the Republican primaries, and then later right on up to about 10PM the night of our latest presnidential ejerktion?
I really do not understand this.
This is the real meat of Kilgore’s above-linked story:
He writes “The differences are most likely the result of a combination of sampling and survey techniques.” Yes. Possibly. But…why are those “differences” not proved out by time? He references Nate Silver…the same pollster who was so right about Obama and so wrong about Trump?
Give me a break!!!
Silver oughta go on back to sports, as did that MSNBC so-called “guru” Keith Olbermann. At least when the sports guys are wrong nobody dies.
Forget about the polls and go do what your hearts and minds tell you is correct.
There is no certainty above truth. If it fails, it wasn’t true. Not true enough, anyway.
Or as Gandhi put it:
Bet on it.
I am.
AG
Yeah, I wouldn’t have spent so much time parsing polls given their recent track record.
But that hardly matters for my point.
The Democratic Archipelago
“…energies that used to go into building and selling now go into managing and administering. Fortunes and family lives now depend on how regulations get drawn up and how problems get defined. It is only natural that political “polarization” should be on the rise: The stakes of governing are rising.
Any place that has political power becomes a choke-point through which global money streams must pass. Such places are sheltered from globalization’s storms. They tend to grow. Austin, Texas, adds tens of thousands of residents a year, and is now the country’s 11th-largest city. The four richest counties in the United States are all in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Resources are sucked from almost everywhere into political capitals and a few high-tech centers and university towns allied with them, where ambitious people settle and constitute a class. The Democratic Party is the party of that class, the class of the winners of globalization.
There are now just three regions of the country in which Democrats dominate–New England, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Otherwise, the party’s support comes from the archipelago of powerful New Economy cities it controls. Washington, D.C., with its 93-to-4 partisan breakdown, is not that unusual. Hillary Clinton won Cambridge, Massachusetts, by 89 to 6 and San Francisco by 86 to 9. Here, where the future of the country is mapped out, the “rest” of the country has become invisible, indecipherable, foreign.
And the rest of the country belongs to Trump.
(Christopher Caldwell, the Claremont Institute, Sanctimony Cities) Look it up if you want the rest. Trigger Warning: Weekly Standard editor.
No, it doesn’t. Plenty of people in all the Trump states voted for Clinton or someone else. More of those people didn’t vote at all. Acting like there’s some impenetrable red monolith eating 2/3 of the country is just as myopically self-destructive as ignoring all the Trump voters in blue states.
This is a fucking purple country, the numbers bear it out, and the so-called “great sorting” is a marketing ploy that too many people on both sides are falling for.
Pretty much this.
There were enough “moral non-voters” in Mi, Wi, and Pa to allow Strongman Trump to win the election. Because morals and ethics and principles, oh my.
Georgia and Texas are slowly but surely turning purple – and onto blue.
This isn’t a reason to become complacent, and in fact shows how important it is for liberals and progressives to worry about fighting each other about the most bestiest liberalist policies if and when we control at least one of the branches of government. Destroying the Democratic party now is essentially suicide.
Turnout was way up in Pennsylvania.
Here: http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls
and search for “income”.
So just to make sure I’ve got this straight: uprecedented disapproval ratings, record-low approval ratings, millions protesting around the world, more protests every day, the universal scorn and disgust of all news media, pundits etc. (excluding FOX etc. as usual), the immediate collapse of the immigrant ban, #TrumpRegrets, the press conferences, Flynn’s resignation, the constantly-developing Russia stories, and appalling gaffes and every day — despite all of this in four weeks, with much more to come — it still won’t make any difference in the voting booths? Just because last November surprised everyone?
I just want to make sure I’ve got this straight.
Reality is what we make it. If November didn’t teach us that then nothing will.
For GOP voters, no. Everything you stated showing Trump’s incompetence is, in fact, evidence of how much liberals hate America and are the real enemy, along with the liberal media. 5th Columnists are more dangerous than ISIS and Iran combined. Duh.
It isn’t about changing the minds of GOP voters – they don’t have minds, they have talking points d/b/a political philosophy.
It’s about getting liberals and people who don’t even know that they are liberals to get out and vote.
Trump disapproval is essentially meaningless for the 63 million pig people who voted for him and are itching to go out and vote for his party in 2018 just to make you and your friends cry. Once you remember that, then it becomes clear that it’s about mobilizing liberals and progressives, not getting people to finally realize that they’re fucking idiots.
Jordan,
I also am very worried about this. Sure, lots of people are woke. Lots of people are angry, are protesting, are attending town halls, are getting active. They’re GOING to vote. Great. Are they greater in number than Dampnut’s voters? And esp. in the red states, in the teeth of gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. That’s the question, innit?
And to echo others up-thread, INDEED, I wonder how the nation stays together, if, as last time, the voters in Blue State America have to sit and take a world that Red Staters foist on them. Lots of things are decided at the federal level — and those things affect Blue Staters and their families.
I’ve been thinking about how, if Dampnut actually goes forward with his plans for the ICE expansion and massive deportations, families of the deported will react. It could get ugly, and get ugly fast. These are the families of citizens — and the fact that some of these people are undocumented will not carry weight with these citizens (nor should it) — they’ll be angry, and wanting their family back.
In sum: sure, we’re woke. Are we sure we’re numerous enough to actually carry the day in 2018? Not clear. Not clear.
One thing I’m still looking around for, is a way to get involved in voter registration and canvassing in swing districts. I think it has to start now, so that by the time we get to election day, those voters are already well-prepared to vote. E.g., signed up for absentee voting, or vote-by-mail, or whatever. Have had regular contact with people who provide the support needed to get them to the polls. I don’t think this can be left until the summer before the election.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not Chicken Little here. I think we -can- win in 2018. But getting angry isn’t enough. Getting angry at Ted Cruz fixes nothing. Only registering and motivating enough voters in Texas, will fix anything.
If a whole bunch of people woke up after the election, what were they all doing before that? Just nodding off I guess. Was there reason to be awake even under Barack Obama. Evidently not.