Diminishing Democratic Majority
Levan Ramishvili
Last weekend I wrote about how the landscape of 2021 is suddenly letting Republicans play politics on “easy” mode, by giving them back the kind of issues that built Ronald Reagan’s majority in the 1970s and 1980 — rising inflation, rising violent crime, a Cold War rivalry (Chinese rather than Russian this time) and backlash against a culturally ascendant but overreaching and self-deceiving left.
I also wrote that this state of affairs was probably temporary, defining the environment as we head toward the 2022 midterms but not actually catapulting us permanently back to the world of 1980. In which case it’s fruitful to speculate about what the world after this strange, Covid-mediated moment holds for our two political coalitions — starting this weekend with the view from the Democratic perspective and continuing with the view from the G.O.P. side next week.
If you’re a Democrat right now, you can tell yourself a reasonably optimistic story, even in the face of disastrous midterm polling, about what the world after 2021 looks like for your party. In this hopeful scenario inflation is a challenge for a year but not a decade, and much of the simmering public discontent with the Biden administration reflects a simple exhaustion with Covid-era abnormalcy — an abnormalcy that, with child vaccinations, therapeutic drugs and widespread immunity, should really and truly be over with next year.
If that abnormalcy goes, so might a bunch of related issues that are currently hurting Democrats, including not just economic problems but cultural ones as well. The current education wars, for instance, have clearly been inflamed by school closings and masking policies, not just by parental doubts about new progressive curriculums. So once Covid-era interventions are finally in the rearview mirror, it may be that the Critical Race Theory debate recedes somewhat as well.
Thus the optimistic Democrat can tell herself that after losing ground in the midterms, the Biden administration will have a better economy thereafter, a lot of popular domestic spending to take credit for, a diminishment of culture war and a Republican opposition captive to its own extremists and likely to once again nominate Donald Trump for president.
All of which would be enough to win Democrats back most of the political advantages they’ve lost in the last year and enable them to go back to worrying about their structural disadvantages in the Electoral College, and how Trump might provoke a constitutional crisis when he loses narrowly a second time. These are hardly trivial worries. But they’re a very different kind of worry, if you’re a Democrat, from the fear that Republicans might cruise to Reagan-like majorities in 2024.
The more pessimistic scenario for Democrats, though, is one in which most of these hopes come to pass and others, too — normalcy is restored, inflation is tamed, schools are open everywhere and masks are set aside, illegal border crossings diminish and homicide rates drop, no major foreign crises intervenes — and it doesn’t help the party or its president as much as one might expect.
I’ll call this, to be provocative, the “emerging Republican majority” scenario, in which it turns out that of the two big political migrations of the Trump era — affluent suburbanites turning more Democratic, working-class whites and then Latinos turning more Republican — the first one was temporary and provisional, and the second one permanent and accelerating.
In this possible future, it will become clear that the Glenn Youngkin result in Virginia was a bellwether — that there’s certain kind of suburban voter who will vote for a moderate-seeming Democrat over the Trumpiest Republican, but who will swing back to the G.O.P. as soon as there’s any excuse to do so. Meanwhile the characteristic Obama-Trump voter, whether in rural white America or in Latino areas of Florida or Texas, will remain so culturally alienated from contemporary progressivism that there’s no easy way for Biden or any other Democratic politician to win them back. And especially not our aging president’s two obvious heirs, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, who built their careers in deep-blue precincts, embodying aspects of elite progressivism that have dubious national appeal.
Which would mean that after Biden, liberals should expect the deluge — unless, of course, the Republican Party makes itself so utterly objectionable that it torches all of these advantages and ensures that any emerging G.O.P. majority is stillborn.
This possibility confronts Democrats with a strange political calculus, albeit one that they already faced somewhat in Trump’s first term. It may be that the things they (rightly) fear most about a Trumpian revival — all the paranoia and conspiracism that gave us Jan. 6 — are also the only things that, by alienating suburban voters from the G.O.P., keep the present Democratic coalition viable.
Whereas without Trumpishness as a foil and boogeyman, current-era liberalism would be headed for a fate once anticipated for Republicans: a slow but steady ebb, a surprising demographic squeeze.
Levan Ramishvili
Last weekend I considered what the Democratic Party should expect from politics after Covid — the hope of revived popularity for Joe Biden under return-to-normalcy conditions, the danger that the left-tilting party might be losing ground across multiple different demographic groups. Now, after an interlude of giving thanks, let’s consider how post-Covid politics might look from the Republican side.
Republicans have a lot to be thankful for. In the years since George W. Bush their party has staggered around without a governing ideology, veering from one style of fantasy politics to another, and twice nominated a ridiculously unfit reality-television star for the presidency. Yet through it all the party has never collapsed, never fallen more than a little distance out of power and almost always retained a certain capacity to block the Democrats, which is the only thing its constituencies can agree on.
This pattern seems unlikely to be broken even if Biden’s poll numbers bounce back across 2022 and 2023. In that scenario Republicans will still probably narrowly recapture the House of Representatives, returning to the position that they held immediately after last November’s election — as a minority coalition, but a large one rather than a rump, which thanks to its structural advantages can always hope to hold at least part of Congress and ride a few lucky breaks into the White House.
But in a way, that advantage is also the core Republican weakness, and the party’s good fortune in avoiding profound punishment for all its follies is the reason those follies will probably continue. The problems in the Democratic Party — the danger that its progressive turn is costing it conservative-leaning minority votes, even as anti-Trump suburban voters could swing back to the G.O.P. — create an opportunity for Republicans to win real popular majorities at the national level, on the scale of Bush in 2004 if not quite Ronald Reagan. But the fact that they don’t need to be a majority coalition to exercise a certain power means that they’re more likely to choose badly, and stay roughly where they are.
The alternative, the best-case post-Covid scenario for the party, was visible in Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia campaign, which essentially blended elements from Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 with Mitt Romney in 2012, while shedding the baggage that kept both men from winning popular-vote majorities. Youngkin has a Romney-esque persona — the corporate suit and genial family man — but where the man from Bain Capital ended up captive to party dogma on taxes and entitlement cuts, the former Carlyle Group executive promised higher education spending and tax cuts that benefit the lower-middle class, playing against the corporate-Republican and supply-side stereotypes.
Meanwhile, Youngkin imitated Trump not just in his relatively populist promises but also in his willingness to pick cultural fights — in this case, on critical race theory in schools — that other moderate Republicans might shy away from. But then in most other ways he was an anti-Trump: decent rather than bullying, reasonable rather than paranoid, keeping conspiracism at a distance, reassuringly competent rather than apocalyptic.
So that’s all the G.O.P. needs nationally to fully exploit its post-Covid opportunities — a more populist economic agenda, a willingness to take the fight to the progressive left (but with a smile) and an end to Trumpian conspiracism.
But do enough actors in the party really want that combination? At the elite level there is a clutch of politicians and candidates who keep groping for a more populist agenda and a group of nationalist intellectuals who think they’re on the cusp of imposing one upon the party. But there is still a larger group of lawmakers, strategist and donors who are very comfortable having no agenda whatsoever, or falling back on the familiarity of upper-bracket tax cuts and pretend budget cuts as soon as they’re restored to power.
Among the party’s voters, activists and media personalities, meanwhile, there remains a clear appetite not for the Youngkin-style appropriation of certain parts of Trumpism, but for Donald Trump in full — nourished by the plausible belief that populists and social conservatives can’t entirely trust more-corporate Republicans, the implausible belief that Trump’s nastiness helped him more than it hurt him, the false belief that he actually won the 2020 election, plus the very America-in-2021 desire for politics to be high-stakes TV entertainment rather than boring attempts to cobble together governing majorities.
And here’s the thing: Between the Democratic Party’s weaknesses, Biden’s age and the unimpressiveness of his possible successors, Republicans could very easily be competitive in 2024 while renominating Trump and campaigning on a purely negative agenda.
Sure, they can’t expect to govern effectively that way, and they’d be throwing away a potentially golden opportunity. But in the end the race would be close, there would be some exciting constitutional-crisis possibilities in the aftermath, and if the Democrats pulled it out, well, their majorities would be slim and 2026 would be just around the corner.
And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past 15 years, it’s that the chance to enjoy a little bit of power without any real responsibility is impossible for Republicans to resist.
Levan Ramishvili
It’s been nearly 30 years since then-Gov. Bill Clinton took a break from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of death-row inmate Ricky Ray Rector. Morally, it may have been repugnant to kill a man so mentally handicapped by a failed suicide attempt that he set aside the pecan pie of his last meal because he was “saving it for later.”
Politically, it was essential.
By the early 1990s the American left had spent a generation earning a soft-on-crime image in an era of growing lawlessness. In 1988, Mike Dukakis secured the Democrats’ third landslide loss thanks in no small part to his stalwart opposition to the death penalty. Four years later, it was difficult to imagine any Democrat reaching the White House without a literal blood sacrifice to the gods of law and order.
Now Democrats seem intent on reviving that reputation. In Waukesha, Wis., six people were killed and at least 60 injured when Darrell Brooks drove his Ford Escape through a Christmas parade, according to the police. Brooks already had a lengthy rap sheet and had reportedly run over a woman with the same S.U.V. early this month. But, as The Times reported, he had been “quickly freed from jail on bond after prosecutors requested what they now say was an inappropriately low bail.”
What happened in Waukesha on Sunday is among the consequences of easy bail. And bail reform — that is, reducing or eliminating cash bail for a variety of offenses — has been a cause of the left for years.
Then there is California, which in 2014 classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.
In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”
As for the rest of the country: Can anyone seriously say that Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia or New York has been improved in recent years under progressive leadership? Why did rates of homelessness register their biggest jumps between 2007 and 2020 in left-leaning states like New York, California and Massachusetts — and their biggest decreases in right-leaning ones like Florida, Texas and Georgia?
Some readers might object that none of these trends take place in a vacuum. The jump in overdose deaths has surely been influenced by the effects of the pandemic, and they’ve also gone up heavily in red states. The rise in lawlessness is in some ways a product of last year’s social upheavals and a reckoning over how the police do their jobs. And murder rates have also gone up in Republican-led cities like Jacksonville, Fla., just as they have elsewhere.
True. But nowhere are dysfunctions more concentrated than in the very places that were supposed to have become beacons of progressive sunshine. And nowhere are the reasons more obvious, too.
This is not social science. It’s common sense. It’s the basis on which the United States was able to make its streets far safer from around 1995 to 2015, when crime rates kept going down — above all to the benefit of the very minority communities that progressives claim to champion.
The Democratic Party has since thrown that legacy away. Joe Biden disavowed his 1994 crime bill. Last year’s protests often devolved into naked criminality, to which many progressives, including those in the news media, closed their eyes, notoriously including those “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” in Kenosha, Wis. Opportunities for thoughtful police and justice-system reform were squandered in the rush to defame, defund, diminish or abolish.
It may be that serious urban leaders like incoming mayor Eric Adams of New York can reverse the trend. Even the ultra-lefties in California D.A. offices, faced with recall votes, seem to have gotten the message that things are out of hand. But progressive misgovernance has now tattooed the words “soft on crime” on Democratic necks, and the country has noticed. It will take years to erase.
And who has been helped the most by all this, politically speaking? Donald Trump and his mini-mes. The country won’t be safe from them until a more serious Democratic Party can set itself free from ideas that embarrass it and endanger us all.