Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The mountain
labored, and brought forth not so much a blue wave as a blue ripple. The United
States had a midterm election more or less on Tuesday, November 6 — exactly one
week ago as I start writing this. I say “more or less” because thanks to at
least some states expanding opportunities for voting — early voting, voting by
mail, absentee voting, turning already filled-out and sealed ballots on
election day without having to use the polls, and “provisional ballots” if your
eligibility or the currency of your registration is being challenged but you
want to vote anyway — the election started well before that date and at this
writing is still going on in some jurisdictions. Ballots are still coming in —
many from U.S. servicemembers stationed overseas and understandably anxious to
have a voice in who’s going to decide what battles in which countries they
fight, and therefore whether they live or die — and a surprising number of
senatorial, gubernatorial and congressional races are still “too close to call”
and are being subjected to mandatory recounts.
Indeed, for me
the biggest single aspect summing up the midterms is just how close many of the
results were. In states ranging from Florida and Georgia to California and
Arizona, we didn’t even come close to knowing on election night who had won.
It’s become a cliché to say that modern America is “a divided country,” but what
the closeness of this month’s election indicates is how evenly divided it is. Both major political parties had
heavily energized, motivated electorates eager to turn out either to ensure
continued Republican dominance of the entire federal government or to
short-circuit it by giving Democrats a majority in at least half of Congress
(and “flipping” some state governorships and legislatures as well), resulting
in what one report says was the biggest turnout for a midterm since 1914.
The result was
neither the “blue wave” the Democrats were hopefully predicting through much of
the campaign season nor the “red wave” Donald Trump and the Republicans said they were expecting. Trump said that the election would
be about “Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order, and common sense,” and in a
way he was right. The U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a
justice of the Supreme Court and the heavy-duty cultural anxieties it aroused —
especially when Democratic Senators brought forth women who claimed Kavanaugh
had sexually assaulted them decades before — closed the voter enthusiasm gap
that had previously run in the Democrats’ favor and probably helped cost
red-state Democratic Senators like Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Heidi
Heitkamp of North Dakota their seats.
Notably, the way
Trump and the Republicans handled the sexual allegations against Kavanaugh by
portraying a vote for Republicans as a vote against the “#MeToo” movement
helped Republicans by widening the gender gap in the electorate. Throughout the
summer polls had indicated that Democrats were doing 25 percent better than
Republicans among women, but Republicans were doing 4 percent better among men.
The Kavanaugh controversy, and the way Trump and other Republicans (including
Maine Senator Susan Collins, who as I noted in my article about Kavanaugh
immeasurably helped the case against “#MeToo” by essentially saying, “Look, I’m
a woman, and I don’t ‘believe the women’ either!”) presented him as an innocent
victim of reverse-sexist harpies, energized male voters and widened the
Republican margin among men to 12 points.
The midterms
revealed the existence of two Americas of roughly equal size. As I’m writing
this, estimates indicate that Democrats won the so-called “generic vote” for
the House of Representatives by between 7 and 9 points, a substantial majority
but hardly the landslide they were hoping for. The election aftermath has also
revealed just how unscrupulous the Republicans have become, to the extent that
one has to question whether the modern-day Republican Party really accepts the
basic principles of democracy — including “one person, one vote” and the belief
that elections are supposed to settle who gets to wield governmental power. As
Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote in the 2018 afterword to What Happened, her memoir of the 2016 Presidential campaign (a
book I happened to be reading during the final stages of the midterm campaign):
In 1995, one out
of every 16 Americans was open to the option of military rule in our country,
which I find to be a shockingly high number. In 2014, one out of six Americans
felt that way. Even harder to believe, the numbers are worse for young people.
According to Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard, nearly a
quarter of millennials think democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way of running
the country. In 2011, almost half said they thought that a political system
with a strong leader who didn’t have to bother with Congress or elections was a
“fairly good” or “very good” idea.
The increasing
support among Americans in general, and Republicans in particular, for
authoritarian politics was evident in 2016 when President Trump and his
surrogates — including his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who
has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — not only denounced Hillary
Clinton as corrupt but called out at their rallies, “Lock her up!” A lot of
people in the media and elsewhere pointed out that arresting, convicting and
imprisoning their political enemies is what dictators, not democratically elected
leaders, do. But we’ve heard “Lock her up!” since directed against U.S. Senator
Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who as the ranking minority member of the
Senate Judiciary Committee during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings brought
up Christine Blasey Ford’s charges against him. And more recently Republican
protesters in Florida have chanted “Lock her up!” against Brenda Snipes, the
registrar of voters in Broward County.
President Trump,
who famously during one of his 2016 debates with Clinton said he would accept
the election results “if I win,” has been screaming “voter fraud” at the
closeness of the recounts in Florida and also in Georgia (which also has an
African-American Democratic candidate for governor trailing a white Republican
opponent by a slim margin). Trump tweeted, “The Florida Election should be
called in favor of [Republicans] Rick Scott [for Senate] and Ron DeSantis [for
governor] in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and
many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible
— ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
He also said the
Arizona Senate race — won by Democrat Kyrsten Sinema against Republican Martha
McSally by about 1.5 percent after McSally led in election night tallies — was
so corrupt there ought to be a new election. Indeed, Trump is reported to have
been angry at McSally for not screaming
voter fraud and demanding a reversal of the poll results. Instead, McSally
filmed a concession speech on video sitting on a couch with her dog, in which
she wished Sinema well. What’s more, both McSally and Sinema invoked the spirit of John McCain, the late
Republican Senator from Arizona and Barack Obama’s general-election opponent
for President in 2008, as a sort of icon of political fairness and
responsibility.
This kind of
post-election sportsmanship is something we used to take for granted. It
acknowledged that however hard-fought elections might be, and however strong
the differences between candidates on how the country should be led, people on
both sides wanted what was best for the country and put the welfare of the
nation over partisan advantage. President Obama put it well when he delivered
the eulogy for John McCain at his funeral — an event to which McCain, on his
deathbed, pointedly insisted that President Trump not be invited to — when he said that, though he and
McCain had fought a tough battle against each other in the 2008 election and
continued to disagree thereafter, “We never doubted
the other man’s sincerity or the other man’s patriotism, or that when all was
said and done, we were on the same team.”
That sense of being “on the same team,” of working together
to bridge the partisan divide for the sake of the country, is gone from U.S.
politics — and it’s mostly the Republicans, not the Democrats, who have killed
it. In his days as an insurgent Republican Congressmember and his four years
(1995-1999) as Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich made clear his goal was not
merely the defeat of the Democrats but their utter annihilation. During George
W. Bush’s Presidency (2001-2009) his political advisor, Karl Rove, often talked
about achieving “full-spectrum dominance” in American politics, and his actions
made clear that what he meant by that was something like what the
oxymoronically named Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, its initials in
Spanish) had in Mexico during the last two-thirds of the 20th
century: other political parties would still be allowed to exist, but only one
would really matter.
When Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White
House, Republicans became even more determined not only to defeat him on issues
but render him irrelevant. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said as
soon as Obama was elected that his goal was “to make him a one-term President,”
and he and House Republican leader John Boehner organized a successful strategy
to make sure no Republicans voted for Obama’s signature issue, the Affordable
Care Act — even though Obama had accepted several Republican suggestions for
amending the bill. And in the last year of Obama’s Presidency, McConnell
refused even to allow the Senate to hold hearings on Obama’s last U.S. Supreme
Court nomination, ensuring that the vacancy would still be open when Trump took
office and Trump could fill the Court seat himself.
The 2018 midterms reveal a still profoundly divided
country, with the Republicans — who still control the White House, the Supreme
Court and the Senate (2 ½ branches of the federal government) — still
determined it be “our way or the highway.” Rather than acknowledge the verdict
of at least some of the voters the way George W. Bush did in 2006 and Obama did
in 2010 and pledge to cooperate with the other party’s Congressional majority,
Trump has proclaimed victory based on his party’s gains in the Senate and
bluntly threatened that if House Democrats investigate him, he will have his
party’s Senate majority investigate them
— and, what’s more, he’ll refuse to cooperate with the Democrats on issues,
government will grind to a halt and he will blame the Democrats for the impasse
when he runs for re-election in 2020.
Mark’s
Pre-Election Predictions: How Well Did I Do?
•
The Republican Party will not only hold on to their current U.S. Senate
majority, they will gain seats as Democratic incumbents in small states Trump
carrled — Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Jon Tester in Montana, Claire
McCaskill in Missouri — fall to the Republican juggernaut. Even Nevada Senator
Dean Heller, the biggest target for Democrats since he’s the only Republican
Senator running for re-election in a state Hillary Clinton carried over Donald
Trump, will win.
About 50 percent
on this one. The Republicans did hold
their Senate majority, though of the four Senators I mentioned, only two —
Heitkamp and McCaskill — lost their re-election bids and therefore “flipped”
those seats to the Republicans. This was balanced by the surprise Democratic
“flip” of retiring Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s seat in Arizona and their
loss of Dean Heller’s seat in Nevada. It looks like the Republicans will still
have the razor-thin 52 to 48 Senate margin they had at the start of the Trump
administration — and that might narrow further by one seat if incumbent Bill
Nelson manages to hold on to his seat in Florida against an aggressive
challenge by Republican Governor Rick Scott.
Nonetheless, in
American politics a majority of one is as good as a majority of 20 — as long as
no one defects on key votes the way the late John McCain, Susan Collins and
Lisa Murkowski did on the late 2017 vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Continued Republican control of the Senate is especially important because it
will enable Trump and McConnell to keep going on their long-term plan to “pack”
not only the Supreme Court but the federal courts in general with hard-Right
judges picked by the person to whom the Republican Party has essentially
subcontracted all its judicial nominations: Leonard Leo, president of the
Federalist Society. Even if the Democrats win back both the presidency and the
Senate in 2020, they’ll still have Trump’s judges to contend with, and the
result could be a standoff much like the one Franklin Roosevelt and
Congressional Democrats faced through much of the 1930’s, when an old-line
Right-wing Supreme Court willy-nilly ruled just about everything they tried to
do to stop the Depression unconstitutional.
•
The Republicans will also hold on to their majority in the House of
Representatives. They will lose 10 to 15 seats, a significant drop but not
enough to cost them the chamber.
The biggest one
I got wrong. Democrats actually did
retake the House, due to a number of factors — including the disillusionment of
suburban voters in general and suburban women in particular with Trump and the
swaggering braggadocio with which he reigns; the willingness of Democrats to
put up candidates in districts so overwhelmingly Republican in voter
registration they hadn’t bothered contesting them at all in previous elections;
the presence of inspiring new candidates challenging the traditional norms of
what’s considered “electable” (including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a
28-year-old self-described democratic socialist who unseated an old-line
pro-corporate Democrat in a New York primary; and Sharice Davids, an openly
Lesbian Native American mixed martial arts fighter who won a Congressional seat
in Kansas — I have a feeling
Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore!); and above all an unusually high voter turnout,
which approached 50 percent and has been called the biggest midterm turnout
since 1914.
My biggest
mistake in predicting the House was underestimating the turnout. I was worried
that when all was said and done, the Democrats would wimp out and not show up
at the polls the way they have in previous midterms. (A New Yorker commentator noted after the Democrats’ disastrous
2010 midterms — when they not only lost the House but took a huge beating in
state governments, significant because they set the rules for elections,
including deciding who can and can’t vote and how easy voting will be, and also
draw the district lines for the House — that if the racial, gender and partisan
composition of the electorate in 2008 had been the same as it was in 2010, John
McCain would have been President.) Instead the Democratic base came through in
a midterm for a change, and it brought with it a lot of voters who had
supported Trump in 2016 but I suspect were turned off as much, if not more so,
by his personal style as his (lack of) political accomplishments.
•
More Americans will actually vote for Democrats than Republicans to represent
them in both the House and Senate, but under the rules of the Constitution that
won’t matter — just as it didn’t matter that in November 2016 three million
more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton to be President than for Donald Trump.
Though Democrats
did win the House, their margin in the
chamber (a five- to 12-seat majority, depending on how some still-open races
turn out) is far below the 9 percent by which they won the “generic ballot” —
and that’s due to the success of Republicans in using their control of state
governments to gerrymander the district lines. “Gerrymander” is a word almost
as old as the United States itself: it comes from Elbridge Gerry, a
Massachusetts politician who was one of the original signers of the Constitution
and James Madison’s second-term vice-president until he died in 1814. Gerry’s
enduring claim to fame is that, in order to ensure that his party would keep
control of Congress, he openly stacked the process of drawing district lines.
One of the districts on his map looked so much like a salamander it was
jokingly called the “gerrymander,” and the word entered American politics to
mean a majority party unfairly drawing districts for its own advantage.
Like identity
theft, gerrymandering became more common and more dangerous with the rise of
computers. Sufficiently unscrupulous partisan officials in state governments
now had access to software that could divide voters precinct by precinct and
even block by block to produce maps meticulously calculated to favor one party
over the other. California pioneered the fight against gerrymandering when its
voters approved an initiative that took the power to draw legislative and
Congressional districts away from the legislators themselves and vested it in
an independent commission, and as of 2017 five other states — Alaska, Arizona,
Idaho, Montana and Washington — had followed suit. Three more states adopted
independent redistricting in 2018, and studies have shown that districts drawn
by independent commissions are more competitive than those designed by
legislators themselves.
Nonetheless,
despite the trend towards independent redistricting, there are still structural
factors, including some embedded in the Constitution, that give small, racially
homogeneous and generally Republican states disproportionate influence over
American politics in general and Congress in particular. The Constitution
guarantees each state two Senators and at least one House member — which means
that the smallest state, Wyoming, with only 1/250th the population
of the largest, California, not only is equal in Senate representation, its one
Congressmember represents only one-fifth as many people as each of California’s
52.
That’s why I’ve
often wished that the U.S. could abandon its system of representative
government and substitute Germany’s, where the legislature is elected
nationwide and if your party gets five percent or more of the national vote, it
gets a proportion of legislative seats equal to its total percent of the vote.
One good thing about the German system is it makes the formation of alternative
political parties more rational. If you’re a German and you vote for the Green
Party in a national election, you’re likely to get what you want — more Green
Party members in Germany’s Congress, the Bundestag. If you vote for the Green Party in the U.S., all
you’re likely to do is take votes away from the Democrat and help elect the
Republican.
•
With Republicans still in control of both houses of Congress, and with such
mildly Trump-critical Senators as Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), Jeff Flake
(R-Arizona), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the late John McCain (R-Arizona) replaced
by Trump loyalists, Trump will be emboldened to “clean house” at the Justice
Department, replacing Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, firing Robert Mueller
and ending all investigations into his campaign, his Russian connections and
his personal and business finances.
With Republicans
losing control of the House, President Trump is moving even faster than I
predicted to shut down the Mueller investigation. The day after the midterms,
he fired Jeff Sessions as attorney general and replaced him with his chief of
staff, Matthew Whitaker, who’s made it clear in countless TV appearances that
he regards the Mueller investigation as illegitimate and thinks it should be
shut down, either by firing Mueller or by restricting his powers and his budget
so much he can’t continue an honest, thorough probe. Whitaker’s appointment is
being challenged on constitutional grounds, but with a Supreme Court majority
solidly in Republican hands — and extreme Right-wing Republican hands, at that
— the Court is likely to rule 5-4 that Whitaker’s appointment is legitimate and
so is whatever he wants to do to Mueller.
Trump is well
aware that he faces a deadline with Mueller: he must not only stop (or severely
limit) his investigation, he must do so before January 3, 2019, when the
Democrats formally take control of the House and can start their own
investigations. At the same time, House Democrats will be in a bind because the
Mueller investigation, as much as it’s become a cause célèbre in Washington, D.C., is considered virtually
irrelevant by the rest of the country. The people who voted for House Democrats
didn’t elect them to protect Mueller or investigate Trump: they elected them to
protect their access to health care and hopefully generate some infrastructure
projects that will create jobs.
One prediction I
didn’t articulate in my original article on the run-up to the midterms was I
didn’t think Nancy Pelosi would become House Speaker again even if the
Democrats won the majority. I had thought that too many Democrats running from
swing districts had had to promise not
to vote for Pelosi in order to carry their districts that she would be
defeated. Though the Democrats aren’t going to vote on their leadership until
November 18, two days from now, I appear to have been wrong on that one.
Certainly Pelosi is acting like a
Speaker-in-waiting, and while she has a lot of the same kind of negative
baggage Hillary Clinton did from decades of Republican political and media
propaganda against her, one nice thing about Pelosi becoming Speaker again is
how much it will discomfit Donald Trump, who’s made it clear over and over
again he hates the very thought of a woman being in a position of authority.
•
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will end the legislative filibuster so
Republicans can pass bills without any Democratic input or support. He’s
already ended the filibuster for judicial nominations (which is how Neil
Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh got on the Supreme Court), and he wanted to end the
legislative filibuster in 2017 but was blocked by John McCain and Orrin Hatch.
Now that Hatch will be out of the Senate and McCain is dead, he’ll have the
votes to get rid of the filibuster once and for all.
Had the
Republicans kept control of the House, abolition of the Senate filibuster would
have been virtually a done deal. McConnell would have wanted a sweeping
legislative record to get Trump re-elected and keep the Republican majorities
in 2020. Now it’s unclear because much of McConnell’s agenda — including the
sweeping cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid I discuss below — will
be “dead on arrival” in a Democratic House anyway, unless the Democratic leaders
fall for the siren’s song of a “grand bargain” in which they give away the
store on social programs in exchange for heaven knows what. The irony is that
ending the legislative filibuster in the Senate is actually a long-overdue
reform — the majority party in Congress should be able to legislate freely so voters can hold it to account and
either reward it with continued power or punish it by taking it away — but now
would be the worst time for that
to happen for the causes and issues I believe in.
•
Once they get rid of the legislative filibuster, the Republicans in Congress
will repeal all or most of the Affordable Care Act and pass the big cuts in
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid they need in order to pay for the 2017
tax cuts (so clearly skewed towards the richest Americans they aren’t supported
by a majority in polls) and the “phantom” middle-class tax cut Trump promised
in the later stages of the 2018 campaign.
It’s quite
possible that at least one factor in the Democratic gains in the House (and some
unexpected victories in Senate races in places like Arizona and Nevada that
partially counterbalanced their losses in Missouri, North Dakota and likely
Florida) was McConnell’s passing statement in October that the new Congress
would have to look at cutting Social Security and Medicare to pay for those big
tax cuts for the super-rich. The Republicans remain an ideologically
libertarian party, committed to the long-term goal of ending Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act completely and eliminating all taxation of the rich to benefit
the not-so-rich.
•
Though Democrats may make some gains in state governor’s and legislative races,
most state governments will remain under Republican control. That means
Republicans will continue and intensify the gimmicks with which they have
maintained minority control, including gerrymandered Congressional and
legislative districts and elaborate voter-suppression laws so people who
wouldn’t vote Republican won’t be able to vote at all.
Actually the
Democrats did pretty well in state races — they “flipped” the governorships not
only in competitive states like Wisconsin (goodbye, Scott Walker, and good
riddance!) and Michigan (goodbye and good riddance to the people who poisoned
Flint’s water!) but even in Kansas, where the state’s finances and particularly
its educational system have been ruined by decades of Republican control and
libertarian tax-cutting. They came heartbreakingly close in Florida and
Georgia, but though these races haven’t definitively been settled it’s clear
that the odds are against any state in the former Confederacy electing an
African-American governor.
As I pointed out
above, control of state governments is more important than control of Congress
in at least one respect: state governments control the rules of elections and the drawing of legislative districts. During the
Obama years, Democrats talked a lot about demographics being destiny; they
pointed to the fact that their parts of the electorate, particularly young
people and people of color, were growing and the Republicans’ were shrinking.
Rather than broaden their appeal, the Republicans decided to respond with a
massive program of voter suppression to make sure people unlikely to vote
Republican would not be able to vote at all. Only by contesting and winning
more state governments can the Democrats block this and safeguard the ability
of their voter base to vote. It’s especially important that Democrats take back
statehouses in 2020 because those will be the governments that draw the
Congressional districts for the next decade.
•
Donald Trump will get re-elected President in 2020 the same way he got elected
in 2016: he’ll lose the popular vote but will amass enough state victories
he’ll win the Electoral College anyway.
Donald Trump
will have a lot going for him in 2020, including a worldwide trend rewarding
authoritarian populists. In 1974 Hans Morgenthau wrote an article in The New
Republic that said there will always
be limits on capitalist democracy because
“there are some issues on which the ruling class will not allow themselves to
be outvoted” — and today one of the biggest issues on which the world’s ruling
classes will not allow themselves to be outvoted is their continuing
determination to grab even more of society’s wealth and income for themselves.
Not just in America but in countries as varied as Russia, Turkey, Hungary,
Poland, the Philippines and Brazil, ordinary citizens have given up on
democracy as a remedy for wealth and income inequality and are instead electing
strongmen who promised to fix everything by the sheer strength of their
personality.
Indeed, the
inability of the established political parties to do much of anything to
counter the trend towards increasing inequality is making politics more volatile
worldwide. In the parliamentary systems of Western Europe, it’s increasing vote
totals among the extreme parties of both
Right and Left at the expense of the traditional center-right (usually
Christian Democrats) and center-left (usually Social Democrats) parties. In
Britain it led to “Brexit,” the nation’s insane and self-destructive vote to
leave the European Union. In the countries listed above where authoritarian
strongmen have taken over — essentially using the democratic process one last
time in order to destroy democracy once and for all — it has led to one-person
rule and the inevitably resulting abuses, including the end of press freedom
and civil rights and the mass arrests of political dissidents.
In the United
States the frustration over the widening gaps in wealth and income produced
first the center-left presidency of Barack Obama and then a massive (though not
quite as massive as Trump and Republican propaganda would lead you to believe)
shift to Donald Trump and the authoritarian solution. In a 2017 interview with
Rachel Maddow, Hillary Clinton summed it up when Maddow asked her why Trump
admires Russian President Vladimir Putin so much, and Clinton answered, “He
wants to be like Putin.” Trump’s
admiration for Putin was apparent in the photo of the world’s leaders at the
World War I centennial commemoration in Paris, in which the Western Europeans
greeted Putin with pursed-lip frowns and Trump smiled at Putin like the
Cheshire cat.
And his
fundamental impatience with democracy was apparent in the week after the
midterms, when he ramped up his attacks on reporters to such a degree he seemed
(at least to me) to be thinking, “I wish I were Putin. Then I could have you
arrested and your media outlets shut down.” In 2018 voters in the U.S. didn’t
rise up and reverse Trump’s authoritarian agenda, but they did try to put the brakes on it and slow it down. The
bad news from the midterms is that there is still a sizable minority of
American voters who believe in Trump, his agenda and his style. The good news
is that the rest of America is beginning to rise up against him.
