Since most political journalism tends to be wishful thinking, most of the post-midterm analysis this year followed predictable paths.
Liberal partisans were pleased to note that the closely divided House of Representatives returned power to the Democrats for the first time in nearly a decade. Conservatives, by contrast, were gratified to pick up a couple of Senate seats, which will limit the range of the new House majority. You can judge the mixed outcome of gubernatorial races, or the Trump Effect, or the likely results of the next presidential election, by your own lights: There is evidence for nearly every interpretation.
It is certainly true that based on the 2018 balloting, Republicans have their work cut out for them appealing to suburban—specifically suburban female—voters next time around. Similarly, Democrats could not fail to have noticed that most of their successes were achieved by center-left, rather than hard-left, candidates. While President Trump undoubtedly helped Republican candidates in some places, he proved a liability in others. The coalition of voters that elected him two years ago broke down this past month; but then again, the circumstances that elected him in 2016 were significantly altered in 2018.
All of which emphasizes the obvious: Sometimes elections presage larger trends, and sometimes they do not—yet no one but God seems to know which “trends” endure; and as the late Harold Wilson once observed, a week is a very long time in politics.
How long? Well, I was peripherally involved in the midterm elections of 1970 and, by any measure, they were good news for Democrats. It is true that Republicans picked up two seats in the Senate, as well as a Conservative (James Buckley, and in New York, of all places); but the Democrats gained 12 seats in the House to expand their prohibitive majority, and the Democratic stranglehold on governors’ mansions and state legislatures was tightened.
Richard Nixon had campaigned widely and vigorously that year, proclaiming that the vote was a referendum on his policies and presidency. Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) delivered a much-admired nationwide television address on the eve of the balloting, which was credited with pushing innumerable Democrats over the top.
Once the dust had settled, Nixon was seen to have been personally rebuked—he was, after all, a minority president who had been elected in a three-way race—and Newsweek guessed that he might be tempted to cut his losses and decline to seek a second term. Muskie, by contrast, emerged overnight as the Democratic presidential frontrunner for 1972 and began to marshal his party’s establishment behind his candidacy.
Of course, knowing what we know now, the conventional wisdom of that moment seems quaint, even surreal. But it made sense at the time. The Republicans were, then as now, the party of older, whiter, wealthier males in the midst of the resurgent women’s movement and a flood tide of immigration from the Third World. Moreover, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which would reduce the voting age from 21 to 18, was about to be ratified. In the era of massive antiwar demonstrations, campus violence, and Woodstock, an influx of new post-adolescent voters was perceived as a windfall for Democrats.
But events, as always, bend the arc of history in unexpected ways. It is nearly impossible now to recall the dramatic effect of Nixon’s subsequent pilgrimage to Mao Zedong’s China, reopening a door resolutely shut for a quarter-century—and reframing the Cold War. Similarly, in 1972, Nixon was fortunate in the fact that the Democrats rejected Muskie and his ilk to choose a (comparatively) hard-left candidate, George McGovern, as their presidential nominee.
The gods of politics are not mocked: Just as the newly enfranchised women of 1920 helped to elect Warren G. Harding to the White House, the 1972 youth vote went strongly, and decisively, to the (comparatively) conservative, unhip Richard Nixon.
This is not to suggest that the world of 2018 bears a close resemblance to 1970 or that the conventional wisdom is invariably wrong. But it does introduce a cautionary note for both parties.
For some decades now, we have been told, changing demographics will ensure a bright, nearly limitless, future for Democrats and portend imminent obsolescence for Republicans. Yet it has never quite worked out as planned: Women don’t necessarily vote in conformity with what the press describes as “women’s issues”—notably abortion—and discrete populations don’t always respond to what the press considers their interests. The youth vote, whatever that means, is predictably unpredictable.
Just as geography in politics is changeable—who in 1950 would have guessed what would become of the Solid South a few decades later?—voting populations are not static. The electoral habits of blue-collar workers, affluent suburbanites, Irish Catholics, and Ivy Leaguers are not what they once were, and giant constituencies—women, evangelicals, Midwesterners, Italian-Americans—evolve with time. The affluent don’t always vote to protect their wealth, and poor immigrants beget rich first-generation offspring, and on it goes.
In other words, the allegiance of certain voters at a certain time works to the advantage of certain candidates and parties; but electoral cycles more closely resemble a kaleidoscope than a still life. And to this, of course, must be added the personal factor: Just as the triumphs of Ronald Reagan (1980) and Barack Obama (2008) might have seemed outlandish not long before their time, the appeal of 2016’s Donald Trump may yet revive. We simply don’t know. Events might well consign Trump and Trumpism to the dustbin, or they may anticipate some enduring realignment.
In that sense, Republicans might enjoy—perhaps may even be tempted to exploit—one advantage. The Democratic hierarchy seems increasingly to rely on tribalism to motivate its base. Apart from hostility towards Donald Trump, their strong message in the midterm elections was not so much ideological as personal: You must vote Democratic because you are a [fill in the blank].
Biology, however, is seldom destiny, and in a liberal democracy ideas matter. One enduring mystery of modern politics is that voters don’t always endorse their perceived interests. But the interests of voters are usually determined not by blood but principle: You don’t have to be a union rep to vote Democratic or a Mayflower descendant to vote Republican.
I would be the first to acknowledge that President Trump is a unique, even volatile, factor in our politics. But in the voting booth, as his own electoral victory proved two years ago, emotional factors—ethnic identity, picturesque family, personal charm—tend to take a back seat to political conviction. Republicans used to call themselves the party of ideas. A couple of new ones would do them no harm.
