Republicans’ excellent run in Tuesday’s Senate races, along with a few positive surprises for GOP gubernatorial candidates, have given the party plenty to be relieved about. Here’s how Donald Trump, who has been watching the returns from the White House residence, put it:
Tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018
But the president overstates how good things are. The truth is that the next two years of Trump’s presidency will be nothing like the previous two. That’s because Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives—and with it, gain control of the House floor, its committees, and subpoena power.
There’s little chance Trump will be able to pass much meaningful legislation unless he embraces some more Democratic positions and convinces House Democrats that he won’t sell them down the river (as many House Republicans felt when working on healthcare or even some aspects of the successful tax bill). And that’s assuming it’s even politically palatable for House Democrats to work with Trump, who is toxic to their party’s base. Trump’s congressional agenda stalled out after the tax bill passed last December. Don’t expect it to suddenly start up and motor out of the driveway now.
The outcome of the Mueller investigation may or may not prompt a push from Democrats to impeach Trump, but don’t think that the new House majority will be content to wait for the go-ahead from the special counsel. Through its oversight and investigative powers, Democrats will have the ability to call members of the Trump administration to answer for just about anything they want to investigate.
The model here will be John Dingell, the ferocious Michigan Democratic chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee throughout the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Dingell went after everything he could in the name of oversight and was able to draw blood on several issues of corruption. Democrats will put this process into hyperdrive, trying to make every day for the next two years miserable for Trump and his administration.
But consider, as well, what the Democratic takeover of the House means politically for Trump. The seats Democrats have been able to flip aren’t concentrated in one geographic region of the country. They stretch from upstate New York through Virginia down to Florida. But they also penetrate the heartland: Illinois, Minnesota, Texas, Colorado, Kansas—even deep-red Oklahoma and Utah. Some are in states Trump won in 2016, some he lost, but what unites most of them is how much they look like a key part of the Republican coalition: suburban, educated, above-average wealth.
These people are not Trump’s base. In many ways they form a part of the party Trump’s candidacy was designed to ignore, downplay, or even antagonize. Republicans in these districts aren’t as alarmed by immigration. They prefer the benefits of global trade to the protections of tariffs. They bristle at Trump’s coarse style of politics that punches first and asks questions later. They look at the final message from the Republicans ahead of Tuesday’s elections and cringe. These voters, otherwise inclined to vote for the GOP, may have swallowed a vote for Trump and their Republican House member in 2016, when the alternative was Hillary Clinton. But they either stayed home in 2018 or voted for the Democrat.
The result is a Republican House conference that looks more like Trump. But it’s also smaller than it was two years ago, which suggests Trump has been unable to reassure those voters who tentatively gave him their support in 2016. Maybe the Trumpian GOP no longer needs these voters in its coalition to win in 2020. Maybe, as it was in the statewide Senate and gubernatorial races where the GOP overshot expectations, Republicans will be able to grind out a reelection victory.
Or perhaps the Republican coalition is weaker than Trump or anyone else realizes. If that’s the case, their only source of comfort is that Democrats, so certain they could win with unabashed progressives in Florida, Texas, and Georgia, also seem vexed about how to put together a winning national coalition.
