The optimism of Democrats about the midterm election is based on the assumption that political conditions won’t change between now and November 6. Indeed, some of them won’t.
One thing sure not to change is history. There’s a longstanding rule: The party without the White House has the advantage in a president’s first midterm. Democrats lost 63 House seats in President Obama’s first one in 2010. The 2002 election was the only recent exception. That was the post-9/11 election when George W. Bush was president. Republicans won two Senate and eight House seats.
The woeful approval rating of President Trump is also likely to be cooked in the midterm cake. It’s tied to Trump’s personal traits and unpleasant behavior. Though a majority of Americans find them distasteful, Trump hasn’t flinched. He’s as disagreeable as ever.
That the media will be on the side of Democrats is another certainty. That applies to all elections, not just midterms. This means the elite press will take its cues from Democrats. Whatever Democrats focus on, the media will focus on.
But that’s not all that favors Democrats. In November, Democrats won the governor’s race and a shocking number of legislative seats in Virginia. Loathing of Trump was the catalyst for what I’d call a mini-wave election.
Just as encouraging to Democrats was an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on the preference of voters for election of a Democratic or Republican Congress in November. It’s a poll Republican operatives believe isn’t rigged. They take it seriously. Democrats were preferred by 50 to 39 percent, a margin consistent with a Democratic landslide.
As you might expect, all this has sent Democrats, both elected officials and the rank and file, into a tizzy. And as Dan Balz of the Washington Post noted, there’s “a growing consensus, or at least a rising chorus among the political class, proclaiming a tsunami-in-the-making across America.”
But hold on! That’s not the end of the story in 2018. There’s more to elections than a few perennial factors. Not everything will be working on behalf of a Democratic victory next fall.
The biggest drag on their prospects is Democrats themselves, their tactics and their policies. They have allowed their anti-Trump feelings to get out of hand. The party’s liberal base now casts itself as the Resistance. And their chosen tactic, as if they were the Sandinistas of North America, is to resist everything associated with Trump and Republicans in even the tiniest of ways.
This got them nowhere in 2017 and threatens to prevent them from having an impact in Washington this year as well. In Congress, they harass Republicans, slowing down approval of Trump administration officials and judges.
On tax reform, they insisted on veto power over any provision. Republicans weren’t about to accept that, as Democrats must have known. The result was that Democrats played no part in drafting the bill. Not only did blue states suffer, but the individual mandate was eliminated from Obamacare, nearly crippling it.
Last fall, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi met with Trump to discuss the Dreamers brought here as children by their illegal immigrant parents. Trump offered legal status in exchange for building his wall on the southwest border. Democrats refused and made no counteroffer. Rather than compromise, they gave up.
Democrats lack an agenda. The liberal policies they defend vociferously are those most unpopular with voters, such as sanctuary cities, more immigration, fewer pipelines, LGBT issues.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, says this year Republicans will be “looking for bipartisan agreement because that’s the way the Senate is.” He wants Republicans to be seen as ready to operate across party aisles. Democrats also say they want to, but their anti-Trump obsession makes this all but impossible.
Their two campaign targets are Trump and tax reform. Both are problematic. The president will never be lovable, but voters may get tired of listening to anti-Trump tirades. And Democratic hysteria over tax reform may backfire when paychecks next month reveal less withheld in taxes.
To promote tax reform, a powerful rebuttal of Democrats is circulating among Republicans in Washington. It would have the GOP elevate tax reform as the paramount issue in the midterm campaign. Democrats would find this unthinkable, since they are persuaded by polls showing Republican tax policy to be unpopular. But the polls are soft and susceptible to being flipped.
A tax-cut crusade is not an unheard of idea for Republicans. Led by Jack Kemp in 1978 and Ronald Reagan in 1981 and 1986, they championed supply-side tax cuts that spurred economic growth and job creation. The result was a party realignment with Republicans the beneficiary.
Too far fetched for 2018? I don’t think so. And if taxes are the centerpiece of the State of the Union address later this month, we’ll know Trump doesn’t either.
