The forecast for November 6, 2018 is a Democratic tsunami.
Trump’s abysmally low approval numbers (currently in the high 30s), the recent off-year election results (most notably in Virginia and Alabama), and electoral history more generally (see chart below) all spell doom for the GOP this fall.
Or do they?
Actually, a good case can be made for the irrelevance of the first two factors. Trump, you’ll remember, had the same favorables right before the 2016 election, and we all know what happened then. The fact that the president won’t be on the ballot in 2018 doesn’t matter; he’ll be the most consequential political element in each and every close race.
When it comes to the off-year and special elections we’ve already had, each contains an idiosyncratic feature that might keep us from seeing it as representative of the upcoming midterm contests. Here are two examples: in Alabama, the discovery of Roy Moore’s reprehensible sexual past led to nearly 23,000 voters casting a write-in vote, a number larger than Doug Jones’ margin of victory; and in the race for Kansas’ 4th district House seat, Republicans suffered a 20-point drop from November 2016 to April 2017 partly due to the unpopularity of Governor Sam Brownback, whose supply-side experiment was widely seen as catastrophic for the state.
With that said, even if Trump’s approval ratings and the recent special election results don’t end up mattering, the third factor, a historical record overwhelmingly pointing to the sitting president’s party suffering significant midterm losses, will be hard to overcome.
A net loss in the House is likely unavoidable, but there’s a huge difference between suffering a loss and giving up control of the chamber: a 23-seat loss preserves Republican control; a 24-seat loss puts the Democrats in power. In the Senate, the Democrats merely have to pick up two seats, though that’s complicated by the fact that the makeup of the contests is structurally favorable to Republicans.
If a storm is indeed threatening the president’s party, is there anything Trump can do to change the weather?
Here are ten things he can do, in no particular order.
1) Incessantly Tout Our Strong Economy
Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign gave us a bevy of memorable moments, perhaps none more culturally resonant than James Carville’s strategy directive: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
While it’s certainly true that the political dynamics have changed in the past 25 years, one timeless rule remains forever in place: Any political figure, party, or administration who can plausibly take credit for a strong economy should do so.
When I say “plausibly,” I don’t have economists in mind but voters. Economists generally maintain that presidents have less impact on the economy than is popularly believed, and they’ll see the growth of other markets, such as E.U. countries and Japan, as reason to doubt that our own economic growth is due to Trump. But those aren’t arguments voters will respond to.
Voters will hear of record-breaking stock market highs, the lowest unemployment rate in decades, exuberant business investment, and job creation numbers.
Consider this recent news report:
That sounds like Breitbart out propagandizing on behalf of Trump, right? Well it’s actually from the New York Times.
A Gallup poll conducted a year after Trump’s election shows that voters rate his effect on the economy higher than any other issue: It runs eight points above his overall job approval.
2) Pass a Massive Infrastructure Bill
Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, just reconfirmed what we’ve known for a while: the administration plans to unveil a huge infrastructure spending plan later this month.
If the design of the plan roughly corresponds to Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney’s outline last year, which called for a “5 to 1 leverage ratio,” the federal government will spend $200 billion and private and state/municipal spending will pay for the rest of the trillion-plus proposal.
One potential issue is that the president appears to be souring on a public-private infrastructure scheme. Reports suggest Trump has been privately complaining about Cohn’s preferred approach since December, and if he’s now going public with his misgivings, it’s unclear how this will all go.
Despite the #resistance rhetoric, Democrats will have a hard time obstructing Republican spending on infrastructure. Many will see the spending binge as a win for their districts or their home states.
And what happens if the Democrats convince themselves that helping Trump score another legislative win will harm them in November? It could subvert their own chances at retaking Congress, since it would gift the GOP a new narrative. Whereas Republicans would be pursuing initiatives traditionally favored by Democrats, and spending in ways Democrats should want to support, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would be out there playing politics. It would not be hard to paint their refusal to come to the table on infrastructure as a casualty of their political ambitions.
3) Focus Messaging on Tax Reform Benefits
The first three moves form a connected triad: (1) presiding over a booming economy; (2) improving America’s infrastructure; and (3) giving money back to most Americans.
Here’s how they come together: If Republicans are smart enough to inject tax cuts into their talking points at every opportunity, it will provoke two main responses from Democrats: (a) that “the rich” are the biggest beneficiaries and (b) that tax cuts will inevitably reduce government spending.
And these attacks can be effectively parried away by the two aforementioned factors: a strong economy and increased federal spending on infrastructure.
In other words, against the charges that the GOP enacted a #taxscam and that they’re trying to cut spending, Republicans will be able to counter that if their bill is such a scam, why is the economy doing so well? And if they’re so intent on cutting spending, why is a Republican Congress and a Republican White House pushing massive spending increases?
This is a strange moment in which Republicans might find it politically advantageous to highlight their spending.
4) Play Up Democratic Designs to Increase Taxes Significantly
The flipside of heralding tax cuts is blasting the opposition party for wanting to do away with them.
Bernie Sanders’ Obamacare repeal-and-replace proposal—which would expand “Medicare for all”—would cost the federal government between $20 trillion and $30 trillion over the course of a decade and lead to massive tax increases. The plan has drawn support from a number of 2020 Democratic hopefuls, including Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris.
Republicans should present Americans with a choice between a party in favor of tax cuts with moderate spending and a party wanting so much spending it will need to raise taxes to achieve it.
5) Forget Entitlement Reform
The raw odds of the Democrats gaining 24 seats this fall are pretty good, which means Paul Ryan’s days as speaker of the House are probably numbered. Which would mean that the days of Republicans embracing entitlement reform are probably numbered, too.
In the short term, Ryan’s hands are somewhat tied on the entitlement front: He has stated he won’t go after the programs Trump wants to leave untouched, which include Medicare and Social Security. This leaves far less expensive programs, such as SNAP, which are associated with economically vulnerable populations Trump will not want to provoke leading into 2018.
And Ryan doesn’t seem likely to have a partner in the Senate: Mitch McConnell is looking for bipartisan legislation, and there are probably zero Democrats who will sign on to welfare cuts. Ryan has suggested the Senate could pursue passing such cuts using reconciliation, with only 51 Republican votes, but before Christmas, McConnell told reporters, “The sensitivity of entitlements is such that you almost have to have a bipartisan agreement in order to achieve a result.”
It’s best not to start digging what Republicans know in advance will be a dry hole.
6) Pass DACA
Trump has warmed to Dreamers far more than voters might have expected based on his 2016 campaign. Support for Dreamers is extremely high, which means Trump can broaden his appeal among gettable voters while forestalling the mobilization of a major political force in opposition. And he can also spin his DACA opposition as a commitment to the Constitution, arguing that his problem with DACA was procedural, not substantive. He can say that he was open to DACA all along and only kicked it to Congress in order to get it done the right way.
7) But Require Border Security In Exchange
That same poll with the extremely high support for DACA also found that “two-thirds back a deal to enact such legislation in tandem with higher funding for border control.”
It seems unlikely that Trump will be able to get funding for his wall in exchange for Democratic support for DACA. If Democrats were to comply, they’d be opening themselves up to considerable pushback from their base at a time when enthusiastic turnout is their highest priority.
So the solution for Trump is to agree to border security funding understood more broadly—which doesn’t necessarily require a wall.
One option is to agree to put up money for the sort of border security package that each side can plausibly spin as a victory. For Democrats, that would mean agreeing to fund border security measures, including even fencing reinforcement and expansion, so long as they could meaningfully deny they helped Trump build his wall. For Trump, that would mean securing funding for security initiatives (border structures, personnel increases, better technology, etc.) he could claim are even better than walls. And of course whatever fencing enhancements he can wrangle will allow him to claim a personal victory—the best he could get out of the loser Democrats.
Last week, Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported that former chief adviser Steve Bannon had attempted, prior to his fall from grace, to recruit the House Freedom Caucus to demand that Trump only offer to protect DACA if Congress ends its “chain-migration” policy (the process whereby green-card holders bring over their immediate family members). As it stands, such a demand is unworkable; there is perhaps a way to get merit-based immigration through the door a la the RAISE Act, but Democrats are under significant pressure to avoid making concessions of this magnitude.
(8) Herald the Defeat of ISIS
In early December, Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s Prime Minister, declared victory over ISIS: “Our forces fully control the Iraqi-Syrian border, and thus we can announce the end of the war against [ISIS]. Our battle was with the enemy that wanted to kill our civilization, but we have won with our unity and determination.”
In 2016, the specter of how to deal with ISIS overwhelmingly dominated the foreign policy segments of the presidential primary debates. Yet news of ISIS’s defeat has enjoyed relatively scant coverage.
You’d expect the GOP to be shouting about the fall of ISIS from the rooftops, but this hasn’t happened.
There is a simple fix: They should make clear that ISIS’s aspirational caliphate has been dealt a crippling blow.
9) Continue to Avoid Red Lines on North Korea
It would be wonderful if Trump were to let his team, which boasts immense collective military experience, dictate his public statements regarding North Korea.
Indeed, it seems as though every other week there’s a new Trump tweet on North Korea that scares half of Washington to death. I get it—Trump mentioning nuclear weapons, in almost any context, is grounds for serious concern. But I actually think it’s remarkable Trump hasn’t said worse.
Because with Trump’s adherence to the principles of dominance politics the real danger for calamity has been the possibility of the president setting up explicit or de facto red lines. This is a good thing.
Trump is a politician committed to dominance. If a rival talks up his nuclear button, Trump is psychologically compelled to play up his own (far larger!) button.
Random bluster may not be optimal, but it is vastly preferable to Trump setting up showdowns which could then escalate on a logic of their own.
10) Prioritize Narrow, Focused Tariffs
Trump largely avoided trade issues during his first year as president. These will play a far more prominent role in 2018.
Economic nationalism is the closest thing Trump possesses to a core belief. Everything else may be open to negotiation, but even as a faux-candidate in the 1980s, Trump railed against the trade practices of other countries the same way he has in recent years.
Luckily for Trump, there is a way for him to get his tariffs without putting in place the conditions for prices to rise. He can avoid slapping tariffs against entire product categories or industries, and instead erect narrow, targeted ones against strategic offenders.
