“Meathead” is in high dudgeon, seen gnashing his teeth and asking the heavens how in the Hell this could be? Hillary is more worried she will finally have to pay the price for her violations of the law.
Another four years of judicial appointments would give the conservative movement a hammerlock on the judiciary for a generation. And in that time, Trump’s judges will or could rubber-stamp changes to election laws that further erode what remains of popular sovereignty in this republic — and the world’s most powerful nation would stumble four years closer to climate catastrophe according to the false but populat Liberal Bible.
Trump’s reelection will be a nightmare for the Left.
Right now, the odds of the Democrats winning control of the Senate next year are slim, and getting slimmer. Democrats will need a net gain of three seats to wrest the upper chamber from Mitch McConnell’s caucus. And while Republicans will have 22 of their incumbents on the ballot in 2020, only two of those represent states that have leaned Democratic in the past two presidential elections — Colorado and Maine. For the Democrats to win in Maine they will have to beat Susan Collins, who has held her seat for more than two decades, and remains quite popular with her constituents (including many of the state’s Democrats). Thus, there is no reason to assume Democrats will be able to win the only two blue-state seats on the board. But let’s be generous and say they do.
Beyond [Colorado and Maine], the Democratic pickup opportunities slim dramatically. Of the other 20 Republican-held seats up for election, 16 of them are in states that were 10 points or more Republican than the nation as a whole in a weighted average of the last two presidential elections. None of these races look competitive at this time.
The other four have leaned 5 to 10 points more Republican than the nation in a weighted average of the last two presidential elections: Arizona (Martha McSally), Georgia (David Perdue), Iowa (Joni Ernst) and North Carolina (Thom Tillis).
… Elected Republican incumbents are, at this point, expected to be running for all these seats, except for Arizona. Generally, incumbents do better than non-incumbents. Even if the 2018 political environment were in effect (i.e. one where they won the national House vote by high single digits), the lean of each state in the 2018 House elections suggests that only Arizona (because McSally wasn’t elected) would go to the Democrats.
In other words, even if Democrats win the national popular vote in a 2018-esque landslide, chances are they’ll come up at least one seat short. Democrats will effectively need to flip five (5) seats after they (almost certainly) forfeit the Mountain State and Alabama?
Anything’s possible, of course. Democrats could find stellar candidates in every quasi-competitive state. Far-right weirdos could win GOP primaries in all the right places. Millennials could show up at the polls in 2020 in unprecedented force, and remake America’s electoral math in their image.
But odds are, if Biden wins he will be faced with a Republican Senate. Which means that he will not have the power to appoint any Supreme Court justices or, in all probability, left-leaning federal judges of any kind.
A recession that discredits the progressive agenda before Democrats even get to enact it.
In a February survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, 75 percent of economists predicted the U.S. economy would slide into recession by the end of 2021, with 42 percent expecting a downturn next year, and 25 percent the following one. Since that poll was taken, the Federal Reserve backed away from rate hikes, and markets soared. And (since expansions never last forever under capitalism) the odds of the economy going south in 2021 are now higher than ever.
In this scenario, do you think Mitch McConnell will put country before party and approve a bipartisan stimulus package to prevent the slump from deepening — or will he decide that deficits are bad again? History says this shouldn’t even be a question.
The Senate lost and gone forever (or at least for a decade).
So we’re looking at a historically ineffectual president who has failed to deliver on any of his or her major campaign promises, and is presiding over a needlessly severe recession.
In this scenario, how excited will the progressive base be to turn out for the Democratic Party in 2022? Once gridlock replaces Donald Trump in the headlines, is it easier to imagine liberals sustaining their current levels of civic engagement or catching up on lost brunches?
The 2022 Senate map is the friendliest that Democrats are likely to see until those same seats come up again in 2028. If Republicans win big in 2022, the Senate could very well be theirs until the end of the 2020’s. Barring a revolution in the GOP’s internal politics, that would mean no major climate legislation at the federal level until it’s much too late.
Meanwhile, when 2024 rolls around, Republicans will be one branch of government shy of a trifecta, and the Democratic incumbent will have no real achievements to run on. And next time, the GOP’s proto-authoritarian standard-bearer just might know how to stay on message.
There remains a decent chance that the U.S. economy will enter a recession next year. Thus, it is possible that Democrats will engineer a 2020 landslide large enough to secure them full control of Congress. And even if they don’t, Mitch McConnell could have trouble preventing two or three of his caucus’s more moderate members from cutting deals with a Democratic president. If a recession does hit in 2021, it could very well be a minor affair, in which case, the economy could be growing at a good clip when voters head to the polls in 2022.
Progressives shouldn’t lose sight of the lesser nightmare. If the past three years of political history have taught the Left anything, it’s the virtue of planning for the worst. And envisioning how the next Democratic presidency could go horribly wrong is a prerequisite, both for preventing such an outcome, and preparing to mitigate its most dire effects. Regarding the former, Team Blue’s leadership must convey the profound stakes of next year’s Senate elections to their highly energized — but presidency-obsessed — base. The small-dollar armies that are currently powering so many dark-horse presidential bids must eventually spread the wealth down-ballot. Democratic elected officials, for their part, must recognize that their party’s agenda will have no future unless the legislative filibuster becomes history.
Big-dollar Democratic donors, meanwhile, need to devote more time and money to developing an answer to their party’s deep, structural problem in the Senate — namely, that as urban-rural polarization deepens, the upper chamber is becoming more biased toward rural voters, and the GOP is growing less willing to accept the Democratic Party’s right to govern.
Part of the answer for the radical Left will be to find messages, organizations, and trusted local leaders who can improve Team Blue’s performance in low-density areas. But rural regions are drifting right in democracies all across the West. It’s unlikely that the trend can be fully reversed. Thus, more audacious solutions must be entertained. The next time Democrats eke out a Senate majority, approving statehood for D.C. — and, if the people of the island want it, Puerto Rico — must be a priority. Meanwhile, America’s bleeding-heart billionaires should consider trying to replicate the right’s success in buying up TV news outlets, and peppering their regular content with lies and Socialist propaganda. They might also mull making investments in start-up incubators, or liberal arts colleges in low-population, light-red states. Helping Missoula become the new Austin might not sound like a political project. But turning Montana blue through targeted investments would get a Democratic donor way more bang for her political buck than, say, a dumb, stupid and expensive national television campaign in favor of impeachment.
Finally, liberal activists must prepare for the time when legislative progress at the federal level might not be possible for a long time. Thus, they must redouble their efforts to make state-level change, and exploit the Democrats’ control over California for all its worth; which is to say, they should continue trying making un-popular strict environmental and labor standards the price of admission for corporations that wish to do business in the world’s fifth-largest economy. That’s not going to happen.
The Democrats are The Party of Doom…
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