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What About the Midterms?
I hope the Democrats understand what the results of the midterms really mean. They didn’t just win Congress in a landslide. They landed a two-year job interview with the American people, a kind of audition with the presidency in 2028 as the real prize if they do well, a chance to prove in hard policy terms they should be handed the White House. Or they could squander it beating up on lame duck Trump. Will control of both houses of Congress be enough to seal the deal for 2028?
Some of the impact is obvious. Dems are in a position to overwhelm Republican initiatives that make it to Congress for a vote without deals having to be made across the aisle. Democrats have clearly been facing restiveness from their base over failing to stand up to Trump. It will be unlikely for them to cooperate with the administration. They may even be able to override a presidential veto and will possibly have the votes available to impeach and convict Trump, something they lacked in Trump’s first term. But how will they use this power?
As in so many other elections past, it was the economy, stupid. Americans face higher prices and higher inflation when they were promised relief. They want cheap gas as their birthright. Though the guy who promised them universal healthcare failed to deliver over a decade ago, they still need it. They were promised an end to American wars of choice in the Middle East. It appears voters either did really pretend Trump was on the ballot and voted against him, or that they in a small way began to hold Congressional Republicans’ feet to the fire for letting so many bad things happen on their watch. There is no doubt the people spoke, the center held, the system worked, and all the pre-election noise about the end of democracy and fascism was just guff.
But to the important stuff. Trump is president for another year and some months. He acts unilaterally and somewhere between boldly and erratically, so for better or worse policy actions will continue to happen quickly. The winning Dems won’t take office until January and even the full year of 2027 for them will be bifurcated by the start of serious campaigning ahead of the 2028 presidential election. They don’t have much time. But to pass the test the American people have set before them — do something about the economy — it is unclear what they can accomplish. Time is not on their side. Trump-appointed Republicans still control Treasury and Commerce and the Fed will still do what they do. People seem unclear of the status of tariffs after so much Trump-made fidgeting, never mind what the actual impact has been. ICE and its sister organization, Customs and Border Protection, are largely untouchable in the short run as they are already funded for the balance of Trump’s term. There are no obvious Supreme Court vacancies coming. If you can’t control interest rates and thus inflation, and if you can’t slam the brakes on Trump in Iran and lower gas prices, what can you do? What was the point of electing Democrats again?
If the practical side of the Democratic Party is stymied, it opens the door for the vengeful and radical wing. Internal Democratic struggles, not legislation, will then likely dominate. Driving narratives about Epstein, the Arch, Elon Musk, and corruption will overrun getting real things done if people like AOC and El-Sayed fill the oxygen gap while centrist Dems are frustrated on the sidelines. It is hard not to see Democratic voter dissatisfaction grow even though they did so well in the midterms. They were told this was the most important election of their lifetimes. They showed up and voted, but they don’t seem in line to get much of what they wanted.
None of this is helped by the inability of the Democratic party to push some viable presidential candidates toward the front ahead of 2028. Polling shows the leading Democratic candidate at present is Kamala Harris with 34 percent support, who badly lost both past primaries and the general election. AOC, who has little support outside coastie progressives, is at 11 percent. New-Blood governors Andy Beshear and Josh Shapiro did not show enough support to even make the chart. Dems appear to have no strong successor with a national following, which only reinforces the impression of a party that can organize opposition but struggles to articulate a governing alternative.
Instead the people will likely get more of the same, lawfare. Since that fateful night in 2016 where the world said goodbye to Hillary Clinton, the Democrats sought to first overthrow Trump in a Deep State-assisted coup centered around Russiagate, then to destroy him politically via two impeachments, then during the Biden administration to bankrupt and/or jail him with New York-led prosecutions, civil suits, MeToo, and debanking, and more recently, by connecting Trump with personal conduct somewhere inside the Epstein Files so vile even his base will walk away. Expect more of all that; food fight impeachments and investigations, over what some might say, but the details don’t really matter. Revenge, and dragging Trump through the mud hoping to have the smear rub off on Vance through the process does.
The problem of course is that none of those things worked to bring down Trump. Arguably, surviving them made Trump look stronger and Democrats weaker for having failed. Even as he was found guilty of multiple felonies for falsifying business records (it remains the only criminal conviction against Trump and ended with no prison time, no probation, not even a fine) the impact never really got out of New York. Same for the civil case of sexual assault. Much of the country yawned seeing how one city wedded to its liberal values and biased juries could stir up a lot of smoke and fail to start a fire. The Biden administration and the pro-Biden FBI had the full Epstein files for years and found nothing to go after Trump about. Yet it is likely instead of presenting themselves as the party that can fix America’s real problems, the Democrats may instead squander the opportunity and end up looking petty, focused on the past, dreaming it is somehow 2014 again.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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