The Luck of the Democrats

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/sunday/midterms-democrats-trump.html

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One of the interesting features of this election cycle has been the gulf, often vast, between the hysteria of liberals who write about politics for a living and the relative calm of Democrats who practice it.

In the leftward reaches of my Twitter feed the hour is late, the end of democracy nigh, the Senate and the Supreme Court illegitimate, and every Trump provocation a potential Reichstag fire. But on the campaign trail, with some exceptions and variations, Democrats are being upbeat and talking about health care and taxes and various ambitious policy ideas, as though this is still America and not Weimar, a normal time and not a terrifying one.

One way to look at this gulf is to argue the pundits are saying what the politicians can’t — that alarmed liberals grasp the truth of things but swing voters don’t, so Democratic politicians have no choice but to carry on as normal even if inside they’re screaming too.

Another way to look at it, though, is that the politicians grasp an essential fact about the Trump era, which is that while they were obviously unlucky in their disastrous 2016 defeat, in most respects liberalism and the Democratic Party have been very lucky since. So their optimism isn’t just a gritted-teeth pose; it’s an appropriate reaction to a landscape that’s more favorable than it easily might have been.

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To understand this good fortune, consider two counterfactuals. In the first, the last 21 months proceeded in exactly the same fashion — with the strongest economy since the 1990s, full employment almost nigh, ISIS defeated, no new overseas wars or major terrorist attacks — except that Donald Trump let his staffers dictate his Twitter feed, avoided the press except to tout good economic news, eschewed cruelties and insults and weird behavior around Vladimir Putin, and found a way to make his White House a no-drama zone.

In this scenario it’s hard to imagine that Trump’s approval ratings wouldn’t have floated up into the high 40s; they float up into the mid-40s as it is whenever he manages to shut up. Even with their threadbare and unpopular policy agenda, Republicans would be favored to keep the House and maintain their state-legislature advantages. All the structural impediments to a Democratic recovery would loom much larger, Trump’s re-election would be more likely than not, and his opposition would be stuck waiting for a recession to have any chance of coming back.

Then consider a second counterfactual. Imagine that instead of just containing himself and behaving like a generic Republican, Trump had actually followed through on the populism that he promised in 2016, dragging his party toward the economic center and ditching the G.O.P.’s most unpopular ideas. Imagine that he followed through on Steve Bannon’s boasts about a big infrastructure bill instead of trying for Obamacare repeal; imagine that he listened to Marco Rubio and his daughter and tilted his tax cut more toward middle-class families; imagine that he spent more time bullying Silicon Valley into inshoring factory jobs than whining about Fake News; imagine that he made lower Medicare drug prices a signature issue rather than a last-minute pre-election gambit.

This strategy could have easily cut the knees out from under the Democrats’ strongest appeal, their more middle-class-friendly economic agenda, and highlighted their biggest liability, which is the way the party’s base is pulling liberalism way left of the middle on issues of race and culture and identity. It would have given Trump a chance to expand his support among minorities while holding working-class whites, and to claim the kind of decisive power that many nationalist leaders around the world enjoy. It would have threatened liberalism not just with more years out of power, but outright irrelevance under long-term right-of-center rule.

But instead all the Trumpy things that keep the commentariat in a lather and liberals in despair — the Twitter authoritarianism and white-identity appeals, the chaos and lying and Hannity-and-friends paranoid style — have also kept the Democrats completely in the game.

Indeed there is an odd symbiosis between the liberal analysts who muster 16 regression analyses to prove that Midwesterners who voted twice for the first black president and then voted for Trump were white supremacists all along, and Trump’s own instinctive return to race-baiting in the final weeks of this campaign. Both ascribe more power than is merited to purely-racialized appeals, and both are in denial about something that seems pretty obvious — that a real center-right majority could be built on economic populism and an approach to national identity that rejects both wokeness and white nationalism.

But it’s the president’s denial that’s more politically costly for his party. If left-wing Twitter were running Democratic strategy while Donald Trump talked about infrastructure and drug prices, 2018 might seal a conservative-populist realignment.

Instead, the Democrats who are talking about health care while the president closes with fearmongering may know the secret of this election cycle: The same environment that’s making liberals feel desperate is, for Democrats, one of the more fortunate of possible worlds.

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