Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Contemplating GOP Juggernaut, Matty Yglesias Despairs
Matthew Yglesias at Vox is way more optimistic about our prospects than we ever allow ourselves to be here at Ricochet. Or rather, he’s freaking out about how good our prospects are, which makes me wonder why we’re quite so down:
The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.
Yes, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in his seventh year in office. Yes, Republicans can’t find a credible candidate to so much as run for speaker of the House. Yes, the GOP presidential field is led by a megalomaniacal reality TV star. All this is true — but rather than lay the foundation for enduring Democratic success, all it’s done is breed a wrongheaded atmosphere of complacence.
The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. [My emphasis, I strongly agree.] Republicans are confident they won’t lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.
Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren’t even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don’t even admit that they exist. …
The worst part of the problem for the Democratic Party is in races that are, collectively, the most important: state government.
Elections for state legislature rarely make the national news, but they are the fundamental building blocks of American politics. Since they run the redistricting process for the US House of Representatives and for themselves, they are where the greatest level of electoral entrenchment is possible.
And in the wake of the 2014 midterms, Republicans have overwhelming dominance of America’s state legislatures. …
In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.
Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:
- An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
- The spread of union-hostile “right to work” laws into the Great Lakes states
- New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
- Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats
Admittedly, one of the Democrats’ seven states is California, which contains more than 10 percent of the nation’s total population. But Texas and Florida combine for more people than the Golden State, and the GOP also dominates Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina — all of which are among the 10 largest states by population. Democrats’ largest non-California bastion of unified control is Oregon, home to only about one percent of the American people.*
… Liberals accustomed to chuckling over the ideological rigor of the House GOP caucus won’t want to hear this, but one of the foundations of the GOP’s broad national success is a reasonable degree of ideological flexibility.
Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don’t want to pay taxes and business owners who don’t want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance.
“Republicans have a plan,” he warns in terror. (We do!? That’s great!)
Any serious article about the prospects for Democratic Party policymaking in 2017 starts with the premise that Republicans will continue to hold a majority in the US House of Representatives. This presumption is built on four premises:
- The natural distribution of population in the United States tends to lead the average House district to be more GOP-friendly than the overall population.
- GOP control of most state legislatures lets Republicans draw boundaries in a way that is even more GOP-friendly than the natural population distribution would suggest.
- Incumbents have large advantages in House elections, and most incumbents are Republicans.
- So-called “wave” elections in which tons of incumbents lose are typically driven by a backlash against the incumbent president. Since the incumbent president is a Democrat, Democrats have no way to set up a wave.
One striking fact about this is that the presumption of continued GOP control is so solid that you don’t even get pushback from House Democratic leaders when you write it down. Privately, some backbench Democrats express frustration that the leadership has no plan to try to recapture the majority. In their defense, it’s not like anyone outside the leadership has a great plan either.
But this isn’t just a parochial issue for the House Democratic caucus. It means that the party’s legislative agenda is entirely dead on arrival at the federal level. …
The GOP, by contrast, has basically two perfectly plausible plans for moving its agenda forward. One is to basically change nothing and just hope for slightly better luck from the economic fundamentals or in terms of Democratic Party scandals. The other is to shift left on immigration and gain some Latino votes while retaining the core of the party’s commitments. Neither of these plans is exactly brilliant, innovative, or foolproof. But neither one is crazy. Even if you believe that Democrats have obtained a structural advantage in presidential elections, it’s clearly not an enormous one. The 51 percent of the vote obtained by Barack Obama in 2012 was hardly a landslide, early head-to-head polling of 2016 indicates a close race, and there’s always a chance that unexpected bad news will hit the US economy or impair our national security.
Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position …
Of course, he sees this as the ultimate nightmare vision; but I see it and think, “What’s not to like?” If Matty’s got heartburn like this, maybe we’re in better shape than I thought?
Published in Elections, Politics
This reads like some of the NFL preseason articles extolling the “excellent” prospects of my now 2-3 Eagles. Translation- don’t count on it.
Beware the temptation of confirmation bias. Remember Vox, which shows us, if nothing else, just how ridiculously stupid Yglasias is capable of being. So is he showing uncharacteristic insight, here, or is this just more of the same from Vox, only now something that we also want to be true?
Nutzlos. Useless.
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
If Trump were not in the race, I think we’d be ecstatic right now. Our biggest liability has always been our propensity to shoot ourselves in the foot, and I think Trump actually falls into that category too: if we were having more debates, his poll numbers would go down. He’s most impressive when he’s a one-man show, and least impressive when stuck between others and given limited time. Also, more debates would help winnow the field, and Trump’s no one’s second choice candidate. The choice to have fewer debates was meant to avoid 2012’s glut and protect the frontrunner, and it’s working perfectly: every debate is watched and analyzed, and the frontrunner remains intact. It’s just that it’s Trump in front.
There is no way to overestimate the GOP’s ability to do the stupid thing.
Claire – I generally accept that anything Vox says is wrong so clearly there will be a Democratic landslide – for President-elect Jim Webb probably.
I am glad to see the party of pessimism still reigns on Ricochet! John Derbyshire would be proud.
What this shows is the Democrats just assume that the voters who put all those state legislatures in place are being catered to by the GOP.
The amazing thing is the GOP does everything it can to insult, trash and spray spittle on those voters to chase the unicorn of the low info moderate. Obama won in 2012 because he got his base out better than Romney did.
2016 will be a repeat unless one of the despised and vilified non politicians get the nomination.
The only problem with the analysis is it assumes the GOP wants to win as opposed to keep their power despite a loss.
Totally agree. Our prospects would look really good if “Trump” did not exist.
The most vivid characteristic of our current Democratic party and the class it supports is its eagerness to use up our national design margin to get at the sweet creamy golden stash that is contained within, along with all the debt you can eat. This will dispense the goodies to those who vote for free stuff, along with the commensurate graft, corruption, and cutouts to keep the nomenklatura hopping and happy. So have they also done with their own party’s design margin, and Matty is one of the first to notice the hot steaming political ruin left in the aftermath.
BHO and his enablers and fans are the ultimate apres moi crowd.
I’m still looking for that Republican plan he was talking about.
Who is this person writing under the guise of Matt Yglesias, and what did he do with the body? Or did someone slip him a generic knockoff version of the drug from Limitless?
I would love to think the Republican leaders are smart enough to entrench themselves for several decades, but our elected representatives can’t even properly question the head of an organization which sells baby parts. They could have prosecutors for the Nuremberg trials and lost. (Imagine a whole opening statement focusing on Nazi abuses of German monetary policy and failure to pay WWI reparations.)
I hope I’m wrong and Yglesias is right. (I pause as I feel a cold spectre passing by as I write that last statement). The nagging feeling I have, however, is that the Republicans won’t so much win this election so much as the Democrats will lose it. May the least worst party win.
There is an Arnold Lobel short-story called “tear water tea.” It is delicious, and the main character, Owl, sits down to contemplate sad things (forks falling behind the stove, books with pages torn out, beautiful sunrises that happen before anyone is awake to see them, etc…) while crying into a teapot. At the end, he enjoys a delicious cup of tear water tea.
If Yglesias is the one filling the tea-pot, I agree that it would be a most delicious cup of tea.
Regarding Trump:
It is early. 12.5 months to an election is like 12.5 years in a normal universe.
I don’t think he will be the nominee and will to be a factor in the general.
I think Trump is a positive in this early stage. Jeb! and Ted Cruz are both on record saying Trump is bringing a lot of the record audiences to these early debates.
A lot of Ricochet was/is very high on Ms. Fiorina and Sen. Rubio’s performance in the last debate. Without Mr. Trump in the race as few as half of the viewers would’ve tuned into to see Fiorina and Rubio’s performances.
In the face of the entrenched bureaucracy, I find this difficult to accept.
Let me guess. You have small children.
Sounds wonderful. Now let’s make it work.
There are several factors at play; don’t get hung up comparing the RNC to the DNC. Both are incompetent, and the GOP has better candidates to offer to citizens who are paying attention. The battle is for the low-information crowd.
The DNC has several advantages. First their skunk works is better. They have a more capable bunch of techno-weenies for the purpose of micro-targeting their phone outreach and social media campaigns.
Second, they have a huge advantage with the mass media. Only about five percent of the mass circulation newspapers in America lean conservative. Fox is the only broadcast network that will give a fair presentation of conservative ideas (I don’t consider them a competent voice for conservatives, but they do provide a platform for conservatives, even if they prefer histrionics to persuasion). The big media advantage that the progressives have make this a two-front war.
Third, social media is killer. Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Yahoo, and just about everyone you can think of favor the progressives. This is a third front in the war that the GOP isn’t even thinking about. We are about to get clobbered by a giant force that isn’t even on the GOP radar.
I’m so used to Vox being wrong about everything that this article has me more depressed than ever.
He forgets to mention that people are becoming increasingly tolerant of the president ignoring Congress, which offsets Republican advantages there. Also of the power of courts at both the federal and the local levels to decide that language means whatever liberalism needs it to mean to override democratic institutions when convenient.
Yeah. I was here in 2012. Not doing it again. I’ll believe in the Republican landslide when they are are sworn into office, and even then I’ll insist someone pinch me.
I may not believe that Republican majority will do anything useful with it until ObamaCare is dead, buried at a crossroad, under a stream, with a stake through it’s heart.
If you look closely at the Democrat field… it is pretty apparent that they don’t have a bench at all. For all those hoards of Obama voters, none of them seem inclined to actually run for office in a way that would win an office.
We really just need to win the Whitehouse and we should be able to overturn the mayhem of Obama, getting our international reputation back might take more time. And there are a slew of devil may care judges that will be with us forever, but much of what Obama has wrought can be changed if we can get the Whitehouse.
That is why… I hate to say it, but if Trump should win, we have to buck up and vote for him.
Sure he hates Bush, but he hates Obama too. And it is Obama’s mess we need to clean up. Trump might stay interested long enough to help Congress do that.
But Trump’s not the man to count on to undo the Obama damage. And the damage he would do to the Republican Party in the meantime might well be irreparable. If Trump wins the nomination, I won’t be going to the polls next November, for the first time since I was eligible.
Case in point: one of our gripes against Obama is his furtherance of the imperial Presidency. Think Trump wants to undo that? He is ego personified.
I’m (relatively) confident he won’t be the candidate. But you can mark this down as a pledge: if he is, the Republicans won’t be getting my vote. The old adage of “most conservative viable option” has a breaking point, and this is beyond it.
Yes, but in a choice between Hillary and Trump, it is like Communism and Capitalism. I don’t think the option of staying home even exists. Hillary’s foreign policy is happening right now. I’m not okay with that.
This is a choice between bad and worse. I would choose bad over worse.
I’m not for Trump, I’m just not seeing how, after all he’s done, after being so well known, for so long, his numbers go down. And he sucks all the air out of the room so no one else is getting traction.
And honestly I think I’d choose Trump over Bush. I just feel insulted that Bush is running, like someone wants Gore v. Bush to go on forever.
The America of the future is not going to be anything like it has been. I’m coming to terms with the fact that Obama really has changed everything. I just want it to go in a direction I like better than his.
Republics are inherently short lived they depend on everyone agreeing to accept losing, from time to time, and no one does that anymore.
I agree that we should be cautious about making predictions about the future. Most of the article is about the past, though. Does the descriptions of victories already achieved and the already vested failures of liberalism seem plausible to you?
His numbers don’t have to go down for him to lose. He just needs the field to narrow, which it will.
Well, all the Republicans have to do is finish ahead of the hapless Democrats, like your Eagles did last night to my Giants.