NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office. — Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”
Candidates in this year’s elections will soon be bouncing around like corn being popped. By November, the nation might long for a rebirth of political reticence.
In 1876, although Rutherford B. Hayes was Ohio’s governor and the Republicans’ presidential nominee, he doubted even the propriety of attending Ohio Day at the Philadelphia celebration of the nation’s centennial. Fifteen decades later, ambition is no longer demure. But what are candidates ambitious to do? As politics has become more tribal, it has become more gladiatorial, and the satisfactions of catharsis — the expression of animosities — have supplanted expectations of agendas for governing.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal with a conservative disposition (he thought conservatism is a disposition), once said, “Liberals are people who would like to see things improved, and conservatives are people who would like to see things not worsened.” Today, many voters at both ends of the ideological spectrum primarily want the same thing: to see the other side lose. Theoretically, people vote, then the results have consequences. Actually, today, voting is its own consequence: catharsis.
In this era of presidential dominance, voters thinking (if they do) about midterm congressional elections might wonder, what’s the point? Adam J. White of the American Enterprise Institute writes that presidents use Congress’s inertia to justify their own assertiveness, “but this gets the situation backwards. The defining fact of our era is: Congress won’t act, because Presidents will.”
The vast majority of House seats are, in normal times, which means most of the time, secure for the parties currently holding them. And all but three states have two senators from the same party. This means that incumbents’ job security depends primarily on avoiding primary challenges — to Democrats from the left, to Republicans from the right. As Yuval Levin says in his book “American Covenant,” often “winning a primary now involves effectively committing not to negotiate or bargain with the other party.” So, for both parties, the crucial promise is to not do what member of Congress should do, which is bargain.
Today’s presidential dominance serves Republicans because their party’s raison d’être is nothing but subservience to the president. The Economic Innovation Group’s Sarah Eckhardt, Connor O’Brien and Ben Glasner report that in 2024 Trump received a larger portion of the vote than in 2020 in 90 percent of counties. But without him on the ballots in 2026, will his voters bestir themselves?
Trump, himself a highly caffeinated creature, has been caffeine for the electorate: a stimulant, who in 2024 upended the axiom that higher voter turnout is better for Democrats. Last spring, David Shor, a data scientist, calculated that if more people had voted, Kamala Harris would have fared even worse. Trump would have won the popular vote by almost five points instead of 1.4 points, and in doing so would have won five states he lost (Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Virginia). The electoral vote outcome would have been 355-183 instead of 312-226.
Trump, however, will never again be on a ballot. So, what is the foreseeable political residue of Trump, who, in his Louis XIV (“L’Etat, c’est moi”) mood, has said, accurately, “I am MAGA”? AEI’s Timothy P. Carney has examined Pennsylvania (“arguably the swingiest of swing states”) and discerned a realignment — the working class becoming more Republican, upper-middle-class suburbanites become more Democratic — that is not symmetrical:
The Democrats’ gains are largely from former Republicans switching parties out of disgust with Trump. The Republicans’ gains include many former blue-collar Democrats, but “more disaffected nonvoters coming out of political inactivity to vote for a once-in-a-lifetime candidate.” Hence the asymmetry:
“Many of those former Republican voters are now firmly country club Democrats, while many of those working-class voters never quite became Republicans — they were simply Trump voters.” Thus, when Trump disappears, “the country club will still be very Democratic … but the working-class whites will go back to being missing white voters.”
Now, never underestimate the Democrats’ ability to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. As an Israeli diplomat once said of the Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If many Democratic candidates try to pump up deflated hysterias — democracy is dying, the planet is frying — they can make themselves resemble a (to recycle a phrase) basket of deplorables. Failure is a choice.
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