This year’s political struggle concerns control of a legislative branch that controls not much (presidentialism through executive orders predominates) or even itself (see its slapdash budgeting). Voters should be disgusted by the empty ritual of choosing, every two years, from a pool of potential legislators who do not seem to mind that they do not matter.
In the 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022 off-year elections, voters ended an arrangement that they frequently forget is usually unfortunate: the president’s party controlling both houses of Congress. Now, after 12 months with a president unconstrained by his party’s supine congressional majorities, chastened voters might, come November, restore a semblance of checks and balances: divided government.
Party loyalty now eclipses legislators’ institutional pride. So, only divided government can make its Madisonian architecture — the separation of powers; what writer Yuval Levin calls “the deliberate recalcitrance of our system of government” — work.
Judging by recent decades of presidential politics, divided government would be representative government: It would represent the nation’s disposition. There has not been a presidential landslide since 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated former vice president Walter Monday by 18 points. This was just 12 years after Richard M. Nixon defeated Sen. George McGovern by 23.2 points, which occurred just eight years after President Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Sen. Barry Goldwater by 22.6 points.
Since 1984, the largest margin of victory was President Bill Clinton’s 8.5 points over Sen. Bob Dole in 1996, and the average victory margin has been just 4.6 points. Since 1988, no presidential candidate has won more than Barack Obama’s 53 percent of the 2008 vote.
In 1972, in the Democratic convention roll call of delegates nominating McGovern, the states were called in a scrambled order to prevent the injustice of alphabetism, discrimination on the basis of placement in the alphabet. The country, not being weird, decided the Democrats were.
Today, Democrats have pronoun fixations, and Republicans believe whatever the president purports to believe at the moment, including that trade deficits (present for 50 years) suddenly threaten the nation’s existence. So the parties’ craziness quotients are comparable. This is one reason why this year’s elections probably will again reflect electoral parity — a national shrug. Although midterm elections are usually referendums on the incumbent president, and although his negatives exceed his positives generally, and on key issues (the economy, immigration), a “blue wave” is unlikely.
In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats gained 40 seats. Just eight years later, sophisticated gerrymandering and the rigidities of polarization, cause Erin Covey of the Cook Political Report to note that only three House Republicans representdistricts won in 2024 by Kamala Harris. And just 10 represent districts that Donald Trump carried by 5 points or less.
In the 1980s, about two dozen states had a senator from each party. Today, just three do (Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin). The nation has sorted itself into a peculiar political stasis: ideological convergence during intensifying polarization. The rhetorical ferocity from each party’s most incandescent faction is disguising what has become a politics of emulation. Traditional progressives, and those conservatives who now are contemptuous of traditional conservatism, are only rhetorically, not actually, antagonistic.
Julia R. Cartwright of the American Institute for Economic Research notes that many self-designated conservatives — she calls them the New Right — have “mastered populism’s simple moral drama.” Progressives have long inflamed ordinary political tussles by characterizing them with Manichean rhetoric: the wicked “oppressors” and the virtuous “oppressed.” Now, faux conservatives are paying progressives the compliment of plagiarism, celebrating the virtuous “people” against the corrupt “elites.” Voters’ choice is between these binary moral dramas.
Some choice. As Cartwright says,
“Many of the New Right’s current policies would have been familiar to the Left a decade ago: tariffs and industrial policy; fixation on the trade deficit as a national scoreboard; a growing willingness to police speech in the name of public morality or national cohesion; and an eagerness to bend independent institutions to executive will. This is a politically marketable package because it translates frustration into concrete action: use the state. The rhetoric is crisp, the villains are named, and the time horizon is now.”
For prudent voters and actual conservatives (and their congenial cousins, classical liberals), the proper time horizon is tomorrow. They are, Cartwright says, “less concerned with who wields power today and more with designing constraints that minimize damage when power is inevitably misused tomorrow.”
This year, voters can produce the constraint of divided government. And can seed Congress with members of both parties disgusted by what it has become.
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