Biden’s first year in office has strengthened Republicans
WHAT, if anything, does the Republican Party stand for? The closest thing Republicans have to a positive agenda is support for Donald Trump – up to and including his false, destabilising claim that the last presidential election was stolen from him. Candidates in Grand Old Party (GOP) primary elections for the 2022 mid-terms contradict Trump at their peril.
To be sure, the party's negative message is clear enough. Republicans have even reduced it to the snarky catchphrase “Let’s go, Brandon”.
And yet, after a year of unified Democratic government in Washington, with President Joe Biden at its head, the deeply flawed GOP – organised around little more than rejection of the Democrats, to the point of downplaying the pro-trump attack on the US Capitol – is not losing adherents. It might, in fact, be gaining them.
Amid the many downbeat reports on Biden’s first year, the Republicans’ undiminished popularity presents Democrats with an especially sobering data point. More sobering, there might not be much they can do to counter it, at least not in the short term.
The latest Gallup findings on the two parties’ support, released on Monday, show that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents made up an average of 46% of adults in 2021, versus 43% for the Republicans, a twopoint pro-gop shift from the 48-to-43 Democratic edge in 2020. (The margin of error is one percentage point.)
Yet, the average figures mask the ebb and flow during 2021, which favoured the GOP. Gallup took soundings every month; in the first quarter; Democrats held an average 49-to-40 edge, but in the fourth quarter of the year, the GOP was ahead 47 to 42. That’s a 14-point swing.
Caveats apply. One, mentioned by Gallup in its report, is that things don't look quite as bad for Democrats when the fourth-quarter 2021 data are disaggregated by month: in December, the GOP edge was only 46 to 44.
Still, Gallup’s results are consistent with Biden’s job approval rating, which is now in the low 40s and began to plunge around the time of the US military’s chaotic pull-out from Afghanistan, as well as with “generic ballot” polls, which show Republicans with a slight lead in voter preference for Congress.
Nor is it difficult to list reasons for this situation, which range from Biden’s blunders (failing to prepare the Afghanistan pull-out) to his bad luck (the Omicron variant) to forces beyond his control (sheer partisan polarisation.
Possessed of tiny majorities in the House and Senate, the Democrats overestimated how much the public wanted a transformational Great Society 2.0 – as opposed to a restoration of stability in the economy, education and public health.
They underestimated the resistance Democratic Senators Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, would mount to grand progressive plans, especially after inflation began to take precedence among voter concerns.
Biden and his advisers should heed the warnings of political analysts who speak from inside the Democratic camp – but outside the Washington bubble.
Political scientist Ruy Teixeira has been fairly screaming about signs that working-class Latinos are deserting the Democratic Party for the Republicans, as so many working-class whites have already done.
Data scientist and political consultant David Shor argues that party preference increasingly reflects a cultural divide. It runs between those with a college degree, who tend to back a progressive Democratic agenda, and those without a degree – including, in small but significant numbers, non-college-educated people of colour – who are both less affluent and more moderate ideologically.
“If we don’t listen to them,” Shor argued in an August 13 interview with Freddie Sayers of Unherd, “they’ll just become Republicans. And that is what we are seeing.”
It’s easier to recommend tuning out activists and donors – such as those who are threatening Sinema’s political future now over her resistance to filibuster reform – than actually do it. There might not be a moral equivalence between Democrats’ dependence on a progressive base and the GOP’S dependence on a Trumpist one; but politically, they’re similar.
Democratic defeat in the 2022 elections could force Biden into a more sustainable ideological position, much as President Bill Clinton “triangulated” after Republicans swept into control of the House in 1994.
The difficulty, however, is precisely how far left the party has shifted in the nearly three decades since then. You can’t pivot to a centrist strategy without personnel – donors, activists and candidates – willing to execute it.
There is still time for Democrats to recover, especially if they get good breaks on inflation and the coronavirus instead of bad ones.
Step one of their comeback, however, should be a close reading of the Gallup study, followed by brutally honest reflection about why, awful as the Republicans are, some swing voters seem to prefer them.