Which party will survive the election-year rapids ahead?
If the election year ahead were a set of rapids, this would be a moment of pulsepounding anxiety. The current is quickening on a river that can’t be scouted because there’s simply no way to get a clear look at the gorge ahead. Is the Democrats’ vintage wood-and-canvas vessel durable enough for the rocks, drops, holes, and standing waves it will shortly confront — or will the extended battering prove they should have shifted to a modern composite craft before paddling into the fray?
Can the Republicans ride the strong populist current ripping along the river’s right side safely down through the gorge — or will it sweep them into a channel that narrows to a torrent which becomes an unrunnable waterfall?
It’s all made more perplexing by the mixed signals of the past few weeks.
For the Democrats, the elections on Tuesday were very good, and hinted at a nation receptive to their message. In Ohio, a state that has tended steadily rightward in the past decade, they won a huge victory with a ballot measure to constitutionally enshrine abortion rights. The question there, however, is whether broad support for abortion rights expressed on a ballot measure also translates into backing for abortion-rights candidates.
In Kentucky, the abortion issue also helped Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor, win reelection. That matter seems to have played a role in Virginia as well. There, Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has tried to establish a non-absolutist but comfortable-for-conservatives position by proposing a ban after 15 weeks, hoped to turn the legislature completely red. Instead, Democrats held their majority in the state Senate and took control of the House of Delegates.
In Iowa, meanwhile, the religious book-banners took it on the chin in their effort to win school board seats.
All that proved a tonic for Democrats after some bad news: the New York Times/Siena College polling showing that the Democratic incumbent trails a resurgent Trump in five of six battleground states surveyed.
That news is dreary tending toward dismal. It’s not just that voters aren’t giving Biden credit for an economy that has produced millions of jobs in short post-COVID order. That could change over time, after all. The larger worry has to be the objection many have to Biden based on his age. Currently 80, he would be 82 at the start of a second term. Many voters are telling pollsters that because of his age, they simply won’t vote for him in 2024.
The question, then, is this: Are those judgments reversible? If it turns out that half of America has simply taken the phone off the hook when it comes to Biden, that’s bad news indeed.
But that’s where Trump comes in. If the Republicans nominate, say, Nikki Haley, who on Wednesday turned in yet another strong GOP debate performance, or Chris Christie, a Republican with a record of winning in a blue state, Biden could rightly be pronounced in acute political peril.
Yet things are different with Trump, because of the water regularly coursing over the gunnels, rendering his craft harder and harder to maneuver and ever more prone to a candidacy-killing capsize.
Trump himself is closely associated with two matters that have proved toxic to Republicans, according to John Cluverius, associate director of UMass Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion.
He’s the president who vowed to and did appoint Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and thus eliminated a constitutional right to abortion — and abortion rights are something that Americans even in conservative states have repeatedly demonstrated they value. Further, he is running a campaign based on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him — an utter falsehood that set the stage for the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol.
The actions he took to subvert the legitimate election results will play out both in federal and state courts. A conviction will seal his electoral fate, or at least it would in any sane, democracyvaluing nation. Contrariwise, though an acquittal would spare him legal punishment for his actions, it’s hard to think it would rehabilitate him in the eyes of democracy-supporting Americans, given the information we already know about the role he played in pressuring Georgia officials to “find” more votes for him and in urging the creation of fake Electoral College slates as part of his cabal’s scheming to purloin the election from Biden.
But tempting though it is to beg the question, the view here is that the Democrats’ old wood-andcanvas craft is a better bet to survive the gorge than the leaky, heavily weighted canoe MAGA Republicans want to ride through the rapids.