Three big questions for after November’s election
On the sad slog to November, an immense volume of words will analyze who’s up and who’s down. Scores of polls will predict an increasingly unpredictable electorate. Political experts will turn into full-time sportscasters with the daily box score. I will be as guilty as anyone.
But the overwhelming bulk of this commentary will focus on the wrong finish line. Far more interesting than the November vote count are longer-term trend lines and considerations of what this dispiriting contest means for each party and our political system.
Leaving aside the lingering potential for some third-party entrant, the match-up is set as each party has its presumptive nominee. Donald Trump cleared a 17candidate Republican field in astounding fashion. Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead remains unassailable, notwithstanding setback after setback to a limited opponent with only tenuous ties to the Democratic Party. Neither campaign has been pretty, but politics is not often judged on style points.
The campaign to unfold will be among the most distressing in memory. Lacking much potential to appreciably increase their respective likability and approval numbers, both Clinton and Donald Trump can be sure to scorch the earth in order to drive the other’s already huge negative numbers still higher.
Be assured that 2016 will bear no resemblance to 2008 when, whatever your rooting interest, there was a sense that each party was putting forth an exemplar of hope and honor.
It’s a depressing truism that someone will win this election. If one candidate’s negative rating is at 65 percent, then the opponent with a 62 percent negative score is king. Or queen.
Clinton starts the general election race with multiple advantages: basic plausibility, changing demographics, the Electoral College map. She may well need each and every one given her multiple
faults. There is little clamor in the land for a Hillary Clinton presidency, but that is the likeliest outcome as the GOP suicide march reaches its logical terminus.
If she takes the oath of office next January, three compelling, long-term political questions will come to the fore.
1. What’s next for the Democratic Party?
Only once since Franklin Roosevelt has a two-term president been succeeded by a president of his own party. That transpired in 1988 when George H.W. Bush took the baton from Ronald Reagan. Save for the initial Gulf War, the tenure of this first President Bush was distinctly indistinct.
There is every potential that a Clinton presidency will be far more akin to that of George H.W. Bush than to the far larger tenure of her husband. As the first Bush presidency was essentially the third Reagan term, so, too, would a Hillary Clinton presidency be significantly a third term of Barack Obama.
In both cases, the successor lacks the political skills and appeal of the original product. As Reagan had defeated Bush for the 1980 nomination, Obama did the same to Clinton eight years ago. Voters are discerning. Avis rarely eclipses Hertz.
Bernie Sanders is no Obama. Yet, Hillary Clinton’s endless, joyless grind and flip-by-flip leftward drift to dispatch him have been telling. She and her troops eventually will win this battle. But the Sanders constituency looks to be winning the war for the party’s heart and soul.
2. What’s next for the GOP?
The post-November Republican challenge will be a massive one. How do you put Humpty Dumpty together again?
For decades, the GOP has been a rather stable, threelegged stool. Limited-government types, supporters of a muscular American presence in the world and social warriors made common cause in some uneasy harmony.
Donald Trump upended that stool, and fed it to the chipper.
Far beyond the upheaval to the coalition, Trump rewrote all the rules of how a nomination contest is waged. Celebrity beat gravitas; cable saturation beat massive advertising; universal name recognition beat Super PAC millions; anger beat rationality; instincts beat the consulting class.
If a November debacle ensues, Republicans will have many questions to figure out long before identifying their next great hope. What does it mean to be a Republican? Is there a core ideology? Is it to be a conservative party or a nationalist movement? Where is there a home for fastemerging demographic groups? Where go those principled conservatives who sat this one out? Is there a price to be paid for those who jumped onboard the Trump train while knowing far better?
3. What does this portend for our body politic and political system?
This tumultuous election assuredly will be something of a turning point. The direction of that pivot is what remains unknown.
On one route lies a downward spiral in which politics becomes just another form of diversionary entertainment in which serious voter engagement wanes and American society continues to pull apart into polarized camps.
The main difference between the Tea Party’s jolt of one party to the right and the Sanders jerk of the other party to its left flank seems to be about six years.
But there is also a more hopeful course. It involves turning this election, pitting candidates who unite most Americans in finding them unsavory and unfit, into a form of shock therapy. In economic terms, politics is a demanddriven process. Ultimately, candidates and their handlers provide the kind of product that voters reward at the ballot box. Perhaps it is time for the voting public to raise the standard and to quit settling.