By Charles C. W.
Cooke
Monday, January
17, 2022
For once, it seems that the
Republican Party may have picked a good time to lose a presidential election.
Historically, the GOP has chosen its
victory years badly. Through no fault of their own, Republican presidents have
happened to be in office during the 1990–1991 recession, the 2001 “dot com”
crash, the 2007 financial crash, and the Covid-19 pandemic. President Trump was
routinely his own worst enemy, and yet his defeat in 2020 was at least in part
the product of the personal and economic chaos that was caused by a virus over
which he had precisely no control. If Trump had won reelection last year — as
he nearly did — it is fair to assume that the same headwinds that dragged him
down at the voting booths would have continued dragging him down well into his
second term.
Just look at Joe Biden. There have been
many causes of Biden’s present predicament — his catastrophic handling of the
withdrawal from Afghanistan; his preposterous and inappropriate overreach; his
tendency to label his opponents as secessionists and traitors; his focus on a
set of issues that nobody much cares about; and his uncanny ability to make any
bad situation worse — but, despite his flaws, it seems unlikely that the hole
that Biden is in would be as deep as it is had Covid-19 gone away as an issue
last January. As of today, the RealClearPolitics polling
average has Biden at 42 percent favorable, 53 percent unfavorable. Where,
exactly, do we imagine Trump would be if he were currently the president?
Modern history shows that presidents and their parties begin to crumble in the
public’s estimation as they enter their fifth and sixth years in office, and
that this crumbling tends to be reflected in the results of the next midterms.
Irrespective of the degree to which the country’s problems could credibly have
been considered his fault, it should not be too hard for us to imagine what the
coming elections might look like if Donald Trump, rather than Joe Biden, were
being blamed for the continuation of Covid-19, for spiraling inflation, and for
our ongoing supply-chain problems.
Voters should not play games with their
votes; rather, they should vote for the candidates they wish to see win,
without respect to the broader patterns and undulations of political fortune.
But, on a purely analytical basis, one may reasonably wonder whether, in the
long run, the Republican Party will come to be grateful for its loss in 2020.
Absent some dramatic change to the political landscape, this year may well turn
out to be the high-water mark of Democratic power for the next five — or
perhaps ten — years. That panic you see on Chuck Schumer’s face is the product
of his suspicion that the next decade will be marked by electoral outcomes that
make the sweeping change his party so desperately covets impossible. Had Trump
hung on in 2020, Schumer would presumably be more relaxed, patiently waiting
for Republicans to feel the backlash in 2022 and 2024.
And this is before we consider the
straitjacket into which the Democrats’ victory has placed them. One year into
his presidency, Joe Biden is an aging joke. Worse still, his vice president,
Kamala Harris, is even less popular. Come 2024, the Democrats will have three
choices, none of them good. The first will be to run Biden again, at age 82.
The second will be to convince Biden to drop out in favor of Harris. The third
will be to spurn both Biden and Harris and host a brutal primary while
the two of them are serving out their terms. It is too early to tell
whether this month’s “Hillary 2024” talk is anything more than a trial balloon,
but one thing is for sure: Such gossip only begins when the incumbent is
considered DOA.
Political history is full of accidents.
The Republican Party benefited enormously from its loss in 1976, without which
there may never have been a President Reagan; it suffered enormously from its
victory in 1928, without which there may never have been a President Franklin
Roosevelt; and, the nominations of Justices Roberts and Alito aside, it would
probably have been better off losing in 2004, so that John Kerry, rather than
George W. Bush, had absorbed the blame for the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina,
and the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Likewise, the Democratic Party may well
have been devastated after Michael Dukakis’s loss in 1988, but it all turned
out for the best when, four years later, the considerably more palatable Bill
Clinton made it to the White House in time to enjoy a booming economy that he
had done nothing of consequence to create. On the flipside, Grover Cleveland’s
much-vaunted victory in 1892 turned out to be a generational disaster. Through
no fault of his own, Cleveland inherited a tanking economy immediately upon
taking office, which, among other things, pushed the Democrats to fracture,
helped the Republicans to unite, and ended up locking the party out of the
White House until 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy split
the GOP vote and delivered Woodrow Wilson to victory.
We cannot know for sure if, 20 or 30 years
hence, Republicans will come to regard the plebiscite of 2020 less as a
frustrating could-have-been than as a dodged bullet. But with each passing day,
that outcome seems more and more likely indeed.
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