By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, November 09, 2022
There
was no red wave in 2022. Despite the unpopularity of the sitting president and
his party, a national
malaise owing
to a growing sense of precarity among voters, and polling that found an almost uniform
Republican advantage across the country, the GOP turned in a shockingly
underwhelming performance at the ballot box. In the end, Republicans are still
expected to retake control of the House of Representatives, but only by the
narrowest margin. Democrats are giddy. Republicans are depressed. The conflicts
that consumed the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency will persist
unresolved. It’s 2021 all over again.
Republicans
who are inclined to do any soul-searching are likely to be those who see the
voters’ verdict as an indictment of the GOP’s populism and its tendency to
nominate incendiary neophytes to high office. Despite the handful of
exceptions that
prove the rule, the Republican newcomers who earned Donald Trump’s endorsement
cost the GOP winnable races in states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, New
Hampshire, and elsewhere. Republican House candidates of
the election-denying variety helped embattled Democrats beat back this year’s political
headwinds. The GOP’s survivors, as of this writing, are those who can lay a
convincing claim to
some degree of
conventionality.
A
substantial portion of the Republican Party long ago resigned itself to the
inevitability of the populist takeover, but those debates are no longer
settled. There will once again be open repudiations of Donald Trump and
Trumpism within Republican ranks. The GOP will once again re-litigate the
former president’s fantasies about the fraudulence of the 2020 vote in the
light of their self-evident toxicity. The party may once again commit to a
zero-sum conflict over whether it can survive as a working-class vehicle or if
that sacrifices too many affluent, degree-holding voters in America’s must-win
suburbs.
As for
Democrats, say goodbye to the gentle efforts by anxious liberals to push Joe
Biden off the political stage. His obvious and intensifying decrepitude
notwithstanding, Biden isn’t going anywhere. The 46th president weathered a
historic storm, defying expectations set by decades of political precedent.
He’s earned the deference of his party, and he’ll get it. Moreover, all the
Democrats who rattled the cages of progressives and insisted their party had
governed too far to the left despite the dubiousness of their mandate will take
a back seat. There will be irresistible pressure on the party’s
moderates to
swallow their anxieties about the direction in which the party is headed and
keep their objections to themselves. There will be little appetite on the left
to read these results as victory by default and to govern accordingly.
All this
means that the issue set that should have helped the GOP this year is preserved
in amber. Divided government, if that’s what we get, will put an end to the
legislative phase of Joe Biden’s presidency, which means there will be no more
multitrillion-dollar spending sprees. That will send a positive signal to
markets, and it may put some downward pressure on inflation. But economists
expect a recession in
2023, and Democrats
will be the governing party that navigates it.
The
success of down-ballot Democrats ensures that there will be no major push to
rethink crime prevention and the prosecution (or lack thereof) of violent
criminals. There will be no legislative effort to compel Joe Biden to police
the border; no reckoning with the Covid regime and its many excesses; no
parent’s revolt on a scale sufficient to scare educational reformers away from
imposing mature cultural themes on kids. If these election results impose
caution on anyone, it is likely to be Republicans who saw the post-Dobbs environment
as an opportunity to pursue restrictions that exceed the national consensus on
abortion access. That will all have to wait another two years.
And the
next two years begins today. All eyes will settle on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,
whose state provided Republicans with their one and only unambiguous bright
spot on the map this year. Because the debate within the GOP over how to
recover from its infirmity will coalesce around the virtues and vices of
Trumpism, we’re likely to see a familiar debate around provocativism vs.
pragmatism. This is not, however, going to be a contest of Jeb Bush-style
conservatism vs. table-flipping nationalism a la 2016; that argument is
settled. Republicans are going to struggle with themselves over which version
of Ron DeSantis they should hope to emphasize: the popular and effective
governor or the culture warrior.
These
two iterations of DeSantis are compatible. And they do not preclude courting
controversy—DeSantis’s education reform bill (deemed “don’t say gay” by its
maligners) is as popular as his more banal initiatives like property-insurance
reform. But DeSantis’s appeal to the GOP is now firmly rooted in winning,
and quixotic culture wars like the one he and the
Florida legislature waged against Disney and the social-media outlets who were
mean to Trump do not fit within that rubric.
All this
sets us up for two more years that are likely to look a lot like the past two
years. It’s not often you get a chance to do it all again—this time, different
and better. Republicans might make the most of it, emerging from this setback
as a healthier party keen on representing a majority of the country. They could
commit to a course that would give GOP voters something more tangible than the
satisfaction they derive from owning the libs on Twitter. If history is any
guide, however, the GOP will settle in to its stultifying persecution complex.
Democrats will misread the moment, just as they have before, and govern with
reckless disregard for the popular will. And the rest of us will have to live
through it. Again.
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