How the Losing Party in This Election Could End Up Controlling the Next Era of American Politics

By Natan Ehrenreich

Thursday, August 01, 2024

 

It’s not a groundbreaking observation to note that many Americans are unsatisfied with the governing visions offered by our two major political parties and the candidates they have chosen as their leaders. As much as we should resist the allure of nostalgia-tinted visions of the “good old days” of national unity and contentment, it would be a simple untruth to claim that the public frustration with the options presented to us by our parties is without alternative. Gallup polling indicates long stretches of the 1990s and 2000s when both the Democratic and Republican Parties commanded approval ratings above 50 percent.

 

According to Gallup, the last time the Democrats had a majority-favorable image was over a decade ago, in early November 2012. The GOP very briefly reached 51 percent favorability in January 2020, but has not come close to reaching that number since. Before 2020, you’d have to look back to February 2005 to find the Republican Party enjoying the approval of a majority of Americans.

 

Yet even those prone to disappointment at the state of our politics have reason to hope. That’s because, even as the battle between Trumpism and wokeness — the two preeminent forces in our national discourse for much of the last decade — seems established as the fight of our politics, this November will be the first head-on collision between these forces in a presidential election.

 

Both the 2016 and 2020 elections featured Trump, of course. But the public saw neither Hillary Clinton nor Joe Biden as super-woke candidates. In 2016, wokeness wasn’t yet a fully developed or felt social phenomenon, and in 2020, Biden was seen as somewhat of a social moderate who had repudiated the more progressive, woke candidates competing in that year’s Democratic primary (Kamala Harris was one of them).

 

But this year, despite the media’s best attempts at doing so, it is hard to disentangle Kamala Harris’s image from the wokeness at the core of both her presidential campaign in 2020 and her selection as Biden’s running mate that year. Jonathan Chait summarized the “strange combination of factors” that led to her selection: “Early on, [Biden] promised to appoint a female vice-presidential nominee. And after winning the nomination, the murder of George Floyd led activists to pressure him to choose someone who was Black.”

 

Harris’s past embrace of the defund-the-police movement is sure to resurface in the months ahead. She is woke, and much of the public knows she is woke. That she very well could win in November is mostly a reflection of the unpopularity of the opposing vision offered by the GOP — Trumpism.

 

Despite the claims from certain segments of the Right that Donald Trump has built a new majority coalition capable of capturing widespread approval from the American public, it’s simply not so. He has lost the popular vote in two straight elections. His favorability ratings have been consistently underwater. He is, to put it mildly, not adored by the median American.

 

Two things, then, can be said about this election with certainty: An unpopular vision for the country that has captured one of our major political parties is going to win. And an unpopular vision for the country that has captured one of our major political parties is going to lose. What makes this election different from 2016 or 2020 is that that loss might be quite a bit more humiliating.

 

If Harris is defeated, it will serve as an embarrassing rejoinder to the party and movement that has styled Trumpism as a threat to American democracy itself. Twice in one decade will an unpopular female candidate have failed to quell the threat of “fascism,” “Christian nationalism,” and “authoritarianism.” But this time, it will also be an explicit failure of wokeness itself to do so.

 

Conversely, if Trump fails to obtain a second term, it will be his second straight fumbling of a winnable election. This time, however, it’s unlikely that another once-in-a-century pandemic will occur on which to try to pin the blame. And his loss will be to a candidate far more ideologically extreme and representative of the social leftism — yes, wokeness — that his supporters claim so passionately to fight. Trump will also continue to be vulnerable to the various criminal charges he faces.

 

One can hardly count on parties to learn the right lessons after an election loss, and it would thus be foolish to predict with certainty — or anything approaching it — the fall of either wokeness or Trumpism. But the abject humiliation that is sure to befall the loser of this election may just be so intense as to give one reason for cautious and rational hope. One can at least see how things might get better.

 

After the 2020 election, Yuval Levin observed for National Review that, in reality, America functionally has two opposing minority parties: “Although elections empower their winners,” he noted, “[this 2020] election looks likely above all to end up sending a warning message to both parties.” The 2024 election offers an intensified version of this process — the loser is primed to receive a message far more overt than a mere “warning.” Perhaps it could finally knock our politics off the double-minority track it’s been running on for at least a decade.

 

In time, then, it could be that the losing party of this November’s election ends up winning in the long term. One of our major political movements — Trumpism or wokeness — will be humiliated less than four months from now. If the losing political party jettisons that unpopular vision it has presented to American voters and instead is pushed to adopt a serious governing agenda capable of commanding approval from independents and moderates, it could control the next era of American politics as a true majority movement and, in due course, reap monumental electoral benefits.