What if the Democrats Lose Again in 2018
How the Democrats Can Have Back Congress
2 architects of their party's last congressional victory argue Democrats demand to recruit candidates who match their districts and offer voters a detailed agenda.
Donald Trump is a historically unpopular president, and Republicans in Congress are pushing through a remarkably unpopular calendar. Under such auspicious circumstances, it'due south only natural for ardent Democrats to experience energized and empowered. Some see 2018 as their own Tea Party moment to sweep even the bluest of candidates to victory in the reddest of districts. Information technology looks similar an election Democrats tin can't lose—the sort Americans haven't seen since, well, final twelvemonth.
And so how can Democrats ensure that 2018 delivers the success they failed to attain in 2016? The stakes are too high to rely entirely on 1 side's enthusiasm or the other side's disenchantment. If their overriding objective in 2018 is to save the country, not realign the Democratic Political party, Democrats need to look back to the last time they won back the House in 2006. We helped coordinate that effort, and the lessons nosotros learned and so nevertheless utilise today. Waves don't happen on their own: Democrats need a strategy, an argument, and a programme for what they'll practice if they win.
In the last 60 years, command of the U.S. House of Representatives has inverse hands just three times, always in midterm elections, with command shifting abroad from the president's party. The 1994 and 2010 campaigns were dominated by attacks against the incumbent president and his party over health care; 2006 became a referendum over the ruling party's incompetence and corruption. In percentage terms, the worst midterm defeat in the past century came in 1974, when a nation weary of obstruction of justice sent a quarter of the House Republican caucus packing. Some presidents are unfortunate enough to face one of these circumstances; with the midterms still more than than a year away, Donald Trump already seems to take all those bases covered.
Opposition parties, by dissimilarity, find the odds forever in their favor. In the last xx midterm elections, the president'southward party has picked up seats just twice: in 2002, when Republicans gained eight right after 9/11, and in 1998, when Democrats gained five thanks to House Republicans' obsession with impeachment.
Trump and his party accept particular reason to fear a reckoning in 2018. No showtime-term president has gone into a midterm this unpopular since Harry Truman lost 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate in 1946. Similar Democrats in 1994 and 2010, Republicans in 2018 confront a firestorm over health care. If Hurricane Katrina, Republic of iraq, and the Jack Abramoff scandal dogged congressional Republicans in 2006, Trump is already torturing them with incompetence and corruption of unprecedented scale. Add potential balloter devastation to the list of Trump mistakes Republicans tin can't prevent. Donald Trump came to Washington to make waves—and he may deliver a moving ridge ballot powerful enough to sweep his party out of command of Congress.
Democrats enter the bicycle with a distinct advantage. For campaigners in primary, the toughest race to win is when they're the proper noun in voters' sights only not the proper name on the ballot. Trump volition be an infrequent liability on the campaign trail—determined to redeem himself, drastic for validation from his base, and toxic to every candidate in a marginal race. Trump presents vulnerable Republicans with a no-win proposition: They tin't run with him and their Democratic opponents won't permit them run without him. The last matter a bulk of voters desire is to give this president a blank check—or every bit Trump prefers to call it, loyalty.
So Democrats don't demand to spend the adjacent year navel-gazing over how to motivate their base. In 2018, Trump will provide the greatest fundraising and go-out-the-vote auto the party has ever had. Moving ridge elections are a chance to build on that base by winning back voters disappointed in the other side. Democrats will have enough of disappointments to bring to their attention, including Republican health-care and tax-cut plans that betray the working-form voters who put Trump in the White House.
To pull that off, though, Democrats must channel their anger, not be defined by it. In 1994, Gingrich Republicans used an culling agenda, the Contract with America, to take back the House for the start time in 40 years. In 1998, those same Gingrich Republicans played to their conservative base of operations past campaigning for impeachment, producing another historic result: making Beak Clinton the first president in 176 years to gain House seats in the sixth year of his presidency. Democrats should listen that aforementioned lesson. They don't accept to make 2018 a referendum on Trump's impeachment. If they desire to win the majority they need in order to concord Trump answerable, they'll practise much better making the election a referendum on Trump'south tape.
That referendum volition be won or lost in swing districts—and they are much harder to find than they used to be. The Cook Political Study institute that the number of swing seats—where neither party runs more than than five points amend than it does nationally—has dropped by more than than one-half over the last 20 years, from 164 to 72. The nigh vulnerable seats in the current House majority belong to 23 Republican incumbents in districts Hillary Clinton carried, largely clustered in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington. These districts tend to be mainstream in tone and interest. That's a tough place to win the hand Trump has dealt Republicans of cutting student aid, denying climate change, and eliminating protections for pre-existing conditions.
Just Democrats don't but need to choose the right battles, they also need to cull credible candidates who tin win them. Candidate quality may non make the divergence in a place like Montana's at-large district, where Greg Gianforte won handily only hours subsequently assaulting a reporter. Winning hotly contested swing seats, however, requires candidates who closely friction match their districts—fifty-fifty if they don't perfectly align with the national party's activist base. In 2006, the Democratic base was energized and angry, but then equally now, capturing a majority required winning some tough races in red and regal states across the heartland. Equally leaders in that 2006 effort, we recruited a football histrion in North Carolina, a man of affairs in Florida, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania, and a sheriff in Indiana. The Democratic Party won twice every bit many seats as it needed to proceeds command.
There's a long-term payoff for a party that gets this right. Good candidates non only help build a wave, they help sustain it. Moving ridge elections offer the gamble to establish new beachheads in hostile territory, only it takes gifted leaders to survive when the pendulum swings dorsum. In the 1980 Reagan landslide, Republicans gained 34 Firm seats—just to lose 26 seats ii years subsequently—and 12 Senate seats, only to lose 8 senators and Senate control when those seats came open up 6 years later. With the right candidates, the impact of a wave can be felt for decades. Half a dozen "Watergate babies" elected to the Firm in 1974 went on to serve in the Senate. And so take three Democrats who joined the House in the 2006 wave.
Fifty-fifty with the right candidates in the right districts, a wave won't become far without a credible plan to address the country's problems, not simply run attack ads against the parade of horribles from the other side. In 2006, nosotros published a book called The Plan , which offered detailed proposals on college, retirement, health care, and the economy. One reason today'southward congressional Republicans are struggling to enact an agenda is that unlike the Contract-with-America Republicans of 1994, the GOP waves of 2010 and 2014 were built merely on saying no to Obama.
Donald Trump may hand Democrats the ballot adjacent year, simply Democrats should strive to earn the people's trust on their own merits anyway. These are serious times for a country at the mercy of an unserious president. The harm may take years to repair, and voters deserve to know what Democrats are going to exercise virtually it.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/riding-the-2018-wave/530952/
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