Nov. 14, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
The Real Trump Card
By Robert Romano
After a disappointing outcome for the U.S. Congressional midterm elections — Democrats will retain the U.S. Senate either without any net loss of seats, and Republicans poised to retake the U.S. House by a slim majority — political attention is already shifting to the race for 2024 and the White House against President Joe Biden, and to whether former President Donald Trump might run again for the nation’s highest office.
Midterms usually favor the opposition party, with a 90 percent likelihood of picking up seats in the U.S. House from 1906 to 2018, which did happen. The question now is how many seats and if it was definitively enough to win the race. As of this writing, Republicans have 212 seats to Democrats’ 205 seats in races that have been called, and Republicans have leads in nine races not yet called, just barely enough to get a majority.
Which matches the data: Republicans appear to have won the popular vote for the U.S. House, 52.1 million to 47.5 million, or 51.3 percent to 46.7 percent. While the margin of victory at the end of the day will be quite narrow, barring an unforeseen surge in late races called in Democrats, will undoubtedly be disappointing to House Republican leaders, at the end of the day, a win’s a win.
On the Senate side, which heretofore had only afforded a 70 percent likelihood of picking up seats, elected Republican leaders are considering their own coattails were similarly not enough to secure Republican Senate wins where needed in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and maybe Georgia, too.
The reason why these races were not GOP wins is twofold.
Low propensity Trump voters from 2020, who usually only vote in presidential elections, did not show up, or at least they did not show up enough in order for Republicans to win. In the meantime, thanks to early voting, enough low propensity Biden supporters were identified before the election to match GOP turnout in almost all of the key Senate races.
Georgia is a good example, where about 600,000 Trump supporters and 600,000 Biden supporters from 2020 both stayed home. That is normal in an off-year election and so usually the question comes down to who did a better job at activating those voters in the runup to the election. Clearly, Democrats did a better job in the swing states that mattered.
There’s still a chance that Herschel Walker could defeat Raphael Warnock for the Georgia Senate seat, which would be a pickup for the GOP, but it will come down to whether those low propensity Trump voters — who typically only vote in presidential elections — can be focused enough to turn out in the special election.
But do Republicans want Trump voters? How many candidates told Trump to stay away in 2022? That might have helped Republican governors keep their jobs, but what about down the ballot? Did that help?
In 2024, these problems for the GOP will be compounded as the U.S. enters the presidential reelection cycle, which unlike the midterms, usually favors the White House incumbent party. Sitting presidents who have stood for re-election have won about 70 percent of the time, although until the 1800s, state legislatures generally chose electors.
Since 1948, incumbent first-term presidents have a 67 percent reelection rate in their first terms. Harry Truman won in 1948, Dwight Eisenhower was re-elected in 1956, Lyndon Johnson won John Kennedy’s second term in 1964, Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1972, Gerald Ford was ousted in 1976, Jimmy Carter was ousted in 1980, Ronald Reagan was re-elected in 1984, George H.W. Bush was ousted in 1992, Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996, George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 and Trump was ousted in 2020.
So, depending on the circumstances, there’s only about a 1 in 3 chance that Biden could be ousted, and given Biden’s performance in the midterms plus the fact that he netted more than 80 million votes his first run, the odds seem lower than usual.
For that reason, presidential bids against a sitting president are usually about minimizing losses for the party, and if they get lucky, to pull off the upset.
Biden had coattails, or at least enough coattails to do what presidents are supposed to do in their first midterms: Rally the voters and minimize losses in Congress. Politically, that makes Biden at least as successful as Trump in his first midterms, who picked up two seats in the Senate for the GOP after losing the House.
That doesn’t mean Biden is unbeatable. Given the right combination of circumstances, sitting presidents can become vulnerable in their first terms of office. But it usually takes a recession. Just ask Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump. And thanks to the inflation, the continued global supply chain crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden appears to have a recession, although just how bad it will be from an unemployment standpoint remains to be seen.
But to take advantage of that opportunity, Republicans will need to be united in 2024.
Usually, what happens in presidential reelection cycles, especially when the incumbent party has only held the White House for one term as opposed to two or three terms, is the President runs relatively unopposed in the primary, keeping his base united, while the opposition party will have a competitive primary. Generally, the more beat up the opposition party’s candidate gets in the primary under those circumstances, the less likely he or she is to win the general election.
The odds of an upset increase when Presidents are opposed in their primaries. Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 after he barely won the New Hampshire primary. Jimmy Carter went on to be defeated by Ronald Reagan in the general election after a competitive primary with Ted Kennedy in 1980. George H.W. Bush was defeated in the general election by Bill Clinton after a competitive primary with Pat Buchanan in 1992. All three years were wins for the opposition party.
In 2020, Trump ran relatively unopposed and easily secured his party’s nomination. So, despite the Covid recession—where by April 2020, there were 25 million jobs lost—Trump managed to get an economic program in place to withstand the pandemic lockdowns, keep his base together, pick up 14 seats in the U.S. House elections and barely lost the presidential contest by a scant 43,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
That makes the question of whether Biden runs or not actually more important than if Trump runs. If Democrats have a competitive primary because Biden stands aside and does not run, the odds of an upset rise again. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were both elected after sitting Democratic presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson opted not to run again.
Whereas the novelty of a former president running for reelection is much more rare. It happens, just not too often: Martin Van Buren in 1844 and 1848, Millard Fillmore in 1856, Ulysses S. Grant in 1880, Grover Cleveland in 1892 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Of those, only Cleveland was able to get reelected, and the reason is simple: He had the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1892. Whereas every other former president to run lost their former party’s nomination. 1912 is an interesting case where Theodore Roosevelt actually won the primaries but lost the nomination at the GOP convention to the sitting then-President William Taft. 1912 also stands as the only test of a former president in primaries.
Like Roosevelt, Trump is still very popular among Republicans, who will decide the nomination, garnering 81 percent favorability among Republicans, including 50 percent very favorable, in the last Economist-YouGov poll taken prior to the 2022 midterms.
78 percent of Republicans in a Quinnipiac survey taken in October say they want Trump to run for president again.
That will make him very hard to beat.
But Trump, should he run, should still be tested by other Republican candidates. It is unclear if Republican voters truly want him to be president again. Fortunately, in the modern presidential primary process, there’s a sure-fire way to find out.
Ron DeSantis easily won reelection in Florida in 2022 and showed he had coattails of his own, netting four seats in the U.S. House, without which a Republican majority would be impossible. Other successful governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Brian Kemp in Georgia, who also picked up a U.S. House seat apiece in their reelection bids, have stories to tell as well. And, if they wish to test Trump’s viability in 2024, they should run.
And Trump might not be the problem. Nominally pro-Trump candidates like Lee Zeldin in New York (who voted in favor Trump’s election challenges on Jan. 6, 2021 and against his impeachments) and Ron DeSantis in Florida, who was elected the first time on Trump’s coattails in 2018, did very well in 2022, and picked up the House seats that will make the Republican majority in 2023.
In truth, the biggest problem Republicans had in 2022 was getting enough low propensity Trump voters to the polls to make a difference in key statewide and House races. In Ohio and Wisconsin, in the Senate, and maybe Arizona, the latter of which has netted the GOP two House seats so far thanks to Kari Lake’s strong run for governor there, it was enough.
In 2024, they will have the same problem of activating his base — that is, unless Trump runs. But the worst case scenario for the GOP would actually be a repeat of 1912, where, like Theodore Roosevelt, Trump runs and wins the primaries but then is denied the nomination at the national convention.
One thing is for certain, if Trump voters are disenfranchised in the 2024 contest for the GOP nomination, they will almost certainly stay home and Biden will win in a landslide. That is the real Trump card in 2024.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/11/the-real-trump-card/
Newt Gingrich: After midterm election, the challenges facing Democrats and Republicans
By Newt Gingrich
The outcome of the 2022 election was far different from what I expected – and what most pollsters and analysts expected.
I thought Republicans would win dramatically bigger victories.
When the exit polls had 75%, three-out-of-four, voters saying America was on the wrong track, I thought for sure there would be a repudiation of Democrats and a Republican tide.
With the crisis in the cost of living (gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, food, rent, and so on), the rising murder and crime rates in our largest cities, a flood of more than 4 million people illegally crossing our southern border, and the growing anger over schools indoctrinating our children with radical values, I expected a wave of opposition.
And in fact, (to make things more complicated) there was a Republican wave. According to the Cook Political Report, Republicans had 6 million more votes for the House than Democrats. These votes did not translate into a surge of seats because districts are tightly gerrymandered and many Democrat incumbents hung on by narrow margins.
The Cook Political Report estimated that Republicans got 52.3% of the vote for the House compared to 46.2% of the vote for Democrats. That 6.1% margin was greater than the 2.5% generic Republican advantage from the average of the national polls just before the election.
As someone who has been involved in campaigns since 1958, this is a surprisingly confusing outcome. The gloom hit a lot of Republicans as the results came in as a red trickle instead of a red wave. Frankly, I briefly joined them in a more somber attitude. Then my wife Callista, who served as chief clerk of the House Committee on Agriculture and knows the House well, turned to me and said, "a majority is a majority."
That realism was strengthened by the Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s chief attorney, Machalagh Carr, who rightly said the speaker’s gavel doesn’t come in small, medium and large. There is only one speaker’s gavel – and it transfers all the power from Nancy Pelosi to Kevin McCarthy.
The biggest single change coming out of the 2022 election will be the shift from a hard left Democrat Party House to a conservative Republican Party. This change will affect everything from spending, to investigations, to committee actions, to what bills move.
As a former speaker of the House, I know that a strong speaker can achieve remarkable results. In this last Congress, Speaker Pelosi passed trillions of dollars in spending and radical social policy bills with a mere five-vote majority. A new Speaker McCarthy can implement a remarkable number of changes and set the stage for a totally different pattern of governing.
The other big outcome was the enormous success of Republican governors.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ re-election was the most obvious example of dramatic change in a state. Florida had been competitive in 2018 when DeSantis won by only 32,463 votes. After four years of conservative, confrontational and remarkably successful leadership, he won re-election by 1.5 million votes. Four years ago, he lost the largest county, Miami-Dade. He carried it decisively in 2022. He also carried the Latino vote. Now, with four years of the DeSantis administration, Florida has been realigned as a Republican bastion.
The challenge for Republicans is to learn what led this election to be the least predictable election in my lifetime. They also must think through a clear, positive program that creates a vivid alternative of workable, doable solutions that solve the American people’s problems. This should represent 90% of their effort.
The Commitment to America was a start, and I promoted it everywhere. But it didn’t become the center of the campaign the way the Contract with America did in 1994. The 75% who said America is on the wrong track want to know what Republicans will do to get America on the right track. McCarthy made a start in this direction, but the party system never drove it home and made it vivid.
The Republicans should spend 10% of their time on serious thoughtful investigations (not show trials or baseless mock hearings). The American people have the right to know about the corruption, dishonesty, inefficiency and law breaking that have occurred while Democrats had complete power.
The Democrats have a totally different problem. In 1994, the size of the GOP victory led President Bill Clinton to admit that their leftwing policies had been repudiated. After that, he went to the Congress and said, "the era of big government is over." Working with Clinton, we passed welfare reform, the largest capital gains tax cut in history, telecommunications reform, Food and Drug Administration reform, and ultimately four straight years of a balanced budget paying down the national debt. (This was the only time in modern history the budget was balanced for four straight years.)
This year, because the Republicans did not have the massive win that was expected, the Democrats will not be alarmed or inclined to change. But they should be. President Joe Biden was clearly self-satisfied during his hour-long press conference the day after the election. He seemed certain that there was nothing that needed to change. He offered to work with Republicans – but promptly pointed out he has a veto pen and can kill any bill he doesn’t like.
The 75% of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track aren’t on the Democrats’ radar because they did not translate into losing House and Senate seats. The Democrats have 23 Senate seats up in 2024. The Republicans have only 10. Many of the Democrats are in increasingly Republican-leaning states such as Montana and West Virginia.
If the Democrats relax because they dodged the bullet of an unhappy public, they may be in worse shape for the 2024 elections than they would have been if the Republicans had won big and forced them to course correct.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has already said publicly he believes it will take 6% unemployment to break the back of inflation. That would double the current unemployment rate. President Biden cleverly got big corporations to hold off on announcing layoffs until after the election. That probably helped in 2022. However, it also will make the economic pain bigger for 2024. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta (the company that owns Facebook) will lay off 11,000 people was the beginning of what may be an avalanche of pink slips laying off people.
The radicalism in the schools will continue to frighten parents and anger most Americans.
The border will remain open and illegal immigrants, drug cartels and fentanyl will continue to pour into America.
This will set the stage for a decisive presidential choice in 2024.
To view online: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/after-midterm-election-challeges-democrats-republicans