Next Phase

I'm curious as to what lessons the Republican Party will take away from their carpet-bombing at the hands of nationwide Democrats last night. As I understand American politics, the likely answer is "None." They, after all, realize that Democrat candidates will have made any number of promises that they're not in a position to keep on their own (candidates for Congress fall into this trap all the time). As long as Republican members of  Congress feel that the "Make American Great Again" activist class will still punish them for any apparent disloyalty to the President and the Trumpist project, the Legislative Branch will be a graveyard for any bill that promises major change, and voters have historically had very little patience for the realities of legislating (or governing more broadly, for that matter).

And so the likely outcome is that Congressional Republicans will obstruct where they can, and rely on the President to Veto things where they can't. Because they still have a base of voters for whom the Democrats aren't simply the Opposition; they're Evil. And while they don't want the country to fail, they also can't see how the Democrats can succeed without the country failing. And as far of those voters are concerned, the problem is with everyone else. (Take Representative Greg Steube {R-Florida}, who claimed that: "Instead of standing firm on our principles, you have governed out of fear, continually knelt to the moderates in our conference (who all got crushed last night anyway), and discarded conservatives like me who warned of last night’s results." I'd like to know what "moderates" he was referring to, given how thoroughly the Republican party managed to purge anyone who refused to salute anything that President Trump hoisted up the flagpole.)

Thus, the cycle will continue.Because the Democrats aren't going to be in the business of selling the difficult choices that will be needed for long-term improvement any more than the Republicans were. And so the promised quick fixes will fail to materialize. The Democrats won't be willing to alienate their core voters in a futile attempt to reach out to people who don't support them any more than the Republicans did. And so expect them to hope that situations that benefit their base, but bother the public at large, will just go away (regardless of how poorly this strategy has worked in the past). Which means that the Democrats will manage to alienate many of the people who voted for them, perhaps for the first time, before the next Presidential election.

Back in 2012, the Republican party created a post-mortem after Mitt Romney's fail bid to unseat President Obama. By 2016, it was being ignored, and the victory of Donald Trump seemed to vindicate that decision. Losing in 2020 didn't change any outlooks, and again 2024 appeared to back that play. But now the standard midterm change in the political tide seems worse than usual, so maybe people will take a second look at what may have gone wrong. But, given the history of such things, I doubt it. Politics seems to be more attached to what's familiar than it is to what might work, because a good number of voters are, too.