Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  When action moved to the Electoral College, the same debate played out: Should the electors act as trustees or as delegates? If electors pledged to Trump were to break out of their commitments to vote for a different (and, by their lights, better-qualified) candidate, would they be heroes or traitors? The history of pledged electors was a much longer one, going back to the nation’s third presidential election. But even here, the original conception was arguably grounded in a different ethos that saw the electors as respected and knowledgeable members of their communities who would put a damper on demagoguery and other negative byproducts of popular election. As we have seen, in the end, the arguments for trustee electors fell on deaf ears. The laws of twenty-nine states operated to prevent defections, as did the deeply entrenched predominant democratic ethos of that system, enunciated in 1796 by a Federalist voter from Pennsylvania who wrote a letter to the Gazette of the United States complaining about an elector pledged to John Adams who voted for Thomas Jefferson instead: “What, do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be president? No! I choose him to act, not to think.”28 Once such norms are widely accepted, it is not easy to undo them; the electors of 2016 had a difficult time acting independently of their party pledge in part because not one of them had been elected to serve as respected and knowledgeable members of their communities whose job was to exercise independent judgment and put a damper on demagoguery. On the contrary, every one of them had been elected as part of a party slate, whose individual names did not even appear on the ballot—elected with the understanding that they would loyally support the nominee of their party. Altogether, though scholarly arguments have been heard for forty years about the importance of restoring the parties as intermediary institutions capable of counterbalancing the candidate-centered nature of the current nominating system, voters showed no sign at all of sympathizing with that argument, or even understanding it. The cultural shift that would be required to have allowed Ted Cruz to win on the second ballot of the Republican convention or a spate of faithless electors to hand John Kasich a win in the Electoral College—and to have those results accepted as legitimate—is enormous, and very difficult at this point to imagine. For the foreseeable future, we will be riding the tiger of plebiscitary democracy.

  POLITICS AND POLICY

  The political conversation that began the day after Election Day was radically different than what most observers had foreseen. They had expected Democratic triumphalism, the confirmation of the “coalition of the ascendant,” accompanied by a blizzard of Republican recriminations. (Did Trump lose because the Republican establishment didn’t back him? Because Ted Cruz didn’t endorse him soon enough? Because his campaign was not technically proficient? Or just because he was singularly unqualified and ill equipped to be president?) Instead, Republicans tried to make sense of an unexpected victory and began grappling with the implications of a mostly conservative party led by a populist outsider who sometimes sounded like a New Dealer. Democrats were the ones forming a circular firing squad.

  The first, most obvious political result of the 2016 election was that Barack Obama’s legacy was shattered. Both Obama and Clinton had framed the election as test of that legacy, an opportunity for Americans to continue the course of the previous eight years. The election resulted in more than a win for Donald Trump. Given results nationwide, it could reasonably be seen as a broad victory for the Republican Party. Most voters said they wanted change, and there could be little question that they would get it. Obamacare was going to be on the chopping block, though getting agreement among Republicans on how to replace it would be challenging and would expose Republicans to serious political risks. A spate of controversial Obama executive actions would doubtless be reversed in short order. The entire thrust of tax and regulatory policy would change, replacing Obama’s emphasis on redistributionism with a new focus on growth. Obama’s climate change policy would be altered, probably dramatically, and defense and foreign policy would be put on a new, more nationalist basis, though exactly how would play out gradually. Obama’s chance to shape the Supreme Court was lost as well; the Scalia seat would likely go to another conservative. Because Trump was ideologically amorphous, one could not predict a consistently conservative outcome, but one thing was clear: Obama progressivism, which was not ideologically ambiguous and whose standard-bearer had become Hillary Clinton, had been stopped in its tracks, at least for the time being. Republicans would have opportunities for conservative policymaking at least until 2018, if not beyond.

  Victory always smooths over a party’s internal contradictions for a time. Republican divisions, deep and intense, had been exposed to the world as recently as a few weeks before Election Day, when dozens of GOP leaders abandoned Trump in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape. On November 9, those divisions were submerged but hardly resolved. Trump’s election night speech promised, before anything else, a one-trillion-dollar infrastructure program, and it was clear that he would be continuing his attack on free trade. At the same time, he moved to appoint not only a cabinet of outsiders but also what David McIntosh of the Club for Growth called “the most conservative [cabinet] since Reagan’s”29 and reiterated his plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and rescind a number of controversial Obama executive orders, making conservatives happy. When supply-side guru Stephen Moore met with congressional Republicans shortly after Election Day and told them that the conservative party of Ronald Reagan had been replaced by the popu-list working-class party of Donald Trump, many were shocked, but some accepted that Trump was now the pacesetter.30 If President Trump pushes for his own version of the stimulus package that every Republican member of the House opposed in 2009 or pushes to remove the United States from free trade agreements (like NAFTA) that more Republicans than Democrats voted to enact, Republicans in Congress will have to decide whether they are members of Reagan’s or Trump’s party; when Congress moves to limit entitlement programs or send aid to Ukraine, Trump will have his own challenges. Republicans who belatedly embraced Trump in victory will also face a diffi-cult decision if he should bring a less sanguine outcome in the 2018 elections or if he should prove himself not up to the task of governing.

  In the summer of 2016, National Review contributor Dan McLaughlin posited two tests for whether the Republican Party was becoming Trump’s party in substance. One was whether key GOP figures Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and John McCain, who embodied an alternative vision of their party, were defeated in their primaries by their openly Trumpist challengers; the other was whether Trump ran ahead of “normal” Republicans in Senate races in November.31 As it turned out, Ryan, Rubio, and McCain all won their primaries handily, and most GOP Senate candidates ran ahead of Trump in November. McLaughlin assumed that Trump would lose in November; his victory meant that the traditional GOP would have to coexist with Trump, and perhaps even bend to him in unpredicted ways. On the edges of the party remained Evan McMullin, hoping to build a new conservative movement and continuing to duel with Trump by the medium of Twitter. The future of conservatism was not necessarily synonymous with the future of the Republican Party, and conservatives ranging from McMullin to the Weekly Standard and the National Review were thinking hard about what of Trumpism could be tolerated and what had to be opposed. In other words, what, going forward, would become the core of conservatism, the non-negotiable elements? And would those elements consist only of certain policies or include tests of character or conduct? On these matters, there was no consensus. However, even in the worst case, the Republicans’ day of reckoning was put off for a while.

  Democrats, however, were thrust at once into unexpected disarray. Like all minority parties, they would have to decide when (if ever) to accommodate the new president and when to obstruct him. More important for the long term, they would have to decide whether to tack further to the left or move toward the center. In the primary season, Democrats’ heads were with Hillary, but it was clear their hearts were with Bernie. The
leading candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee was Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, one of only two members of the House to support Bernie Sanders early in his campaign. However destructive the party’s march to the left had become, there was not in late 2016 any organized force within the party either able or willing to divert it. Even if Clinton had won, there was no recognizable remnant of 1990s centrist Clintonism surviving in the Democratic Party—not on welfare, not on the budget, not on crime or abortion. “Safe, legal, and rare” had been replaced with “safe, legal, and taxpayer-funded up until the last second of pregnancy.”

  There was a debate, nevertheless, about whether this course was advisable. Some in the party argued that 2016 was a fluke, and that no future adjustments were necessary. The coalition of the ascendant would become unstoppable within a few years. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi commented, “Well, I don’t think that people want a new direction.”32 When House Democrats reelected her as their leader, they seemed to agree. Others on the center-left declared that 2016 showed Democrats that they needed to redirect a stronger appeal to working-class whites, or even that they had become dangerously contemptuous of the great middle of the country and needed to reform their attitude before they could compete effectively. Some analysts suddenly declared that it was Democrats who had an emerging Electoral College problem. Democratic congressman Tim Ryan, who unsuccessfully challenged Pelosi for her leadership position, observed on national television that “we’re not even a national party anymore.”33 How Democrats choose to address this debate will be an important question in American politics for at least the next four years. In the further future, without a change of course by Democrats, the prospect looms of the first openly socialist major party in U.S. history.

  More generally, the Trump phenomenon had the potential to cut across the traditional party coalitions. Though they did (barely) hold onto this group in 2016, Republicans ran the risk of forfeiting their hold on white college graduates; Democrats’ hold on the white working class, already weakened long before 2016, was further endangered. During the campaign, Trump also made a play for black votes that could be redoubled, and might even bear a little fruit. If the Democratic share of the black vote were to fall from 90 percent to 80 percent, a number of blue states could tip into the red column or be made more competitive.

  A related question that bears watching is whether party polarization would continue growing or would recede. In 2016, Donald Trump had it both ways: he benefited from near-unity among Republican voters while running as a “post-ideological” outsider disconnected from the official Republican Party. Shortly after his election, there were signs that he would continue to gain from automatic party loyalty divorced from a substantive philosophical understanding of what the party stands for. Polls showed that since July 2016 there had been a dramatic change in the perceptions of Vladimir Putin by Republican voters, and in the opposite direction by many Democrats. Republicans had become much less unfavorable toward Putin and Democrats more unfavorable.34 The party tribes were sticking together, even if doing so required them to be malleable about what they believed.

  However the parties sorted out, politics in 2016 had become more vitriolic and more apocalyptic. The candidates’ supporters seemed further apart than ever, with large proportions of each camp holding the opposing candidate to be not only wrong or accountable for unsuccessful performance in office but also fundamentally flawed and unfit. This feature of the election campaign was doubtless strongly connected to the particular characteristics and background of the candidates themselves, which provided many sound reasons for sensible people to reach that conclusion, but that may not have been all that was at work.

  After Election Day, there was considerable talk about cocooning, the tendency of people to live in areas with like-minded people, working and befriending like-minded people, and receiving news from sources that are tilted toward their own point of view. Even Facebook algorithms dish up news stories that are compatible with the political tendencies of the reader. They are thus constantly reinforced in their political prejudices and have little interaction with alternative ways of looking at the world. A Trump voter who gets most of his news from the Sean Hannity Show on Fox News or the Clinton supporter who is tuned to MSNBC all day will find little to challenge their preconceptions and much to drive them further apart from each other.

  Cocooning, of course, was a trend closely related to the re-emergence of the partisan press, wherever it was found: on cable news television, talk radio, political blogs, social media, or even network TV and major newspapers. Altogether, according to a study by the Shorenstain Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, Donald Trump was treated negatively in 77 percent of the general election news stories about him, compared to 64 percent negative coverage of Clinton. Of ten major news outlets—ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and FOX television and the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today newspapers—FOX news was the most positive, with 73 percent of its coverage of Trump negative. The other nine outlets had at least 80 percent negative coverage of Trump. Fortunately for Trump, the last two weeks of the campaign were his best media weeks, with only two-thirds of the coverage negative.35 Conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson observed, “No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup—and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.”36 No one could offer a plausible remedy for cocooning, though in the long run it had the potential to threaten national unity, and perhaps even peace. Trump did, however, find a way around the hostility of the media, relying on demotic rhetoric and a straight-to-the-people campaign of tweets and rallies.

  At the same time, one of the factors driving social division over the last three decades has been the rise of an aggressive “multiculturalism” that makes identity politics, especially by minorities, the core of political activity. As a frequent critic of “political correctness,” it was clear from the beginning that Trump was a threat to this version of identity politics. Although it was clear what Trump was against, it was never quite clear what he was for: the end of identity politics or the creation of a new, counterbalancing identity politics. On the one hand, he emphasized citizenship and the nation. On the other, his obvious appeals to the white working class and his seeming lack of discomfort with the support of white nationalists led many to suspect that he was engaged in a new form of identity politics catering to that identity group. His attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel as unable to give him a fair trial because he was a “Mexican” was little more than a warmed-over reverse application of Critical Race Theory, long popular in elite law schools, to the case at hand. The expectation nourished by the left that identity politics could remain unidirectional forever, encouraging everyone but whites to obsess about race, was always a risky gambit. While Trump was debating with himself, Democrats began a debate over whether their future lay with a doubling down on their version of identity politics or a move in a different direction.37 A great deal in American society and politics will depend on which Trump emerges in the White House and which argument prevails among liberals. Among other things, given demographic trends, the long-term viability of the Republican Party may depend on which approach Republicans choose; liberal identity politics aimed at minorities showed its shortcomings in 2016, but a new version aimed at whites will likely have a short shelf-life in a country becoming less white by the year.38

  Of course, the importance of which President Trump emerges is true across a wide range of policy areas where candidate Trump gave conflicting guidance. On immigration, he began by promising to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants and ended by promising to deport the criminal element among them, an estimated 2 million. On terrorism, he began by threatening to cut off entry to the United States by all Muslims and ended promising to cut off entry by people coming from countries with a serious terror problem where “extreme vetting” could not be accomplished. On foreign policy, Trump seem
ed at once belligerent and isolationist; his trade and security proposals, if taken literally, had the potential to unravel seven decades of U.S. strategy forged in the aftermath of the Depression and World War II, strategy bred by lessons that had been learned at a terrible price. Smoot-Hawley and “America First” isolationism had not worked well in the 1930s. Yet Trump had made his name as a negotiator and might have been doing nothing more in the campaign than laying down markers, starting points for better deals. That Trump shifted during the campaign on some of his bedrock positions without losing the loyalty of his most enthusiastic supporters, and that his advisers saw him as “post-ideological,” demonstrated the limits of issue voting, even in the primaries where it is often thought to be crucial.

  Trump’s own inconsistency on policy, and certain apparent features of his character and temperament, will also be put to the test by events. It is statistically likely that the nation will experience a recession by 2020, regardless of the wisdom of Trump’s economic policy. Abroad, a number of potential time bombs are ticking, alongside the need—certainly from Trump’s point of view—to restore American credibility after the “red line” retreats of the Obama era. Although his favorability ratings climbed to the mid-40s after Election Day, Trump will have to face whatever crises emerge without the benefit of anything resembling a deep reservoir of affection and support from the American public. On the contrary, he entered office with historically weak ratings. Hillary Clinton, had she been elected, would have borne the same difficulty.