Republicans, are you tired of winning yet?
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 9, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. CDT
A
presidential election is like a barometer, which has been defined as an
ingenious device that reveals the kind of weather we are experiencing. In case
your dismay about the dilapidation of the nation is not yet commensurate with
the valid reasons for dismay, consider four things about the 2020 election:
The
world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the United States, is floundering at
the elementary task of managing the mechanics of voting — printing,
distributing and counting ballots — in a presidential election the date of
which has been known, or at least knowable, for 175 years,
since Congress in 1845 first designated Election Day as the first Tuesday after
the first Monday in November. The world’s oldest political party, the
Democratic Party, is having difficulty sounding sincere and unconflicted in
affirming the world’s oldest political desire, which is for security from
violence, particularly that of mobs. The other party that has framed the
nation’s two-party competition since 1856 has
been reduced to hoping that this presidential election will be the third in six
elections that the Republican nominee wins while losing, as President Trump
certainly will, the popular vote. (In the last seven presidential elections,
1992-2016, the Republican candidates’ largest share of the popular vote
was 50.7 percent in 2004.)
And the best election outcome that can reasonably be expected will show
that about 4 in 10
voters have watched almost 46 months of this president’s
allotted 48, and want 48 more.
If they
get their wish, the nation will get, for the first time,
a fourth consecutive two-term presidency. Only twice before have there been
three consecutive two-term presidencies, the third, fourth and fifth (Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe), and the 42nd, 43rd and 44th (Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama). The reasons that a second Trump term
is unlikely — the reasons he probably will be the fourth elected incumbent (not
including Gerald Ford) in the past 100 years to be denied reelection (Herbert
Hoover, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter) — include:
Democrats
want the election to be a referendum on Trump, and the Republican convention
cooperated. In 1983, the British Labour Party’s 39-page manifesto (platform),
chock-full of socialism, was called the longest suicide note
in history. This year, in history’s shortest — 14 words —
suicide note (“RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will
adjourn without adopting a new platform . . .”)
Republicans said: Trump is all that we are.
Trump
has made himself toxic in what he calls our “beautiful suburbs.”
Forty-nine percent of the votes cast in 2016 came from suburbia.
Any
campaign’s two principal assets are money and the candidate’s time. Trump’s
campaign will have to allocate a lot of both to five states, with 89 electoral votes, that he carried relatively
comfortably in 2016:
Iowa (by 9.4 points), Ohio (8.1 points), Arizona (3.6 points), Texas (9.0
points), Georgia (5.1 points).
By
mid-October, some endangered Republican Senate candidates will begin a delicate
pirouette: They will try to devise an anodyne vocabulary with which to urge
voters to elect them so that the Senate will remain in Republican control and
can temper the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch. The candidates’ challenge
will be to urge this without making Trump enthusiasts, whose support these
candidates need, even more enraged than such enthusiasts are when they get up
on the wrong side of the bed, which they do daily. Republican candidates made a
comparable argument in 1996, when it became clear that Clinton was going to
defeat Sen. Bob Dole. Republicans gained two Senate seats while Dole lost by 8.5
points in the popular vote.
Mike
Bloomberg has found $100 million in
his sofa cushions and will spend it on Biden’s behalf in
Florida. Progressives, who think U.S. politics is polluted by “billionaires”
and “big money,” are silent about Bloomberg’s naughtiness, perhaps because
their grief about it has rendered them speechless.
Trump,
whose reading of constitutional law has convinced him that Article II, properly
construed, means “I have the right to do
whatever I want as president,” has now taken to speaking reverently
about “law and order.” “Nothing,” wrote George Orwell,
“is gained by teaching a parrot a new word.”
Joseph
Stalin — like God, in the book of Genesis — looked upon his work and saw that
it was good. Hence Stalin’s March 2, 1930, Pravda article “Dizzy with Success.” Trump told Americans they
would get tired of all the winning he had in store for them. They are indeed
tired. Promises made, promises kept.
