Democrats really should not be celebrating right now.
I once had a coach tell me that the greatest athletes in their sports hate to lose more than they love to win. Guys like Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, and Tiger Woods were always in the gym at 6:00 AM (or earlier), even the day after winning a championship.
Say what you will about Mitch McConnell, but he is the best player of the game, certainly in my lifetime, and possibly ever. If you’re like me, you’d prefer that politics not be played as a game, but our idealism has long been out of vogue in DC, and has become laughably naive since Citizens United.
It is what it is, and McConnell is a master of it.
Because of this, my liberal friends celebrating the Georgia run-off wins from last night should cut their championship celebrations short, and get to the gym. It’s well past 6:00 AM, and I promise McConnell has already been there for hours.
The Georgia wins are a guarantee of nothing, and pretending otherwise would be stupid. Even with the Georgia wins, the future is very uncertain. I’m gonna run through three things Democrats really need to start thinking about right now if they want these wins to mean anything.
CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS
With 50 Senators and the Vice Presidency, the Democratic Party now has a majority of seats, but this does not automatically mean a majority of votes.
Because ideological purity is less of a prerequisite for Democrats, the number of conservative or moderate Democrats is far larger than the number of moderate Republicans.
If you read that and thought, “well, maybe the Democrats should require more purity tests the way Republicans do,” you are setting yourself up for a black eye. This type of purity test would lose Senate seats for Democrats in a number of red states, the same way the purity tests for Republicans lost them Senate seats in AZ, CO, and a number of other moderate blue states over the last few decades. There are simply fewer blue states than red states, so Democrats cannot afford to require this purity. But, I’m getting ahead of myself; all this belongs in thing two.
Think about liberal items in terms of the reelection of this list of Senators:
Joe Manchin, West Virginia
Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona
Angus King, Maine
Jon Tester, Montana
Gary Peters, Michigan
Chris Coons, Delaware
All of these are conservative or moderate Democrats from states that don’t appreciate woke liberalism. Gary Peters just won his reelection in Michigan in November, squeaking out a win by just 1.7 percentage points: 49.9% to 48.2%. That’s right, he didn't even win half the votes. This is a man who cannot afford to go squad in his state.
For Democrats to pass anything they likely have to go 6/6 on these Senators. While we’re at it, add President-Elect Joe Biden to this list. He’s not exactly a bastion of wokeness either.
Think about it. Can Chuck Schumer really hold all six of these Senators on the Green New Deal? Medicare for All? Aggressive financial and banking reform? Election reform? Banning Semi Automatic weapons or long guns? It’s a long shot at best. Instead, liberals will have to settle for much smaller victories that these Senators can all sign off on, and Joe Biden will be much happier to deliver. More likely policy achievements are:
A $12 minimum wage (yes, I’d bet on $12, not $15. Even that’s the high end of the possibility, assuming they start out with the $15 approach and negotiate aggressively)
Reversal of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which remains deeply unpopular, and really didn’t help anyone but the wealthy, anyway.
Maybe moderate gun legislation that would not ban any guns. Policies like expanded background checks, more mental health screenings, body armor bans, waiting periods, or smart guns.
Student debt help, thought likely not as much as liberals would want.
More aggressive antitrust enforcement (my personal favorite).
Infrastructure spending, including on renewable energy (but this is also less certain because coal still rules in West Virginia).
This is not a comprehensive list, but you get the idea. Nobody should expect a Democratic majority to deliver a liberal utopia. Even getting a judge to the left of Merrick Garland approved might be difficult, and Garland really isn’t all that liberal.
THE 2022 MIDTERMS ARE NO GUARANTEE
Here is the map of the Senate seats up for election in 2022, with the colors representing the incumbents party.
If that looks like a safe map for Democrats, you and I live in different political worlds.
Like I mentioned, McConnell is already going to work for 2022. He may retire in 2026, so having a few more years as Senate Majority Leader—the only thing he has ever actually cared about—means more to him than anything else other than not losing.
Rev. Warnock will have to defend his seat in Georgia in 2022, as will Mark Kelly in Arizona, because these were both special elections to fill empty seats, and their normally scheduled elections both occur in 2022. McConnell will also surely be targeting these states, and other potentially vulnerable states like Nevada, and New Hampshire. For Democrats, the Republican Senators retiring in Pennsylvania and North Carolina present good opportunities, and a Republican is up for reelection in Wisconsin, where they already have one Democratic Senator, Tammy Baldwin.
Two years is a lifetime away in terms of elections, and there is no telling what will happen. It could be that voters are still motivated to punish Republicans for Trumpism (this might depend on how much Trumpism there is left in two years, but i’m getting ahead of myself again), or it could be that voters are angry at President Biden after two years of Fox Newsing his policies. We really don’t know.
These will also dictate whether or not the turnout among Democratic voters is as high as it was in 2020. Typically, it is not so high in midterms, but perhaps that will be changing now that there is more energy among liberal voters after seeing the impacts of not voting in 2020.
Luckily for Democrats, Stacey Abrams might be the only person who can out-work McConnell for the 2022 election in Georgia, but that still leaves questions unanswered for the other states that could be close races.
No liberal or Democrat should discount the likelihood that McConnell becomes Senate Majority Leader again in 2022. It’s too early to give any good odds, but anyone who tells you it’s much different than 50/50 is probably fooling themselves. If that happens, McConnell will kill the entire agenda from Democrats, just as he did with Obama.
WHAT HAPPENS WITH TRUMP?
The way I see it, there are three distinct possibilities with Trump and Trumpism. We know his ego is too fragile to ever accept defeat gracefully, but his own potential legal liability—even if only at the state level, should he pardon himself—might mean he needs to flee the United States to save his own skin.
So, the three possibilities are (obviously): 1) Trump wins control of the Republican Party, 2) Trumpism loses, 3) Trumpism assimilates into the Party.
For Mitch McConnell, believe it or not, Trumpism assimilating is the best possible scenario.
These 2020 elections cannot be mistaken as anything other than a reaction to Trump. Trump lost the suburbs, biggly. He lost ground with elderly voters, women, college educated voters, and pretty much every other demographic that wasn’t white non-college educated men. He made some small gains with Latino and Black men, but not large enough to offset his losses, and these gains did not seem to hold in the Georgia runoffs last night. This may mean that only Trump himself, and not Trumpism, can hold these gains; it is also unclear whether someone other than Trump could mitigate his losses among the other demographics.
If Trumpism wins control of the Republican Party, through TrumpTV and radical Trumpists dominating primaries, they will face the same difficulties in 2022 they face now. The worst case scenario for McConnell is Trump, who is now a legal resident of Florida, deciding to run against Marco Rubio in a primary. Rubio had initially chosen not to run for Senate in 2016, but chose to after losing the Presidential Primary. He may not even have the drive to fight Trump in an ugly “little Marco” primary. Even if he does, who’s to say he could win.
If Trump is running for Senate in 2022, likely under the strategy that he will make himself Majority Leader and make McConnell irrelevant, voters might end up being just as motivated as they were this year. Even if he doesn’t run, and tries to play grand master from Mar a Lago, voters might still reject him, and the Trumpist Republican Party.
If Trump loses control of the Republican Party, it also seems unlikely that he will go peacefully. If McConnell, whom he now despises, cannot convince him to act in the party’s best interest, rather than his own, Trump might just start his own party. Honestly, if Trump wins control of the Party, Bill Kristol and Ben Sasse might just start their own party anway. Either way, the effect would be the same. Even if the two parties have a combined majority, it is likely a 1912 presidential election situation. Teddy Roosevelt and incumbent President William Howard Taft ended up splitting the Republican Party vote, and Woodrow Wilson won easily.
When Roosevelt was persuaded to run, despite a Republican in the White House, he said “I am sure he means well, but he means well feebly, and he does not know how! He is utterly unfit for leadership and this is a time when we need leadership.” Sounds an awful lot like Trump, doesn't it?
The Trump party would do really well in the current Congress, but that may not be the case after redistricting takes place later this year. What seems clear is that a split vote between Republicans and Trumpublicans likely ends up with Democrats winning almost everything.
So, McConnell’s best case scenario is to come to some sort of gentleman’s agreement with Trump, say lots of prayers that Trump keeps it, and assimilate Trumpism into the Republican Party permanently. This is still not ideal (Trumpism just dying all together would be the best outcome for McConnell, but that is not likely in the short term), but it is the best McConnell can hope for. It might be an uphill battle, but McConnell only needs a net gain of one seat in 2022.
And he is the best that has ever played the game.
If I were a Democrat, I would be back in the gym right now. And I would be doing whatever Stacey Abrams tells me to do. Liberals are not likely to get what they want out of the Senate because they have to pull six conservative Democrats along with them. But, it is already time for the celebration to be over.