Machiavelli Would Have Loved This Year’s Midterms

Machiavelli Would Have Loved This Year’s Midterms

Trump may not be on the ballot, but he will be on everyone’s mind.

By Thomas B. Edsall NY Times

The stakes — already sky-high — for both the Trump administration and the Democratic Party in the coming congressional elections have been raised even higher by the struggle over the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

Not only will the outcome be interpreted as a renunciation or vindication of the Trump presidency, it will also determine whether Democrats have recouped since the 2016 disaster and where the balance of power within the Republican Party lies.

Should the House change hands (a likely prospect) and possibly the Senate (much less likely), President Trump’s exposure on two potentially inflammatory subjects will be exponentially greater. Congressional hearings and investigations will display to the public the tangled web of Trump’s financial, real estate and tax dealings, and his relationships with, and payoffs to, women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The November election will also determine whether the regulatory decisions of executive branch agencies, especially the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, are subject to critical review.

Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are already armed with 64 subpoena requests on subjects running from Russian election interference to foreign payments to the Trump organization to charges that the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services withheld documents on the Trump administration’s child separation policy.

If Elijah Cummings of Baltimore, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, becomes chairman, he will no longer make requests to hold committee hearings and write letters asking for subpoenas. He will schedule hearings and issue subpoenas.

The determination of Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee to take on Trump and demand that the Treasury Department turn over his tax filings will be reinforced by the disclosure of a long history of Trump family tax evasion in The Times this week.

As long ago as Feb. 28, Bill Pascrell, Democrat of New Jersey and a member of the Ways and Means Committee, issued a statement asking,

What financial ties exist between Trump and Russian oligarchs? Is the Trump family susceptible to bribery or blackmail? What are Trump’s conflicts of interest as he offers new proposals on taxes and foreign policy? The American people deserve answers and Congress must follow the money. No longer can congressional Republicans reject transparency in order to politically protect the president.

To date, Trump and his cabinet appointees have been able to operate without fear of review or oversight by a compliant Republican House and Republican Senate.

Democrats have vowed that this will end if they win a majority in either branch. Democrats “will not shy away from standing up to President Trump and conducting oversight,” Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic House whip, told CNBC in August.

Control of the House committees would empower the Democrats to focus public attention on both cabinet-level scandals and unpopular administration decisions that have been displaced from front-page coverage and evening newscasts by Trump’s incessant controversies.

Take the House Natural Resources Committee. Democrats on the committee recently warned the administration and committee Republicans of what they will do if in the majority. “The Republican majority on the House Natural Resources Committee has spent the last 18 months wasting taxpayer time and money,” the Democrats declared. Republicans “have managed to ignore almost every important environmental issue we face.

Committee Democrats plan to put a spotlight on one cabinet member who has largely, though not completely, avoided the spotlight:

The Republican majority has ignored the fact that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is the most ethically challenged member of the Trump administration — they haven’t held any oversight hearings on his tenure, which has featured more than a dozen formal investigations by the DOI inspector general, the Office of Special Counsel and other watchdog agencies.

House Education and Workforce Committee Democrats have a long list of challenges to policies adopted by Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, including her decision this summer to abandon an Obama-era regulation requiring for-profit colleges to prove that students get adequately paying jobs after graduation.

In a Sept. 18 letter, Bobby Scott of Virginia, the ranking education committee Democrat, challenged DeVos’s decision to weaken regulation of “predatory” practices at for-profit colleges “pedaling high-cost, low-quality degrees and credentials.”

In a paper delivered at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston, Gary Jacobson, emeritus professor of political science at the University of California-San Diego, declared:

Long-term political trends and the public’s reaction to Donald Trump’s surreal presidency are converging to make the 2018 midterm elections the most sweeping and divisive national referendum on any administration at least since the Great Depression.

Of the political analysts I contacted, Jacobson was the most emphatic in his view that the coming election is of momentous significance.

In an email he said, Voters will decide between two starkly different futures — that envisioned by Trump and his white nationalist and religious conservative allies and another that is best typified by Obama’s legislative and regulatory legacy.

In the paper he gave in Boston, Jacobson wrote:

If the Democrats win control of the House, it will be read, accurately, as a clear repudiation of Trump’s presidency, for they can only do so by winning a large enough majority of votes cast nationwide to overcome the Republicans’ formidable structural advantage. It will put Democrats in a position to challenge, check, and investigate the Trump administration for at least the next two years, precipitating disputes between Congress and the White House at least as fierce as during the Obama presidency after 2010.

Conversely, if Republicans retain their majorities, it will, in Jacobson’s view, “confirm once and for all that the Republican Party is now Trump’s party” and congressional Republicans “will continue to ignore, downplay, or excuse behavior that by a Democratic president would provoke torrents of outrage and demands for impeachment.”

Trump in fact agrees with Jacobson on the significance of the election.

At a rally Saturday evening in Wheeling, W.Va, the president declared:

A lot of what we’ve done, some people could say, all of what we’ve done, is at stake in November. Always fragile. We are just five weeks away from one of the most important congressional elections in our lifetimes. This is one of the big, big — in other words, that’s true, I’m not running but I’m really running.

And what about “this horrible, horrible radical group of Democrats?” They “are determined,” Trump continued,

to take back power by using any means necessary. You see the meanness, the nastiness, they don’t care who they hurt, who they have to run over in order to get power and control. That’s what they want is power and control, we’re not going to give it to them.

On Wednesday night, Trump, after mocking Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi on Tuesday, doubled down on the idea that the Kavanaugh nomination was a political winner:

Wow, such enthusiasm and energy for Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Look at the Energy, look at the Polls. Something very big is happening. He is a fine man and great intellect. The country is with him all the way!

There are some intriguing twists.

Frances Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, argues that from a political rather than policymaking point of view,

2018 is more important than any election since 1994, when Republicans finally ended the seemingly permanent Democratic majority and ushered in a new era of two-party competition for control of Congress.

Lee notes that “Trump frames the 2018 elections to a truly remarkable extent,” not only as the bête noire of the Democratic Party but as the overwhelmingly dominant force within the Republican Party.

This phenomenon, she writes, became evident in the 2018 Republican primaries, which “featured contests between candidates competing among themselves as to who could be most loyal to the president, with Trump’s endorsement deciding the outcome in a number of cases.”

Lee points out that because of Trump’s centrality and his role in

redefining the Republican Party around questions of ethno-nationalism, if Republicans retain control of Congress, even by a narrow margin, it will be an enormous vindication for the president and will further cement his recasting of the Republican Party around issues of national identity.

Lee makes the case that Whether Republicans win or lose in 2018, Trump is likely to gain a firmer grip on the Republican Party after 2018 than he currently has. Never-Trump Republicans have had to either renounce their former apostasy or retire from office. And to the extent that the party loses seats, those losses will heavily come from the party’s moderate wing, leaving behind a more pro-Trump Republican Party in Congress.

Lee is on target as far as Republicans in Congress go, but Trump’s status in the party at large, in the event Republicans lose control of the House, Senate or both, is less certain.

If the outcome of the 2018 election amounts to a rejection of Trump, it will open the door to those hungry to challenge him in the 2020 Republican primaries, including — but by no means limited to — John Kasich, the governor of Ohio.

David Robertson, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, observed in an email that a Republican loss of the House “would reduce Republican control over taxes, spending, trade, and a host of potential policies of interest to the Republican coalition of business and religious conservatives,” and would also

diminish the president’s influence with some Republicans inside and outside of Congress, and stoke interest in a primary challenge in 2020. Finally, Republican donors will question the return on continued investment in President Trump and his re-election.

Like Lee, Leonie Huddy, a political scientist at SUNY-Stony Brook, sees a parallel between 1994 and 2018. She pointed out in an email that.

Congressional acrimony directed at a president of the other party in 1994 will be even worse in 2019 if Democrats win the House. Trump is more unpopular among Democrats in 2018 than Clinton was among Republicans in 1994.

Huddy described a likely agenda for Democrats once in control of the House:

Step 1 is likely to be a subpoena for Trump’s tax returns. But there is a slew of other financial issues that could generate investigations and hearings, including whether proceeds from the Trump D.C. hotel violate the emoluments clause of the constitution, and more generally whether the Trump family is profiting in various ways from the presidency. Trump’s personal life is another likely topic of investigation. Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. These accusations are also likely to generate hearings and investigations.

David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell, agreed with many of his colleagues that a “Republican victory will be interpreted as a validation of its more aggressively ethnonationalist wing,” and that “a defeat will be interpreted as a setback for them and for Trump.”

Still, Bateman, voiced caution.

I don’t see the midterm elections arresting the progress of an otherwise successful political program or overthrowing the ascendant faction of the Republican Party or even throwing the party into disarray — I expect they will quickly regroup, with a more coherent and right-wing caucus and without the burdens of making choices that come with being the majority party.

A Democratic victory, Bateman continued,

will impose some new constraints on Trump, but probably not enough to render him a spent force unwilling to run again (or unable to win) in 2020, let alone disarming his more dangerous tendencies over the next two years.

Many of the most vulnerable Republicans are part of the more moderate wing of the party, as are many of those retiring. As they depart, Bateman notes, the hard right becomes more powerful within the congressional wing:

White Christian nationalism has long been an important part of the coalition, and not only is it not going anywhere but the party’s losses will probably make it more rather than less well-represented in the party.

While Bateman argues that the Trump wing will be fortified within the Republican Party regardless of the outcome in November, Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, argues that the future of the party’s Trump wing hinges on the election.

“For the Republicans, it’s a fight over the definition of and power within the party,” Ansolabehere wrote in an email. If Republicans retain control of the House, “it will be taken as an affirmation of the Trump G.O.P. agenda. Trump’s wing within the G.O.P. will be further strengthened.”

Conversely, if Democrats win the House, Ansolabehere expects them to inflict “death by 1000 cuts” on the Trump administration:

I would look for a lot of oversight hearings to be conducted, dragging every department secretary into office to be accountable for what they have done over the past two years. Especially the Environmental Protection Agency.

The 2018 election, Ansolabehere noted, “feels like a test of whether Democrats are really competitive with the Republicans or if 2006 and 2008 are just exceptions.”

While Trump’s name is not on the ballot this year, there is no question that his presidency is driving the election. In a September survey, 66 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters told Pew that their midterm congressional vote would represent a vote against Trump, and 48 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said their vote would be a vote for Trump.

Trump has thrived in a political climate best described as tribal warfare. As Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenki, both political scientists at Stanford, explained earlier this year:

While partisan animus began to rise in the 1980s, it has grown dramatically over the past two decades. As partisan affect has intensified, it is also more structured; in-group favoritism is increasingly associated with out-group animus. Finally, hostility toward the opposing party has eclipsed positive affect for one’s own party as a motive for political participation.

The conflict between Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has sharply exacerbated polarization and made the midterms more unpredictable. Democrats continue to hold a lead over Republicans in polls of generic voting, but that lead dropped in the two most recent surveys, according to compilations by RealClearPolitics. The website shows a drop of 2.5 percentage points in the generic ballot test, which has fallen from an 8-point edge in the previous four surveys conducted in late September to a 5.5-point edge in the two surveys conducted in early October.

To complicate things further, the fight over Kavanaugh may have different consequences in the fight for control of the House and the Senate.

On Sept. 26, Pew reported a gigantic 26-point gender gap in congressional voting intentions — men saying they plan to vote for Republican candidates 48-45, and women saying they will vote for Democrats 58-35. Democrats in the House are geared up to capitalize on the broadening disparity in the political preferences of men and women. They have fielded strong female candidates in many suburban districts where well-educated women will be an important counterforce to the many men enraged by what they see as the Democrats’ unconscionable treatment of Kavanaugh.

In the Senate races, however, the Kavanaugh nomination poses problems for Democrats, especially those running in red states — Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill, Bill Nelson and Joe Donnelly — who have declared their opposition to Kavanaugh, despite strong support for the Supreme Court nominee among conservative voters.

At the same time, newly reported evidence suggests that Trump should worry about his domination of the Republican Party and that his hold on the party is less secure than his favorability ratings among Republicans suggest.

On Monday, the Chicago Council on Global affairs released a survey that was subsequently analyzed by Dina Smeltz, a senior fellow at the Council, at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage site.

Smeltz found that Republican respondents fell into two categories: “Trump Republicans” who hold very favorable views of the president and make up 55 percent of Republican voters and “Non-Trump Republicans,” whose view of Trump is “only a somewhat favorable or unfavorable.” They make up 44 percent of Republican voters and differ sharply with Trump Republicans on key issues.

For example, pro-Trump Republicans oppose NAFTA 68-30, while non-Trump Republicans support the agreement 61-34. In the case of the Paris climate accords, 59 percent of non-Trump Republicans said the United States should participate versus 34 percent of Trump Republicans.

In an expansive question on a goal of foreign policy, the Chicago Council asked if “it is more important to be admired than feared.” A solid 71 percent of non-Trump Republicans picked admired over feared, while 58 percent of Trump Republicans said it is more important to be feared.

This recalls the famous Machiavelli passage from which the Chicago Council’s question is adapted — which will, in a sense, also be on the ballot in November:

whether it is better to be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved. The reply is that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt. And the prince who has relied solely on their words, without making other preparations, is ruined, for the friendship which is gained by purchase and not through grandeur and nobility of spirit is merited but is not secured, and at times is not to be had. And men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.