As of this writing, uncertainty reigns in the democratic primary as party voters weigh the risks and rewards of an unabashedly left Bernie Sanders candidacy, a moderated tone of Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Blumberg, or the hope of resurgence by Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden. With more than nine months to go until the election, it’s obviously way too early to start prognosticating about the next one. So here goes:
For progressive democrats, there is a compelling contrarian take on November’s big day, no matter who the nominee. Maybe they should hope to lose.
Hear me out. If it is substantial policy changes that progressives want more than the moral victory of beating Trump, there is a strong case to be made that patience is a virtue. Partisan sorting has welded local and national politics together such that congressional races can be extrapolated further and further into the further. While our hyper-partisan era may strain our democratic institutions to the breaking point, the upshot is that election forecasting is increasingly predictable. If, as Ezra Klein and others have argued, even Democrats hoping to deescalate the partisan tit-for-tat in Washington and institute compromise-seeking reforms – reforms like ranked-choice voting or the return of earmarks – should aim to do so through the power of simple majorities in congress. To that end, Democrats may need to embrace one longstanding feature political parties in majoritarian systems: the tactical retreat.
By losing in 2020, democrats odds of winning the presidency in 2024 rise markedly. Incumbent presidents have won seven out of the last ten elections in which they were on the ballot. On the other hand, the same party has kept control of the White House for three consecutive terms only once since 1948. Given such a small sample size, those figures should be taken with a big dash of salt. These odds amount to a 30% probability of unseating an incumbent president versus a 94% probability of defeating the incumbent party when no incumbent is on the ballot. Therefore, absent other factors, these two figures would give Democrats much better chance of unseating the incumbent party in 2024 than 2020. It is exceptionally difficult for a party to win three consecutive terms in office, even in the best of circumstances. Though it rings strange to some progressive ears, Republicans may have reason to fret that Donald Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2024. His successor – Mike Pence? – will almost certainly be blander than Trump himself and it is hard to imagine anyone else in the party turning out the base like Trump does. Democrats haven’t done it since FDR despite their presidents’ generally leaving office with high approval ratings. Republicans succeeded only once in the modern era.
There is a more speculative reason Democrats may prefer a term-limited Trump to a defeated Trump. In the latter scenario, Trump may no longer be president, but he surely won’t be going anywhere. Trump would be free to launch the media empire he had planned on creating after what seemed to be his inevitable loss in 2016. The incoming president would have to contend with a never-ending assault of disinformation flowing from Trump and his surrogates who, win or lose come November, will be just as loyal to him as they are now. No substantial shift has taken place in the right-wing media ecosystem to knock Trump off his alt-right pedestal. True, Trump’s brand is bound up with “winning” and a loss might scrape his veneer a bit. And republican party elites will momentarily breathe a sigh of relief as they attempt to fix the fractures Trump left in their party. But a substantial share of Republican voters will likely take Trump’s defeat as proof that he was right all along; that Washington elites would never accept him; that the deep state or voter fraud robbed him of his rightful second term… you get the point.
Further, while a loss in November might relegate a normal person to early retirement, it’s not clear that Trump would take it that way. Campaigning for president might be the most lucrative business venture of Trump’s life. Without the barrier of a term limit, nothing would stop Trump from reentering the Republican primary in 2024 and very possibly winning it again. Would party dynamics have shifted so substantially that another Republican challenger could stand a chance against the Trump wrecking ball? Possibly, but the smart money says otherwise. And even if he loses, why would he stop? We could be dealing with a Trump campaign in 2028, 2032, and on and on until Don Jr. takes up the mantle. In the nightmare scenario, rather than to the Trump presidency, a democratic win in November would just mean a delay of his second term. At the very least, all future presidents can look forward to a powerful media apparatus led by a former president whose popularity with his base has yet to be tarnished.
Let’s imagine the realistic situation facing a democrat who wins in 2020. Democrats chances of retaking the senate are tenuous. Based on Fivethirtyeight’s partisan lean index, even a reasonably optimistic D+6 night in November (just a hair higher than the average national generic ballot lean at the time of this writing) will result in a best-case scenario where Dems fight the GOP to a draw. Dems have the unhappy task of defending Doug Jones’ R+ +26.8 seat in Alabama and, although they are defending safe seats in other races, their pickup opportunities are minimal. Main and Colorado are getable targets and they have fighting odds in North Carolina, Indiana, Arizona, and Georgia but beyond those six states anything short of an exceedingly unlikely D+12 night leaves the rest of the senate safely in GOP hands. This leaves a likely scenario in which Democrats control between 48 and 52 seats come November 4th. If they win the presidency and reach a draw in the Senate, Democrats will have the Vice-President as a tie-breaker but they will lack any mandate to pass the kind of ambitious policy agenda that most progressives, moderates and even most Trump voters say they actually want.
The anti-Trump wave of 2018 spared democrats what could have been a catastrophic loss in the senate had Hilary Clinton won in 2016, given that year’s map and the tendency of incumbent presidents to lose seats in the midterms. The 2022 map is different. Democrats have potential pickups in Georgia, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The only competitive races for Democrat-held seats are likely to be in Colorado, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all of which have been tending blue in the predictably partisan post-recession era. But having a Democrat in the White House would blunt the impact of this favorable map as sentiment inevitably turns against the president’s party. Rather than picking up as many as seven seats in swing states, democrats will be lucky to hold on to their narrow majority. And 2024 would be even worse. Including the independents who caucus with them, Democrats will have to defend 23 seats versus Republicans’ 10.
The GOP steadily chipped away at Democrats’ brief filibuster-proof majority with which they began the eight years of Obama’s presidency. There is good reason to imagine the same would happen to Republicans’ much smaller majority over the course of a bitterly divisive eight-year Trump presidency. This especially true given the second reason Democrats might be relieved at a 2020 loss: it’s the economy, stupid.
With each passing fiscal quarter, the chances of recession rise. Trump’s economic agenda, like the agenda of George W. Bush before him, is predicated on short-term stimulus at the expense of safety net programs. Seen a bit more cynically, Republicans may know full well that running up deficits during while cutting social spending during times of high employment is likely to set their successors up for economic instability tying their hands to address it. While we are not likely to face a mortgage crisis on the scale of 2008, the Trump-era federal reserve has kept interest rates at record lows and contributed to a corporate debt binge and a severely constrained ability for the government to actually address a recession when (not if) one comes along. Thus, any recession arriving in the next few years is much more likely to be more protracted than it might otherwise be.
The election of, say, Bernie Sanders with his (to some) intimidating Democratic Socialist title may be enough to spook retail stock investors and initiate a long-overdue market pullback. While that is not something to worry about in itself, the agglomeration of economic risk-factors accrued since 2009 may be enough to spark a larger economic downturn. These include the fed’s free-money-for-everyone interest rates; the GOP’s stimulus-in-boom-times tax-cut; the trade war; restrictive immigration rules preventing both high-skilled immigration and low-wage migrant labor from entering the country; purging of recession-proofing social benefit programs; not to mention the looming possibility of Britain failing to reach trade deal with the EU next year. Taken together these factors make a recession in the next four years look plausible if not outright likely. No one knows when a recession will hit, but we do know that when one arrives, the current administration’s policies have already kneecapped the ability of the federal government to effectively deal with one.
If Trump’s economic policies run their course over a full eight-year term, he and the GOP will be on the hook for dealing with the consequences of the recession these policies partially caused. If a democrat wins in 2020, infuriating as it is, Republicans will lay the blame squarely at the feet of progressive policies – whether or not any of those policies were actually enacted in the first two years of the next presidential term. This argument is and will be made in bad faith, but in the midst of even a modest economic crisis it may sway enough persuadable voters, energize enough apathetic conservatives, or dampen turnout among moderates to thwart democrats’ 2022 senate aspirations.
Rather than a blowout for democrats in 2024, which Trump fatigue could well offer if he wins a second term, a democratic president could find herself spending four years as a lame duck, one-term president. This means that a hypothetical democratic successor to Trump, someone who we know will be branded a socialist no matter who it is, will have to approach the presidency with, at best, a 50-50 split congress. Goodbye Green New Deal. Goodbye Medicare for all. Goodbye right-to-vote. Goodbye reforming the courts.
On the other hand, a loss in November could prove a Pyrrhic victory for Republicans. Democrats will probably gain in the senate no matter the top-of-the-ticket outcome. Four more years of running against Trump would help Dems consolidate a majority in the senate. Going into 2024, it might be Republicans who are left holding the bag when Trump’s house-of-cards economic policies predictably crumble. Democrats, and especially the Left, might enter 2024 with the energy and momentum not seen since 2008.
This is not to say four more years of Trump is something to look forward to. He will have the chance to appoint one, two or even three (!) more Justices to the Supreme Court. He will further delay action on climate change perhaps beyond the point of no return, even we aren’t already there. It will mean four more years of needless persecution of and suffering by the most vulnerable members of our society. He will continue to erode norms, values, and institutional checks against corruption to a degree that makes our democracy unrecognizable. Trump, his family, and his acolytes will continue to enrich themselves through the power of his office and at the expense of American interests. America’s reputation in the world, already tarnished, will probably never be recovered. Accordingly, I will still be voting for a Democrat in November.
Even accepting the above arguments it’s not clear what, if anything, Democrats should actually do about it. Obviously, no one will (or should) intentionally lose a presidential election in hopes of waiting for a better map down the road. But keeping 2024 in mind as the real target might at least impact how Democrats allocate their resources. It might also affect the kinds of campaigns that down-ticket candidates run, knowing that a certain distance from the eventual Democratic nominee is likely to be an asset two years from now.
No matter the outcome in November, progressives should at least take heart in the knowledge that history’s wheel keeps turning and sometimes for the better. With a popular mandate, a democratic congress could undue much if not all of the damage of Trump’s time in office. With control of congress Democrats can reform the courts and nullify the impact of Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court gambit. By tearing down our institutions so thoroughly, Trump offers democrats the chance to reform our government with a suite of anti-corruption legislation and campaign-finance reforms. And a convincing 2024 win for Democrats could finally give progressives the chance to enact the sweeping climate-change and infrastructure package that has been the holy grail leftist policy wonks for a decade. No matter the length of his tenure, all of Trump’s policies can be undone if there is the political will for it. We should remember it was the collective fallout of George W. Bush’s catastrophic eight-year tenure that led to Barack Obama’s election and the first true healthcare reform in generations. Was the one worth the other? Possibly not. But four years is not so long a stretch in the arc of history. If four more years of a nightmare is what it takes to build the country we deserve, so be it.
Sean Lawrence is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.