Can Donald Trump Save GOP From Massive Defeat in 2018?
“The New Deal has been halted,” The New York Times decreed on November 10, 1938, two days after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered a crippling defeat in a midterm congressional election. “TAXPAYERS REVOLT,” the accompanying headline said.
Roosevelt had campaigned vigorously for candidates who supported his progressive policies, which vastly expanded federal powers to lower unemployment and beat back the Great Depression. His message to voters: Obstructionists and “outspoken reactionaries” in Congress—in particular those from his own party—had to be expunged for the good of the Republic.
Voters’ message to Roosevelt was no more ambiguous than his to them. “This is a democracy and it is healthy to have a strong opposition,” a small-town minister from Indiana lectured the president in a letter. “No man is always right. You need criticism for your own good.” Democrats lost 72 seats in the House of Representatives and seven in the Senate, and though they kept control of both chambers, anti–New Deal legislators were ascendant, their conservative factions invigorated by victory. Roosevelt would remain president for seven more years, but most of that period would be occupied by World War II. As the Times predicted, the era of freewheeling liberalism was over.
Presidents dread midterm elections, which come two years into their term. A sitting president can expect to lose, on average, 33 seats in the House and two in the Senate. Some have lost much more: Frustrated with the corrupt administration of Ulysses S. Grant, voters in 1874 handed 96 House seats to Democrats. Twenty years later, voters displeased with Grover Cleveland’s handling of the Panic of 1893 rewarded Republicans with 116 House seats. The scope of that differential has not been surpassed since.
Barack Obama’s first midterm, in 2010, was also a dark night for the Democratic soul. Although Democrats managed to keep the Senate, Republicans powered by the Tea Party movement won 63 House seats, in what Obama acknowledged was a “shellacking.”
Some believe that an Obama- or even Grant-sized loss awaits President Donald Trump when he faces his own midterm test on November 6, 2018. His average approval rating for the first year in office, 38.4 percent, is the lowest in American history. Whether maligning the FBI for investigating his presidential campaign or threatening North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on Twitter, defending a senior aide accused of hitting his wives or berating immigration from “shithole” countries, Trump has shattered every expectation of how a president should behave. Some people are thrilled, convinced that only a singular figure like Trump could rescue the moribund institutions of the federal government, in large part by breaking them. But judging by his popularity, or lack thereof, many more are mortified.
Democrats are accordingly preparing to make the midterm election such a devastating referendum that Trump’s presidency never recovers. They believe they can not only win the House but even retake the Senate, where conditions are more challenging but not insurmountable. Were they to fully seize control of Capitol Hill, Democrats could perhaps fulfill a dream liberals have yearned to realize since the wintry morning of January 20, 2017: the impeachment of Trump and his subsequent removal from office.
“The left is going to show up,” warned Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, in a recent speech. He is facing a resilient challenger in Beto O’Rourke, an energetic Democrat who has been raising more money than Cruz. “They will crawl over broken glass in November to vote.”
Whether the GOP can win in ’18 remains a matter of vigorous debate, as does the just-as-important question of what message Republicans hope to win on. Trump, however, doesn’t seem especially worried about the glass-crawlers. “I have a feeling that we’re going to do
