The tug of war for America, by Greg Sheridan.
Donald Trump may be about to drive his revolution of Western politics on to an entirely new level. If at next Tuesday’s mid-term elections Trump’s Republicans retain their majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, it will be an even more astonishing and perhaps even more consequential victory than Trump’s initial stunning upset in winning the presidency in 2016. …
The polls are pretty adamant that the Democrats will probably win the House, like the Republicans did with Obama in 2010.
The Senate, however, is crucial. It is a smaller and much more powerful chamber, perhaps the most powerful deliberative legislative chamber in the world. Above all, the Senate confirms senior appointments, especially Supreme Court justices, and ratifies treaties.
Not only that, the Senate is elected in an especially odd way. One-third of its number is elected every two years. Purely by chance, Republicans this year are defending only a handful of vulnerable Senate seats. Most of the senators up for re-election are Democrats. Therefore, this election favours Republicans in the Senate. …
The media have overplayed their hand:
All that hysterical Trump-derangement syndrome outpouring has proven to be remarkably ineffective as a way of opposing Trump. Polls show that nearly half of Americans believe the mainstream media is campaigning against Trump. They are right. It’s not only that most of the US media have abandoned objectivity, they’ve abandoned proportion. …
Watching CNN yesterday, I saw a news report begin with the news reader saying: “In a rambling, factually challenged speech from the White House on Thursday, President Trump promised to crack down on an immigration crisis which does not seem to exist.”
As the TV equivalent of a newspaper opinion column, that would be fair enough. As the comment of a panellist discussing Trump, that would be fair enough. But for it to lead a news bulletin is ridiculous. …
Trump’s style neuters political correctness:
Many Americans are distressed by the hate-filled, low-rent quality of political rhetoric today. But they rightly see Trump as no worse than his opponents. And, of course, many Trump supporters love his combativeness.
Serious political analysts can see a significant, almost structural, consequence of the Trump style. It deprives the Democrats and their culture warrior allies of their political correctness weapon.
Because Democrats, purveying identity politics, cultivate the idea that everything is offensive and Republicans should be always apologising, they can often secure, especially from a complicit media, an assumed if false moral superiority to Republicans. Trump’s verbal aggression, while at times unattractive, has had the effect of diminishing the effectiveness of this pseudo-moral blackmail. …
The economy:
You cannot gainsay the Trump economy unless you are completely indifferent to facts. There may well be debt and deficit problems ahead, but Trump has turbocharged US economic growth to better than 3 per cent. Unemployment is down to an almost unbelievable 3.7 per cent. African-American unemployment is at almost record lows. Productivity across the economy is sharply up. And, at last, wages are growing strongly, 3 per cent in the year just gone and accelerating. …
If a naturally popular figure such as Clinton or Ronald Reagan oversaw economic numbers such as that, the approval rating would be stratospheric.
It is also the case that this economic boom is not unrelated to Trump’s policies. He didn’t just luck on it. He has cut corporate tax rates, cut business regulation including environmental regulation, secured better deals on trade and takes a wholly pro-business approach. Republicans would always argue that the best form of welfare is a job. Trump even seems to be making some political headway with African-Americans. …
A structural re-alignment of the electorate is occurring, because the new left are the party of the rich and have mainly abandoned the working class:
A populist leader often holds a false promise for established parties. The support melts away when the populist leaves the scene. But the Republican Party is doing everything it can to convert these Trumpers into long-term Republicans. This speaks to the deeper transformation of US politics, which pre-dated Trump. The poorest states, and many of the poorest districts, now vote solidly Republican. The richest states, and many of the richest districts, now vote Democrat.
Just as nationalism once trumped Marxism, now it is trumping liberalism. The Republicans have captured a bunch of the white working class and the white poor living in rural areas. If they can extend that reach to black and Hispanic working-class voters, they will become much more formidable. …
Gone are the days of supine Republicans — fighting works!
The other transformation Trump is pioneering, and that may yet have quite doleful consequences, is that he is showing that political aggression works. At the height of the controversy over whether now Justice Brett Kavanaugh was guilty of uncorroborated and highly questionable allegations of sexual misconduct many decades ago, almost every mainstream commentator in the US assumed this would hurt Trump and hurt the Republicans, especially among women. …
Overall, Trump’s ratings rose during that period, and when the Kavanaugh matter was at its most intense, the generic advantage for congressional Democrats almost disappeared.
The enthusiasm gap disappeared, too. Voting is not compulsory in the US and in the light of the Kavanaugh controversy, Republican voters were suddenly as enthusiastic as Democrat voters. And Kavanaugh united virtually all Republicans. …
Trump personally made the decision to go aggressive on Kavanaugh. His political judgment was superior to that of the pundits and to many of his advisers.
Read it all.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
