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View Full Version : Larry Sabato on the Democrats' strategy



pjohns
03-31-2017, 04:59 PM
Larry Sabato is one of my favorite political analysts. Along with a few others--e.g. Charlie Cook and Stu Rothenberg--he is truly excellent at analyzing political matters, in my opinion.

Sabato, personally, has a center-left perspective. At least, so I have heard. (For the record, I am center-right.)

But he does not allow his personal beliefs to intrude upon his analysis. (In fact, since he occasionally appears on Fox News as a contributor, it may seem evident that he is not a mere apologist for the left--or even the center-left.)

I receive his newsletter once a week (every Thursday), via e-mail.
Anyway, here is his most recent one:

"It’s been nearly a week since the Republican plan to dramatically alter the Affordable Care Act died without a vote in the House of Representatives. It’s 84 weeks until the next national election, the 2018 midterm.

"So saying anything with confidence about how, if at all, the GOP’s failure to pass its American Health Care Act affects the next election is difficult. It may be that Republicans actually dodged a bullet: While Democrats still can and will attack members who backed the bill in committees, the GOP’s inaction on health care may mean that the next election is about some other issue. That may be a blessing for the ruling party from a strictly political standpoint. (Then again, Republicans may circle back around and find some way to enact a health care plan before they face the voters again. That’s impossible for anyone to analyze until the details are unveiled -- if we ever see another plan at all.)

"But at the very least, Republicans have some explaining to do to their base. Nearly every Republican candidate running for federal office over the last four cycles (2010-2016), Trump included, has emphasized at length the need to 'repeal and replace' the ACA ('Obamacare'). The party won three of those four elections, taking the House from the Democrats in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and finally the White House in 2016. Given the power to actually do something about the ACA, Republicans couldn’t even get their repeal/replace bill through the House, where they could have afforded more than 20 GOP defections even without a single Democratic vote. Philip Klein, managing editor of the Washington Examiner and a conservative health care expert, wrote a piece in the aftermath of the House’s failure to act headlined 'GOP cave on Obamacare repeal is the biggest broken promise in political history.' Without necessarily signing on to Klein’s ambitious but defensible assertion, we can say that the GOP certainly talked a big game on dumping the ACA and then, at least for now, didn’t deliver when they hypothetically had the ability to do so. While there may be political benefits to inaction, namely ducking blame for the potential loss of coverage that millions of people could have suffered as a result of the GOP’s alternative, failure on a major legislative priority isn’t a good look. The GOP had so many years to produce an Obamacare replacement and ended up with a bill that satisfied hardly anyone (certainly not anyone on the left, and not that many on the right, either). No wonder it fizzled.

"Midterm elections, where national turnout is typically around 40% as opposed to a presidential election’s 60%, are often about enthusiasm. The party out of power is frequently more fired up to turn out, and Republicans have to be worried that by failing to roll back the ACA after promising, ad nauseam, to do so, their own base might be less inclined to show up next year. Again, that’s a long way off, and some new issue could be animating voters in the fall of 2018.

"President Donald Trump never seemed to fully embrace the AHCA, but he did try to sell it, mostly unsuccessfully, to wary Republican House members. He and his administration made little effort to enlist Democrats or the general public in the effort, though. In fact, Trump seems eager for an alternative solution. He hopes the ACA will wither so he can pin its failure on the Democrats, who passed it during the Obama years but, at least partially as a result of Obamacare, currently control none of the levers of power in Washington. 'The Democrats will make a deal with me on healthcare as soon as ObamaCare folds - not long. Do not worry, we are in very good shape!' Trump tweeted Monday.

"But if history is any guide, Democrats will believe they have zero incentive to deal with Trump on much of anything. And that’s not just because their own base extremely dislikes the president and is urging maximal defiance of his proposals.

"As the University of Maryland’s Frances Lee ably argues in her recent book, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign, both parties have been moving away from bipartisanship for decades. That’s particularly true when they are in the minority in both chambers and do not hold the White House, which is where the Democrats are now. Prior to 1980, Democrats had held both the House and the Senate for almost the entirety of the previous five decades. As Lee notes, Republicans didn’t really believe they could win the House or the Senate for much of that time, nor did Democrats truly believe they could lose them. Republicans, therefore, tried to work within the system to influence the majority party’s policies instead of truly trying to take control. That changed in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House and Republicans surprisingly won the Senate for the first time since a brief, two-year period of narrow control from 1953-1955. That gave House Republicans hope they could eventually win the House, and it presented Senate Democrats with the challenge of trying to win back control of the Upper Chamber. Indeed, 1980 ushered in a new era of two-party congressional competition, and House and (especially) Senate control have flipped several times apiece since then. Throughout the 1980s, both minority caucuses came to the conclusion that heightening the contrast with the majority caucus was a better path to winning a majority than working with the majority.

"This means prioritizing politics over policy.

"That effect is amplified when one party is in a minority in both houses and does not hold the White House, because that party can credibly claim it bears no responsibility for anything that happens in Washington. This dynamic helps explain why Republicans didn’t support Democratic efforts to change health care in the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency (an attempt that failed) or the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010 (it eventually passed without any Republican support). It also explains why Democrats made no attempt to cooperate with Republicans in their attempt to change Social Security in 2005 or to change Obamacare through the American Health Care Act last week. Not only were these bills anathema to the minority party, but the minority party also reasoned that there was more political upside to unconditionally opposing those bills instead of trying to influence them. That means they either block the legislation if possible or, if it passes, they can say that they did not support it if problems emerge.

"In other words, both parties are heavily invested in the other party’s failure as a means of winning back a legislative majority, and have been for some time. This logic is summed up by an assessment made by then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) after Barack Obama took office, as reported by journalist Alec MacGillis from a conversation he had with the late Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) and noted by Lee:

"'We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s "Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that." And we wait for the time when the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on.'

"Democrats have now come to the conclusion that obstruction is preferable to cooperation, a finding reached by other minority parties for the past few decades. That Republicans are hardly making any effort to find common ground with Democrats only makes their decision easier, but even if Republicans were moving to the middle in an effort to attract Democratic support, the Democrats still would likely see no benefit in cooperating.

"Trump can try to blame any problems with health care on the Democrats. Perhaps he would succeed, although Democrats can argue that they have no power in Washington and that Trump and the Republicans have not really sought their input (at least to this point, save for a couple of Trump tweets). And beyond the difficulty of Trump trying to convince the public he is a passenger when the public views any president as the driver, this seems like a hard sell for a chief executive who does not have broad support.

"While specific polls vary greatly, and without forgetting the failure of many polls in 2016, Trump’s approval rating is poor overall. According to three major approval averages (RealClearPolitics, HuffPost Pollster, and FiveThirtyEight), Trump’s rating is barely over 40% and his disapproval is over 50%. Again, the midterm is a long way away, but those are the kinds of negative approval numbers we’ve seen from presidents who have suffered big midterm setbacks."

In short, Sabato says that the midterm elections are looming (in just over a year-and-a-half); fewer voters come out for the midterms (about 40 percent of registered voters) than come out for presidential elections (about 60 percent); therefore, most Democrats have come to the conclusion that it is more important to fire up their leftist base than to reach out to independents (who are probably more centrist).

Comments?

NapRover
03-31-2017, 06:51 PM
Sad that the way to win is to make the other side fail. Trump's OJT needs to get on a faster track. His team needs to advise him better, can't afford more train wrecks like the ACA debacle. On the other hand, he's doing good things for the economy, should have some popular SCOTUS decisions, and should be on higher ground in foreign relations, assuming our enemies get the drift that we're tired of getting pushed around.

texan
03-31-2017, 11:12 PM
I like Larry as well. He was completely wrong on the election so there is that! Now this is not normal times and if Trump continues to make changes that help the economy, look good for manufacturing jobs, and help the blue dogs and working men the dems are screwed. The times are changing.