Im-Politic: Aftershocks

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abortion, African Americans, America First, CCP Virus, China, climate change, coronavirus, COVID 19, Democrats, election 2020, election 2022, election interference, establishment Republicans, Green New Deal, Hispanics, Hong Kong, House of Representatives, human rights, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Biden, mail-in ballots, mail-in voting, Mainstream Media, nationalism, polls, Populism, recession, redistricting, regulations, Republicans, Senate, social issues, state legislatures, tariffs, Trade, traditional values, Trump, Uighurs, women, Wuhan virus

I’m calling this post “aftershocks” because, like those geological events, it’s still not clear whether the kind of political upheaval Americans are likely to see in the near future are simply the death rattles of the initial quake or signs of worse to come.

All the same, at the time of this writing, assuming that the final results of Election 2020 will see Democratic nominee Joe Biden win the Presidency, the Republicans keep the Senate, and the Democrats retain control of the House, the following observations and predictions seem reasonable.

First, whatever the outcome, President Trump’s campaign performance and likely vote percentages were still remarkable. In the middle of a re-spreading pandemic, a deep CCP Virus-led economic slump that’s left unemployment at still punishing levels, and, as mentioned before, unremitting hostility from the very beginning on the part of most and possibly all powerful private sector institutions in this country as well as much of Washington’s permanent government, he gave his opponents a monumental scare. If not for the virus, the President could well have won in a near landslide. And will be made clear below, this isn’t just “moral victory” talk.

Second, at the same time, the kinds of needlessly self-inflicted wounds I’ve also discussed seem to have cost him many important advantages of incumbency by combining with pandemic effects to alienate many independents and moderate Republicans who backed him four years ago.

Third, the stronger-than-generally expected Trump showing means that, all else equal, the prospects for a nationalist populist presidential candidate in 2024 look bright. After all, how difficult is it going to be for the Republican Party (whence this candidate is most likely to come) to find a standard-bearer (or six) who champions the basics of the Trump synthesis – major curbs on trade and immigration, low taxes and regulations but more a more generous economic and social safety net, a genuine America First-type foreign policy emphasizing amassing of national power in all its dimensions but using it very cautiously, and a fundamentally commonsense view on social issues (e.g., recognizing the broad support of substantial abortion rights but strongly resisting identify politics) – without regular involvement in Twitter fights with the likes of Rosie O’Donnell?

Fourth, these prospects that what might be called Trump-ism will outlast Mr. Trump means that any hopes for the establishment wing to recapture the Republican Party are worse than dead. Ironically, an outsized nail-in-the-coffin could be produced by the gains the President appears to have made with African Americans and especially Hispanics. After Utah Senator Mitt Romney’s defeat at the hands of Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican conventional wisdom seemed to be that the party needed to adopt markedly more tolerant positions on social issues like gay rights (less so on abortion), and on immigration to become competitive with major elements of the former President’s winning coalition – notably younger voters, women, and Hispanics. The main rationale was that these constituencies were becoming dominant in the U.S. population.

The establishment Republicans pushing this transformation got the raw demographics right – although the short run political impact of these changes was exaggerated, as the Trump victory in 2016 should have made clear. But it looks like they’ve gotten some of the political responses wrong, with immigration the outstanding example. However many Hispanic Americans overall may sympathize with more lenient stances toward newcomers, a notable percentage apparently valued Mr. Trump’s so-called traditional values and pro-business and pro free enterprise positions more highly.

If the current election returns hold, the results will put the GOP – and right-of-center politics in America as a whole – in a completely weird position. Because the party’s establishment wing still figures prominently in its Senate ranks, a wide, deep disconnect seems plausible between the only branch of the federal government still controlled by Republicans on the one hand, and the party’s Trumpist/populist base on the other – at least until the 2022 mid-term vote.

Fifth, as a result, predictions of divided government stemming from Election 2020’s results need some major qualifications. These establishment Senate Republicans could well have the numbers and the backbone to block a Biden administration’s ambitious plans on taxing and spending (including on climate change).

But will they continue supporting Trumpist/populist lines on trade and immigration? That’s much less certain, especially on the former front. Indeed, it’s all too easy to imagine many Senate Republicans acquiescing in the Democratic claims that, notably, the United States needs to “stand up to China,” but that the best strategy is to act in concert with allies – which, as I’ve explained repeatedly, is a recipe for paralysis and even backsliding, given how conflicted economically so many of these allies are. As suggested above, the reactions of the overwhelmingly Trumpist Republican base will be vital to follow.

One reason for optimism (from a populist standpoint) on China in particular – Senate Republican opposition to anything smacking of the Green New Deal should put the kibosh on any Biden/Democratic notions of granting China trade concessions in exchange for promises on climate change that would likely be completely phony. Similar (and similarly dubious) quid pro quos involving China’s repression of Hong Kong and its Uighur Muslim minority could well be off the table, too.

Sixth, their failure to flip the Senate, their apparently small losses in the House, and disappointments at the state level (where they seem likely to wind up remaining a minority party) means that the Democrats’ hoped for Blue Wave was a genuine mirage – and looks more doubtful in future national contests as well. For state governments are the ones that control the process of redrawing Congressional district lines in (very rough) accordance with the results of the latest national Census — like the one that’s winding up. So this is a huge lost opportunity for the Democrats, and a major source of relief for Republicans.

Meanwhile, on a symbolic but nonethless important level, the aforementioned better-than-anyone-had-a-right-to-expect Trump showing means that the desire of many Democrats, most progessives, and other establishmentarians to crush the President (and other Republicans), and therefore consign his brand of politics and policy to oblivion, have been sort of crushed themselves. So it’s an open question as to whether they’ll respond with even more vilification of the President and his supporters, or whether they’ll finally display some ability to learn and seriously address legitimate Trumper grievances.

Seventh, as for Trump Nation and its reaction to defeat, the (so far) closeness of the presidential vote is already aggravating the nation’s continued polarization for one particularly troubling reason: A Biden victory aided by the widespread use of mail-in voting inevitably will raise charges of tampering by Democratic state governments in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Call it domestic election interference, and the allegations will be just as angry as those of foreign interference that dogged the previous presidential election. As a result, I hope that all Americans of good will agree that, once the pandemic passes, maximizing in-person voting at a polling place needs to return as the norm.

Finally, for now – those polls. What a near-complete botch! And the general consensus that Biden held a strong national lead throughout, and comparable edges in key battleground states may indeed have depressed some Republican turnout. Just as important – a nation that genuinely values accountability will demand convincing explanations from the polling outfits concerned, and ignore their products until their methodologies are totally overhauled. Ditto for a Mainstream Media that put so much stock in their data, in part because so many big news organizations had teamed up with so many pollsters. P.S. – if some of these companies are fired outright, and/or heads roll (including those of some political reporters), so much the better.

Im-Politic: More Evidence That Trump Should Really be Trump

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2018 elections, African Americans, Democrats, election 2020, establishment Republicans, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, Jacob Blake, Joe Biden, Joseph Simonson, Kamala Harris, Kenosha, law enforcement, Mickey Kaus, Obamacare, Open Borders, police shooting, race relations, regulations, Republican National Committee, Republicans, riots, RNC, Rust Belt, tax cuts, trade policy, Trump, Washington Examiner, white working class

Since the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, I and many of those who backed his election have been frustrated by his frequent support for and even prioritizing of issues and positions championed by orthodox Republicans and conseratives. After all, there was little reason to believe that he won the Republican nomination, much less the White House, because he was focused laser-like on cutting taxes and regulations or eliminating Obamacare. If that’s what either Republican or overall voters wanted, then you’d think that an orthodox Republican would have wound up running against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton – and triumphing.

One reason I came up with to explain the early burst of conservative traditionalism from Mr Trump (highlighted by a failed effort at healthcare reform and a successful full court press waged to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017) was his need to make sure that the establishment wing of his party stayed with him if he faced an impeachment.

His gambit worked, but even though the impeachment threat is gone, I still hear the President talking up the tax cuts and regulation thing way too much for my tastes. So it’s more than a little interesting to have just learned that, at least according to a report last week in the Washington [D.C.] Examiner, I haven’t been alone. (Or, more accurately, I and a handful of nationalist-populist analysts like Mickey Kaus haven’t been alone.) In this article, Examiner correspondent Joseph Simonson contends that some folks connected with the Republican National Committee (RNC) came to the same conclusion in the late summer and early fall of 2018. And just as important – their analysis came just before the GOP suffered major setbacks in that year’s Congressional elections after doubling down on conventional Republicanism.

Among the highlights of the report (whose existence the RNC denies):

>”Voter data from areas such as Kenosha County, Wisconsin, [we’ll return to this astonishing coincidence below] and other exurban communities, the individual said, showed a troubling trend. Although voters there very narrowly backed Trump in 2016, President Barack Obama’s margins were in the double digits in 2008 and 2012.”

>”Unlike members of Trump’s base, who can be trusted to vote for just about any Republican candidate, these voters feel no strong affinity toward the GOP. Moreover, the interests of those who live in communities such as Kenosha differ greatly from those who live in the Philadelphia suburbs in Pennsylvania.

“These Rust Belt voters favor stronger social safety nets and hawkishness on trade, rather than typical GOP orthodoxies such as lower tax rates and an easier regulatory environment for businesses. That is not to say these voters oppose those things, but the rhetorical obsession from GOP donors and members of the party do little to excite one-time Trump voters.”

>“Back in 2018 the general response to the report from others who worked at the RNC, said one individual, was, ‘well, we have socialism’ as an attack against Democrats and boasts about their new digital voter turnout apparatus.’”

>”Steve Bannon, the former aide to the president who was indicted last week on fraud charges, had viewed the same report a year ago and concluded that the upcoming election against Biden looked like a “blow out” in the former vice president’s favor.”

But let’s get back to the Kenosha point – which of course is unusually interesting and important given the race- and police-shooting-related violence that just convulsed the small city recently. It’s also interesting and important because the alleged report’s treatment of racial issues indicates that the authors weren’t completely prescient.

Specifically, they faulted the RNC for wasting time and resources on a  “coalition building” effort aimed at “enlisting the support from black, Hispanic, and Asian voters who make only a marginal difference in the Midwest and [that] can prove potentially damaging if more likely Republicans are neglected.”

Explained one person quoted by Simonson (and possibly one of the authors): “Lots of these people at the RNC are in a state of denial. The base of the GOP are white people, and that gives the party an advantage in national elections. You could not have a voter operation in California whatsoever, and it wouldn’t make any difference, but the RNC does because they don’t want to admit those states are lost forever.” .

Yet even before the eruption of violence in Kenosha (and too many other communities), this analysis overlooked a crucial reality: There was never any reason to assume that, in the Midwest Rust Belt states so crucial to the President’s 2016 victory and yet won so narrowly, that significant portions of the African American vote couldn’t be attracted without alienating the white working class. For both blacks and whites alike in industrial communities have been harmed by the same pre-Trump trade policies strongly supported by his chief November rival Joe Biden and many other Democrats. (For one example of the impact on African Americans, see this post.) Moreover, among the biggest losers from the Open Borders-friendly immigration policies now openly championed, instead of stealthily fostered, by the Democratic Party mainstream, have been African Americans.

It’s not that the President and Republicans had to convince massive numbers of African Americans with these arguments. A few dozen thousand could be more than enough to make a big difference this fall. And there’s some polling data indicating that the strategy was working even before the opening of a Republican convention that featured numerous African American speakers.

Now of course we’re post-the Jacob Blake shooting by Kenosha police and the subsequent rioting and vigilantism. We’re also post-the Biden choice of woman-of-color Kamala Harris as his running mate. Will those developments sink the Trump outreach effort to African Americans and validate the 2018 memo’s arguments?

Certainly the Harris choice doesn’t look like a game-changer. The California Senator, you’ll remember, was decisively rejected by African American voters during the Democratic primaries. I’m less certain about the Kenosha Effect. On the one hand, Mr. Trump has expressed precious little empathy for black victims of police shootings. On the other hand, he has villified the rioting and looting that are destroying the businesses – including African-American-owned – relied on by many urban black neighborhoods in cities that have long stagnated, at best, under Democratic Mayors. And this poll I highlighted a few weeks ago presents significant evidence that most African Americans have no interest in fewer police on the streets where they live.

It’s not hard to imagine a Trump campaign message developing over the next two months that strikes a much better balance. And an early test case looks set for tomorrow with the President’s planned visit to Kenosha. Somewhat harder to imagine is Mr. Trump significantly downplaying issues like tax and regulatory cuts, and ending Obamacare. As for his priorities if he wins reelection? At this point, the evidence is so mixed that I feel clueless. So stay tuned!

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Middle Class Meg?

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Democratic National Convention, election 2020, establishment Republicans, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Hewlett-Packard, Jobs, Joe Biden, Meg Whitman, offshoring, STEM workers, tech jobs

“Joe Biden…has a plan that will strengthen our economy for working people and small-business owners. For me, the choice is simple. I’m with Joe.”

– Former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, one of four leading Republicans chosen to speak on opening night of the Democratic National Convention, August 17, 2020

“The IT services market has continued to change and put more pressure on HP to reorganise its operations, for instance by increasing the proportion of its services workforce in lower-cost, offshore centres to 60 per cent.”

–Then Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, September 15, 2015

(Sources: “Former GOP gubernatorial candidate Whitman endorses Biden at DNC,” by Carla Mainucci, Politico, August 17, 2020, https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/17/former-gop-gubernatorial-candidate-whitman-endorses-biden-at-dnc-1309809 & “HP to slash up to 30,000 jobs ahead of split,” by Richard Waters, Financial Times, September 15, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/ff029c82-5bec-11e5-a28b-50226830d644 )

Im-Politic: After Mueller/Barr, Can Trump Be Trump?

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America First, Attorney General, Betsy de, budgets, conservatism, conservatives, establishment Republicans, foreign policy, globalism, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, Kevin McCarthy, Obamacare, Populism, Republicans, Robert Mueller, Ross Douthat, seasonal workers, Special Counsel, Special Olympics, tax cuts, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, Trump-Russia, visas, William P. Barr

A week ago, I posted on the likely political impact of the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of what have become known as the Trump-Russia scandals and of the release of Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary of its principal conclusions – which appear to put these charges and the threat of presidential impeachment they created behind Mr. Trump.

Now it’s time to think about a related and at least equally important subject: the policy effects. They could be profound enough to redefine the Trump presidency and the chief executive’s chances for reelection – even though the early indications seem to be saying exactly the opposite in ways that are sure to disappoint much of Mr. Trump’s political base. Here’s what I mean.

Ever since his administration’s opening months, I’ve believed that Mr. Trump’s policy choices have been strongly influenced by impeachment fears. Specifically, (and I have zero first-hand knowledge here) because President Trump feared that the Democrats and many mainstream Republicans were after his scalp, he concluded that he needed to appease his remaining allies in the latter’s ranks with policy initiatives they’ve long supported even though they broke with his own much less conventional and more populist campaign promises. 

In other words, it was the Russia and related scandal charges that were preventing “Trump from being Trump.”  

Moreover, this reasoning makes sense even if the President was certain that he faced no legal jeopardy. For impeachment ultimately is a political process, and although establishing criminal guilt is clearly helpful, it’s not essential.

The main evidence for my proposition has been the early Trump decision to prioritize Obamacare repeal over trade policy overhaul and infrastructure building; his almost libertarian-like initial budget proposal (at least when it comes to non-defense discretionary federal pending); his business-heavy tax cut; and numerous foreign policy moves that more closely resembled the globalist approaches he decried while running for the White House than the America First strategy his promised.

But although President Trump now seems certain to finish out his first term in office, he still seems to be currying favor with the Republican establishment. Just look at his latest budget proposal, and decision to go after Obamacare again – the healthcare move reportedly made despite the pleas of establishment Republicans like House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy to move on from an issue now stamped as a major loser politically and threat to the party’s 2020 election prospects across the board.

It’s true that many of Mr. Trump’s trade and immigration policies still clash with the donor-driven agenda of the Republican establishment, and especially the party’s Congressional leaders. But even on these signature issues, the President arguably could be breaking even more sharply with the longstanding Republican and conservative traditions.

For example, Mr. Trump continues to keep suspended his threat of higher tariffs on many imports from China in apparent hopes of reaching a successful trade deal even though Beijing still seems determined to avoid significant concessions on “structural issues” (like intellectual property theft and technology extortion) and on enforcement.

On immigration, the President has just raised the 2019 cap on visas for unskilled largely seasonal foreign guest workers to levels never reached even during the Obama years. His administration also has permitted visas for farm workers to hit record levels and done little to stem the growth of work permits for foreign graduates of U.S. college and universities that critics charge suppress wages for high skill native-born workers.

One intriguing explanation for this continuing policy schizophrenia comes from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. In a piece this past weekend, Douthat made the case that, although President Trump’s actual record has been largely heretical in mainstream conservative terms, when it comes to staffing (and especially key staff positions)

“there are effectively two Trump presidencies. One offers something like what the president promised on the campaign trail — a break with Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshade approach to entitlement reform, a more moderate tack on health care, an indifference to Obama-era conservative orthodoxies on fiscal and monetary policy.

“The other offers a continuation of the Tea Party’s insistence on spending cuts and Obamacare repeal, and appropriately its present leader is a former Tea Party congressman — Mick Mulvaney, the Zelig of the administration, whose zeal is apparently the main reason that the Obamacare lawsuit now has administration support.”

And the main reason for this confusing mix? The President has relied “on personnel who are associated with 2010-era G.O.P. orthodoxy, rather than elevating the kind of conservatives who have actively theorized for a more populist right.”

It’s so hard to argue with Douthat’s facts that I won’t. But they still leave the main puzzle unexplained – why so many of the President’s personnel picks have been so un-Trumpian. And much of the answer points to a problem that was clear to me ever since Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy achieved critical mass and momentum, and that doesn’t seem solvable for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, as I’ve previously noted, conservative populists (I’m never been thrilled with this description of “Trumpism,” but for the time being it’s convenient) have never created the institutions and therefore cohorts of first-rate policy specialists remotely capable of staffing a conservative populist administration. Even if you want to identify immigration as an exception – where organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies put out top-flight studies – it’s clear that nothing of the kind has ever existed on the trade and foreign policy fronts.

And even worse, because of the long lead-times needed to achieve these goals, Mr. Trump appears doomed to dealing with shortages of competent true-believers as far as the eye can see. In fact, he’ll face a special challenge in the next few months, as the second halves of first presidential terms tend to see the departures of many early, often burned out appointees. And of course, the Trump presidency has already experienced much more than its share of turnover.

So I’m expecting an indefinite continuation of the eye-popping sequence of events of the previous week – in which Trump Education Secretary Betsy deVos announced an end to federal funding of the popular Special Olympics program, a public outcry ensued, and the President abruptly reversed her decision.

It’s hard to imagine that this kind of zigging and zagging can win President Trump reelection. But it’s also conceivable that the post-impeachment situation will “Let Trump be Trump” just enough – especially if the Democrats err in picking an overall strategy for opposing him.  After all, nothing has been more common in recent American political history than completely off-base predictions of Mr. Trump’s demise.

Im-Politic: Shutdown Lessons – So Far

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border security, border wall, China, Congress, Democrats, E-Verify, election 2020, establishment Republicans, government shutdown, illegal alien crime, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, North Korea, Paul Ryan, Populism, Russia-Gate, shutdown, Swamp, Trade, Trump

Since the fight isn’t over by a long shot, it’s chancy at best to try to figure out many of the biggest implications of President Trump’s decision to reopen the shut down parts of the federal government despite getting no new funding for a Border Wall or any new physical barriers aimed at strengthening border security. Still, here’s what looks reasonably clear at this stage of the struggle:

>First and foremost, the shutdown situation, context, and therefore even the verdict were set in stone more than two years ago by the Russia collusion/election cheating charges, by the opposition (mainly passive) to President Trump’s immigration agenda of the establishment Republicans still so prominent in Congress (and not just in its leadership) during the Trump administration’s first two years, and the resulting politics of impeachment.

That is, as I’ve written previously, from his first day in office, Mr. Trump needed to secure the protection of Congressional Republicans – including their establishment ranks. Therefore, he needed to prioritize their top issues, like Obamacare repeal and a tax cut heavily weighted toward business, rather than his top – populist – issues, like fixing America’s broken trade and immigration policies.

It’s true that in his second year, the President has ramped up the pressure on leading trade predator China and on other mercantile economies (with his steel and aluminum tariffs). But unlike the Border Wall, those measures didn’t require Congressional funding, or any form of approval from Capitol Hill. (The new trade deal with Mexico and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement seems to be moderate enough to at least have attracted mild endorsements from the Big Business-run Offshoring Lobby.)

And if establishment Congressional Republican leaders like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell weren’t going to go the mat for the Wall (which of course would also have required helping to persuade some moderate Democrats to come along as well) when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress, there was absolutely no way Mr. Trump could have generated Wall funding once the Democrats gained control of the House.

Incidentally, it’s being reported by at least one non-anonymous source with first-hand knowledge that the President himself provided some confirmation for this argument – by blaming Ryan for “having ‘screwed him’ by not securing border wall money when Republicans had the majority….”

>If you’re going to shut down the government, and especially if you’re planning to dig in your heels for the duration, shut down the right agencies. For example, if the issues are illegal immigration and law enforcement, don’t shut down the Department of Homeland Security – which is chiefly responsible for protecting the nation’s security in these areas. If you’re a Republican, don’t shut down the Agriculture Department, whose rural constituency is overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, and which was already unhappy enough with the President about China trade policies that had pretty much shut down America’s immense soybean exports to the People’s Republic. Also if you’re a Republican don’t shutdown the Federal Aviation Administration – because victims are especially likely to be businessmen and women and other relatively affluent voters – who provide lots of actual and gettable Republican votes.

>Consequently, the politics of shutdowns, and of some aspects of political populism, are becoming clearer than ever – especially if they’re long ones. And many of these should have been obvious from the start.

Most obvious, voters of all kinds – populists and non-populists alike – who are receptive to anti-government arguments get a lot less anti-government when the affected services affect them directly.

Less obvious, populist voters themselves say and act happy to see populist politicians act like disrupters when it comes to the mutually supportive networks of corruption and propaganda set up by establishment politicians, lobbyists, consultants, think tank hacks, and mainstream media journalists in the Washington, D.C. Swamp The same goes for establishment policies they believe have brought them nothing but trouble, like mass immigration, offshoring-friendly trade deals, and pipe dream foreign wars and similar ventures.

What they don’t want disrupted is the steady stream of government services that make their lives easier – and even viable in the first place.

>For reasons like the above, it’s unimaginable that Mr. Trump will follow through with his threat to shut down the government again if he can’t persuade Democrats to compromise acceptably on Wall funding. His best hope for some kind of partial win is to portray himself as the reasonable party, and the Democrats as the arrogant, rigid extremists.

>In that vein, expect continued, and even more frequent administration activity spotlighting crimes by illegal aliens – especially in the districts and states of key lawmakers. But success is also likely to require claims (which are entirely credible, in my opinion) that illegal aliens steal jobs from native-born Americans and/or drive down their wages, and that the leading victims include minority Americans.

>One particularly effective tactic would be for the administration to push for mandating that businesses use the E-Verify system to prevent illegal aliens out of the national job market. E-Verify is currently being used on a voluntary basis by many companies (not including most Trump-owned companies), and by all accounts is extremely accurate. (That is, it snares virtually no innocents in its electronic net.) But its use so far has been voluntary, meaning that companies that blow it off get legs up on their competition by virtue of easy access to bargain-basement illegal employees.

>Another potentially effective talking point that the administration has strangely ignored: focusing on the sheer numbers of foreigners who’d be likely to swamp U.S. borders – and the country’s asylum system – without more effective physical barriers. The administration and all of its spokespeople and media supporters should keep asking the question of Democrats: How many tens of millions of these would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers can the United States afford to admit?

>If these Trump efforts fail, declaring a national emergency looks like the President’s best bet to reestablish credibility with his base and perhaps with fence-sitting voters and Members of Congress, and even some legislative opponents.

Such a move could also go far toward putting the most politically damaging aspects of this issue behind him. After all, there’s little that opponents can do about such a national emergency declaration other than try to tie it up in the courts. And Mr. Trump could – credibly, in my opinion – respond by using information about illegal aliens crime to accuse them of endangering their countrymen and women’s security. So even if rulings by friendly judges hold up actual Wall construction, Mr. Trump’s political position could benefit.

>The President also could well be tempted to score political points by pressing harder to win some foreign policy victories. A China trade deal and significant progress in limiting the nuclear weapons threat posed by North Korea are the two most obvious candidates, but presidential over-eagerness could seriously undermine major American interests.

I’m most worried about the administration’s dealings with Beijing, given the talk out of China of ending the current trade conflict for the foreseeable future by buying lots more American goods and services. More Chinese imports from the United States would be welcome – no mistake about that. But not if the price is letting Beijing off the hook for its ambitions literally to steal and subsidize its way to global supremacy in key technologies that not so coincidentally have big defense implications.

>Finally, re shutdowns themselves, the policy of requiring furloughed workers to do their jobs without getting paid strikes me as completely unacceptable. In other circumstances like this, at home or abroad, these practices are called “forced labor” or “wage theft.” And they’re rightly condemned. Nearly as bad, these furlough practices help pro-shutdown politicians curry favor with their supporters while mitigating or at least postponing the harm to the public – including those supporters.

In other words, if you’re for a shutdown, make it a real shutdown. For any agency whose funding is cut off, the workers stay home – and the jobs they do don’t get done. If that means chaos ensues and public safety is put at risk, too bad for shutdown-ers. They’ll own it.

>Speaking of owning it, that’s the situation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now finds herself in not only regarding border security but every issue that comes up in national affairs. In particular, when you show you’ve gained enough power to win political battles, you also show that you’ve gained enough power to frustrate initiatives that may be unpopular among your caucus in Congress, or some of your caucus, but that may be popular with everyone else. So forget about the the idea that Pelosi is now free to conduct a campaign of all-encompassing resistance to the Trump agenda, and to dictate terms of those proposals that she is willing to consider.

>And finally, that’s one of the many reasons it’s way too early to predict how the shutdown fight will impact the next presidential election. The main additional reasons: There’s still a long ways to go before that campaign achieves critical mass, and any number of events could turn the political calculus upside down. And similarly, it’s glaringly obvious that the Trump era news cycle – along with the national attention span – is already the shortest in recent memory – and could well keep getting shorter.

Im-Politic: What that Alabama Senate Race Really Means

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2004 presidential election, 2008 presidential election, 2012 presidential election, African Americans, Alabama, Barack Obama, Christine O'Donnell, Doug Jones, establishment Republicans, evangelicals, exit polls, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, independents, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Luther Strange, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Mo Brooks, moderates, off-year elections, Populism, presidential elections, Republicans, Roy Moore, Senate, Steve Bannon, suburbanites, Todd Akin, Trump, Virginia

Last week’s Alabama Senate race results remain worth studying carefully for two main reasons. First, the bizarro and self-destructive intra-Republican politics that handed victory to a Democrat in this deeply red state keep playing out. And second, reading the tea leaves correctly will be critical to figuring out whether, as is widely claimed, the triumph of former federal prosecutor Doug Jones does indeed herald the demise of the currently Trump-influenced brand of the Republican Party.

My overall conclusion: The fate of Trump-ism post-Alabama is still very much up in the air for most of the same reasons that its fate was up in the air pre-Alabama. Because as suggested above, the President and his main allies and surrogates have done such a lousy job of turning a reasonably coherent populist 2016 presidential campaign message into even a minimally coherent governing program.

And from this overall conclusion flow two follow-on conclusions: First, the conventional wisdom surrounding the Republican defeat in Alabama seems considerably off-base. The totality of the polling data shows that it can be mainly blamed on the deep personal and policy flaws of candidate Roy S. Moore rather than on any serious weakening of Trump-ism in the state. That’s lucky both for the President and for Republicans smart enough to recognize that the party’s continued viability depends on abandoning the orthodox conservative agenda still championed by its Washington/establishment wing but so roundly rejected by the voters.

Second, and much more troubling for Mr. Trump and his supporters: In the Alabama intra-party politicking, they showed no greater ability to get their messaging act – and competence – act together than they have in the national political and policy arenas as a whole. And the most glaring sign of this continuing confusion was the decision of the President and initially of his putative ideological guru, Steven K. Bannon to endorse Moore.

The by-now-standard interpretation of Alabama is that a closely related combination of anti-Moore and anti-Trump sentiments pushed black voter turnout in the state way up, turned off many moderate or independent white suburbanites who had gone for the president in 2016, and tipped the election to Jones. Moreover, these Alabama trends supposedly mirrored developments in the November Virginia gubernatorial race in particular, where a Democrat also prevailed – and look like a promising formula for a Democratic comeback in next year’s off-year Congressional races big enough to flip the House or Senate or both, and for regaining the White House in 2020.

But even without the Moore factor, these claims overlook big differences between Alabama and Virginia. Principally, the latter is steadily becoming reliably Democratic, as voters from more liberal areas of the country have flocked to the Old Dominion’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, attracted by government and government-related jobs. In fact, it’s voted blue in the last three presidential contests after staying in the GOP column every year since 1964.

With the Moore factor, the Alabama conventional wisdom looks even weaker, at least if you take the exit polls seriously. (Unless otherwise indicated, the following soundings come from the official exit polls for Alabama from the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential general elections, for the 2016 Republican primary in the state, and for last week’s Senate election.)

It’s true that black turnout was impressive – especially for an off-year election. At 29 percent, it even exceeded the African-American vote in 2012 (a presidential year, when all turnout tends to rise, and when black Americans obviously found Barack Obama a more compelling choice than 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton). It’s also true that because President Trump is reviled in the black community (with approval ratings in the mid-single digits), his endorsement of Moore prompted many Alabama African-Americans to “send him a message.” At the same time, in the 2004 presidential race (the last pre-Obama campaign), Republican president George W. Bush attracted only six percent of their vote (with somewhat lower – 25 percent – turnout). So it’s quite possible that whatever image problems Alabama blacks have with Republicans started well before the Trump era.

There’s also considerable polling evidence for the view that overlapping blocs of moderates, independents, and suburbanites, which gave Trump such noteworthy support in 2016, displayed some buyer’s remorse last week. For example, Moore did win the burbs – but only by a 51 percent to 47 percent margin. That’s much smaller than Mitt Romney’s 66 percent to 33 percent performance. And although there were no Alabama exit polls conducted for the 2016 presidential election, the primary polls report Trump winning fully half of Republican suburbanites – more than twice the share garnered by the next most successful GOP candidate (in a large field), Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

What about the self-described political moderates? In 2012, 52 percent supported Romney – much more than Moore’s 25 percent. Moore’s appeal to these voters also looks paltry compared with Trump’s last year. The president was backed by 40 percent of these voters – many more than supported the runner-up in this category, Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

And the same picture is created by self-described independent voters. Fully three quarters pulled a Romney lever in 2012 – three times the share won by Moore. (The 2016 exit poll lacked any data on this question.)

Yet I find more compelling the evidence that Alabama is sui generis. For starters, although by 53 percent to 42 percent, the state’s voters said that the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore were not “an important factor” in their vote, by 60 percent to 35 percent, they described them as “a factor.”

Let’s drill down a little further. Jones won 49.9 percent of the total vote, and slightly more Alabama voters (51 percent) expressed a favorable opinion of him. Moore won 48.4 percent of the total, but 56 percent of the state’s voters viewed him unfavorably. In addition, whereas 65 percent of Jones’ supporters favored him “strongly,” that was the case for only 41 percent of Moore supporters.

These Moore favorable ratings indicate that he suffered from a distinct enthusiasm gap among his core evangelical backers, and several exit poll indicators support this supposition. Evangelical turnout was slightly lower in 2017 (44 percent of the electorate) than in 2012 or 2008 (47 percent). Moreover, although Moore captured 81 percent of this vote, that share was down from Romney’s 90 percent in 2012, Senator John McCain’s 92 percent in 2008, and George W. Bush’s 88 percent.

And although the size of the 2016 primary field makes comparisons with last year difficult, evangelicals made up 77 percent of the Republican vote (a little lower than last week), and 43 percent went for Trump – nearly twice as many (22 percent) as those who voted for Cruz, the next best performer.

Among the signs that Moore dismay was evident among other voting blocs? He lost parents with children by 56 percent to 42 percent, and mothers with children by a much wider 66 percent to 32 percent. But although losing women overall by 57 percent to 41 percent, Moore won white women by 63 percent to 34 percent.

As for the impact on the President himself? Clearly negative. Mr. Trump remains significantly more popular in Alabama (48 percent approve of his performance as president) than nationwide (just under 38 percent approval according to the RealClearPolitics.com average of the latest soundings). But he won the state by a 62.9 percent to 34.6 percent margin over Clinton, so that’s a huge drop off.

Yet although the president’s nationwide ratings are quite low compared with those of his most recent predecessors at this point in their terms, it’s nothing unusual for them to take a dive after a year in office. Further, 51 percent of Alabama voters told the exit pollsters that Mr. Trump was “not a factor” in their decisions. In fact, the president’s approval ratings among Alabamians are higher than those of the Republican (43 percent) and Democratic (47 percent) parties overall. They’re also higher than those of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (46 percent), whose support of incumbent fill-in Alabama GOP Senator Luther Strange (appointed to replace now Attorney General Jeff Sessions) was deeply resented by many Republicans in the state.

All the same, as the end of his first year in office approaches, the President obviously is less popular than at the start of his term, and it’s easy to see why from simply considering the ideologically scrambled squabbling among Republicans that marked the process of choosing their Alabama Senate nominee. Given his party’s painful experiences with fringe-y candidates in previous campaigns – like Todd Akin of Missouri and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware – it was understandable that McConnell and the rest of the party’s establishment wanted someone far safer to run against Moore. But Strange lacked any ability to connect with the populism and broader voter anger that remains white hot throughout Alabama and nationwide. Even less explicable, a third candidate in the Republican Senate primary – Congressman Mo Brooks – appeared to have combined populist fire with a record that raised no Moore-like questions whatever. Why was McConnell so uninterested in him?

Much more mysteriously, why did Bannon opt for Moore over Brooks – who shared all of his economic nationalist and small-government impulses? His choice is all the more baffling given his acknowledgment last week that “Judge Moore has never been, really, an economics guy. If Mo Brooks had been running here, immigration and trade would’ve been at the top of the agenda — and bringing jobs back to Alabama.” And how come Bannon with all his contacts in the state couldn’t uncover the information about Moore’s sexual past that was reported by Washington Post journalists in the state on temporary assignment? The White House, of course, flunked this basic test, too. 

The president’s endorsement of Strange makes some sense, however, at least according to narrow political criteria. He supported McConnell’s choice because, as I’ve written, he believes he needs to maintain the backing of the Republican Party’s Washington-Congressional wing to survive any possible impeachment proceedings. In other words, at least some of the blame for the contradictions that have been hampering Mr. Trump on both substance and politicking lies with the Democrats. But of course, the president and his aides have given their opponents plenty of Russia-gate ammunition. And whoever or whatever is mainly at fault, the chief problem created by this bind is a powerful one. For the Republican establishment’s agenda remains as unpopular this year as it was last – which is largely why the Obamacare repeals have failed and why the Republican tax bill remains so unpopular with the public.

In other words, the kind of chaos (and yes, I’ve deliberately used former 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s description of the Trump campaign and personality) on display in this Alabama scrum surely reminded voters there about everything that’s always made them uneasy about the president. Although ready to roll the dice with him as a candidate, it’s easy to see why they find his presidency far more troubling – and why these doubts could easily spread further nation-wide, and take deeper root, unless Mr. Trump finds a way to squelch them.