Are Democrats getting their mojo back?
My new commentary in the Business Times of Singapore
Are Democrats getting their mojo back?
The GOP's losses in this week's gubernatorial polls and its rival's solidifying hold over key electoral groups seem to imply so
FRI, NOV 10, 2017 - 5:50 AM
Washington
IT has been said that time flies when you are having a good time. It's not clear, however, whether that was the reason Americans had the strange sensation that Donald Trump's electoral triumph had occurred just a few days ago, when they marked this week the first anniversary of the 2016 presidential election.
In a way, as they follow the 24/7 coverage of the political crises that have engulfed Washington since the President Trump had entered the White House, Americans could be imagining that the election campaign isn't over yet.
Indeed, those sentiments are shared by members of the anti-Trump "resistance" and by Never-Trump Republicans, who have refused to accept the notion that the man they consider a bigot, a misogynist and a threat to democracy is President of the United States.
Questioning the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and trying to prove that has become a full-time preoccupation for Democratic politicians in Washington and for left-leaning political activists around the country. In addition to reminding us that Hillary Clinton and not Mr Trump had won the popular vote, they express their suspicion that the Republican candidate may have "stolen" the election with the assistance of his pals in the Kremlin. Those who embrace that belief hope that the numerous investigations of the Russian intrusion would prove them right, and lead to the removal of their nemesis from office. Only then would they be able to ascertain that the presidential election campaign was over.
But the sense that America is still in the midst of the election campaign is not confined to members of the anti-Trump and Never-Trump forces. Ironically, many Trumpists, including President Trump himself, create the impression that they have yet to win the 2016 election. That would not be until they succeed in defeating those who are supposedly planning a coup to overthrow the sitting president.
The alleged conspirators include the mainstream media, the bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies or the "deep state", the Republican establishment and the rest of the "globalist elite".
Indeed, when President Trump criticised his Secretary of State's diplomatic efforts to resolve the North Korean crisis or bashed the Republican Congressional leadership for failing to advance his agenda, it was easy to think that Mr Trump is neither the man sitting in the White House nor the head of the GOP, but is the leader of a political party conducting a campaign against real government in Washington.
It is not surprising, therefore, that from the perspective of both the anti-Trump resistance and the Trumpists, the results of the races for governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, and of a few other local elections that took place this Tuesday, are seen as just one more stage in that never ending race to the White House.
On one level, the Republican losses in races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey were probably not major surprises, and seemed in line with the results of the 2016 presidential election, when Candidate Trump lost to Candidate Clinton in these two key states. So no big deal, argue the Trumpists; we expect to lose those states in 2020 - and win the presidential election again.
But not so fast, please. First, Virginia has evolved in the last two decades from a Red/Republican to a Purple/Swing state as a result of a large migration of young professionals, government workers and immigrants from Latin America and Asia into northern Virginia. These groups that tend to lean Democratic.
Yet the Republicans have never given up on the state where there are still large concentrations of voters, in rural and suburban areas, who traditionally lean Republican.
But Tuesday's election may mark a turning point, the election that may have transformed Virginia into a full-blown Blue/Democratic state, after the Democratic tide seemed to be sweeping Republican-leaning areas in the suburbs as well as demographic groups, like white women who voted for Candidate Trump in 2016.
Moreover, Democrats seem to be solidifying their hold over electoral groups - the urban professionals, educated women, young voters, immigrants, ethnic minorities and educated women - that went for Democratic presidential candidates in the last three elections. These are demographic groups that are growing in numbers in Virginia and elsewhere, even as ageing white Republican voters decline in number.
The electoral reality is, of course, more complex. Indeed, after the Republican losses in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, some GOP strategists proposed that their party try to court, for example, Latino voters and other immigrant groups, which could have made the GOP more competitive in areas like northern Virginia.
One of those forward-looking Republican strategists was a lobbyist named Ed Gillespie - which makes the story more interesting, since he was the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia who lost the race to the Democratic candidate, former Lieutenant-Governor Ralph Northam.
To say that Candidate Trump rejected the electoral strategy proposed by members of the Republican establishment like Mr Gillespie would be an understatement; Mr Trump adopted in 2016 an anti-immigration election agenda that alienated Hispanics and other immigrant groups, while courting white voters to provide him with a win.
So Candidate Trump ended up winning the presidential election just as one of the favorite sons of the Republican establishment, Mr Gillespie, was planning to run for the Senate, and then for Governor of Virginia. Mr Gillespie - a pro-immigration and pro-free trade Republican - represented everything that the Trumpists dislike about the GOP, while the populist Trump was Mr Gillespie's worst political nightmare.
So when Mr Gillespie launched his campaign this year, he seemed to face a difficult choice: Embrace Trumpism and secure the votes of the white working class and rural residents who voted for Trump in 2016, or to distance himself from the Republican in the White House and woo some professionals and immigrants in northern Virginia.
Mr Gillespie went for a third option. He refrained from inviting President Trump to campaign with him and did not even mention his name during the race. But at the same time, he pledged to take a tough stand against illegal immigrants a la Mr Trump and blasted liberal and African-Americans for demanding that the state remove from public spaces statues of figures associated with the slave-owning southern Confederacy.
The result was that Mr Gillespie antagonised Trump voters while failing to win voters on northern Virginia to his side. In response, President Trump tweeted that Mr Gillespie lost because he failed to embrace the Trumpist agenda whole-heartedly.
But that makes no sense, since, if anything, Trumpism has become politically toxic in Virginia. On the other hand, it is doubtful that Mr Gillespie could have emerged victorious by dissociating himself from President Trump and his populist agenda.
The reason is that most voters now associate the GOP with Trumpism, clouding the prospects of any Republican trying to expand the electoral base of the party beyond the core bloc of Trump supporters. In fact, such a Republican candidate could not now win a Republican primary.
Hence, the "Trumpisation" of the Republican Party would increase the chances of Democratic candidates winning congressional elections in the 2018 mid-term elections and raise the prospects of a Republican loss of control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
It is also important to remember that President Trump had won key states like Ohio and Florida in 2016 by attracting the rural working-class vote, while maintaining Republican support in the cities and suburbs - and will not win re-election if many of these Republicans desert him in 2020.
But it would be a mistake to attribute the Republican losses in Virginia and New Jersey exclusively to the Trump Effect. The other side of the coin is that the Democrats resisted the pressure from their progressive wing to choose populist candidates to run against the Republicans in those races and picked instead centrist Democrats.
Indeed, neither Mr Northam, an understated physician and army veteran, nor Philip Murphy, a former Wall Street investor, projected what could be described as left-leaning radical. They seemed to be the kind of politicians that any white suburban voter would feel comfortable with.
So perhaps both the anti-Trump resistance and the Trumpists got it wrong. The presidential election campaign ended on Nov 8, 2016 and President Trump will serve in office until 2020, notwithstanding the investigation of Russian intrusion or the machinations by the "deep state". Whether he would be re-elected would depend on his performance and on the kind of candidate the Democrats would choose to run against him.