As the Republican presidential primary process careens at breakneck speeds toward the worst-case scenario for GOP officeholders, a creeping realization is beginning to color political commentary on the right.
Today, few reasonable conservative political analysts bother themselves with contemplative ruminations about the best tactical approaches to appeal to the elusive 50 plus one percent of the general electorate. As the GOP stares down the barrel of a radical redefinition with Donald Trump as the party’s titular leader, the Republican governing coalition faces the prospect of a splintering that will kneecap the party in November. But is the White House even still winnable for Republicans? That seems less and less likely by the day. In fact, it may better serve the Republican Party in the long run to focus on doing whatever is necessary to mitigate the damage done by the Democratic tsunami on the horizon, which appears set to sweep a generation of conservatives out of office.
President Barack Obama is having a remarkably good 2016, and not merely because his Republican opposition seems bent on self-immolation. The outgoing two-term president’s job approval rating has rebounded remarkably from December of 2015. On the last day of the last year, Barack Obama was underwater by nearly 9 points, according to the Real Clear Politics average of job approval polls. Today, the president’s image is in positive territory. A Gallup poll of 1,500 adults conducted from March 25 to 28 found Obama with a near double-digit job approval rating. So much for the “angry electorate.”
As the most long-lived pollster in the business, Gallup knows a thing or two about how presidential job approval ratings affect the voters’ thinking about the next election. “At the eight-month mark, an incumbent’s job approval rating is more significantly predictive of eventual election success,” Gallup’s Frank Newport and Joseph Carroll observed in 2003. With the exception of Harry Truman in 1948, every incumbent president with a Gallup job approval rating of 50 percent or more went on to win reelection. That metric went on to be proven true for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The equation changes a bit when a two-term incumbent’s party is seeking a third consecutive term in the White House. The electorate’s hunger for change often trumps their desire for continuity – just ask President Al Gore.
Ah, but what about the “fundamentals?” Factors like the state of the economy, foreign affairs, scandals in the White House, et cetera. Those are more of a mixed bag for Democrats.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is now lower than at any point since the immediate wake of the financial collapse of 2008 at under 5 percent. Conservatives have, however, long pointed to underemployment rates and the underwhelming number of laborers in the workforce to demonstrate that the pace of the economic recovery remains frustratingly sluggish. Those contentions, too, are losing their sting. The U6 — the rate at which the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures workers who are marginally attached to the labor force — has declined steadily since 2010 and is now hovering just around 10 percent. While it remains low, March was the third consecutive month in which the labor participation rate increased.
Overseas, the situation is far more perilous, given the rise of transnational terrorist organizations, revanchist great powers projecting military strength abroad, and the collapse of some Middle Eastern and North African states creating a flood of refuge-seeking migrants into the West. American troops, however, are only marginally involved in these conflicts (although the number of U.S. soldiers committed to them is increasing). In October of 2015, a U.S. serviceman was killed during a hostage rescue operation in Iraq – the first such combat death in Iraq in over a year. That tragedy was not repeated until March of 2016 when an American soldier died defending a U.S. firebase in northern Iraq from an ISIS attack. It is not clear that this casualty rate is steep enough to create a sense of crisis among American voters.
These two factors can change dramatically in the coming months; events have a way of changing electoral dynamics rapidly. Further, the White House can become embroiled in a crippling scandal that changes voters’ perceptions. With the Democratic Party set to nominate a veritable scandal magnet, that is not outside the realm of possibility. What’s more, “fundamentals” do not always predict the outcome of presidential elections. However, if these dynamics prevail for the next eight months, Republicans would have a difficult time winning the White House even if they were to nominate a reasonable and popular politician. And they are not.
The GOP looks set to nominate the most unpopular figure to run for the presidency in modern times, in fact. Donald Trump’s average favorability rating is an anemic 30 percent. He is deeply unpopular with key demographics, including women and Hispanics, without the support of whom no Republican can hope to win the White House. Democrats are salivating over the opportunity to turn 2016 into an up or down referendum on Trump, and he gives them new opportunities to pursue that prerogative with each new day. Just yesterday, the billionaire businessman went to bat for his campaign manager after he was arrested for battery against a young female reporter. When asked about the event, Trump implied that the alleged abuse victim was making the whole story up for the attention it brought her. Democrats couldn’t be happier with the prospective Republican nominee if they built him in a lab themselves.
Democrats will make every Republican office-seeker answer for Donald Trump’s daily indiscretions, and they will not be doing so because they believe the White House remains in play. The Democratic Party’s objective is to wipe out the staggeringly dramatic gains the Republican Party has made over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency, and they may be successful.
If Donald Trump becomes the GOP nominee, analysts increasingly believe that the Republican Senate majority will be lost, but the Republican House majority is also in jeopardy. Even despite having the largest majority in the post-War period and presiding over the majority of states that reapportioned incumbent Republicans into safe districts, the scale of the coming rout for Republicans is believed to be so great that it’s no longer unthinkable that Representative Nancy Pelosi will retake the gavel from Speaker Paul Ryan in 2017.
So, do Republicans have any options available to them that might prevent this political apocalypse? Even if Donald Trump were not to secure the nomination, the fracturing of the GOP base electorate may be unavoidable – even irreparable. That will be particularly true if Donald Trump, the likely delegate leader heading into the Cleveland convention, fails to win the number of delegates necessary to secure the nomination. That scenario and the bedlam that will accompany it is less of a nightmare for the GOP when it is properly understood that the Republican Party has probably already squandered its opportunity to retake the White House. Even if they had a leisurely and cordial nominating process, and even if Barack Obama was as unpopular as he had been before the Republican Party began appearing to voters like a risky bet, the task of winning the presidency was always going to be an arduous one. The party’s congressional and state-level majorities are, however, salvageable, but that is likely true only if Donald Trump is not the name at the top of the Republican column in November.
The notion that the GOP might still rescue victory from the jaws of defeat in 2016 clouds the thinking of political analysts. Republican strategists today may be better served by focusing their attention farther down the ballot, and doing whatever is necessary to preserve that check on what seems unavoidably to be a new Democratic administration in 2017. Even if that means convention chaos, hurt feelings, and even violence in the streets, the stakes for the GOP become far clearer once the realization that the White House is now a bridge too far is fully internalized.
If he is not the nominee, Trump may promise to do his absolute worst to his adopted party. But Trump’s worst is nothing compared to the punishment voters are prepared to mete out to the Grand Old Party in November.
