MITCH MCCONNELL HAS NO ONE TO BLAME BUT HIMSELF

 

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has been the Republican leader of the Senate for the past 15 years.  Recently, Florida Senator Rick Scott has decided to challenge him for that position given the poor showing that the Republican party just had in the midterms; normally, the party not in the White House makes gains in the midterms, and the Republicans were expecting a so called red wave this time.  But it never came and while the party will in all likelihood take the House, they made no gains in the Senate, and may even lose a seat depending on how the run off in Georgia goes.

While I doubt that Scott will defeat McConnell, the fact that he is being challenged after building a reputation as a conservative hardliner while leading his party in the Senate is surprising, and if he were pushed out it would be quite a come down for a man that even Democrats have admitted was an effective leader.  

Even if Scott doesn't depose him, McConnell will still have to spend the next two years as a minority leader with little power.  He saw all of this coming: as far back as August, when he  openly complained that his party's chances of winning the Senate were being undermined, saying that "candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”  This was, of course, his diplomatic way of saying that former President Donald Trump was endorsing a poor crop of Senate candidates (like Dr Oz) who were running extremist campaigns that alienated swing voters.  And, as it turned out,  he was right. But what he won't mention is that this is all his own fault.

Why?  Because after the January 6th riot of 2021, McConnell did little to hide his disgust with Trump's actions, saying on the Senate floor that the former president's actions before the riot were "a disgraceful dereliction of duty."  Clearly he thought that Trump was guilty of inciting a riot.  And yet, he still couldn't bring himself to vote to remove Trump from office, and, without his support, the vote failed to reach the 67 vote majority that was needed in the Senate by 10 votes.  (While we don't know for sure, it's pretty safe to say that if McConnell, as Republican leader in the Senate,  had voted to remove Trump, it would have paved the way for other Republican Senators to follow).  Trump, in typical fashion, still insulted McConnell after the vote, calling him a "stupid person" and nicknaming him "Old crow".

While it appears that McConnell and other Senators thought it wasn't necessary to vote to remove Trump given that he was almost about to leave the White House anyway, they miscalculated something.  Removing him from office would have crucially prevented him from ever running again.  Which meant that Trump's hold over the Republican party would have been broken, and with no chance of ever running again, he would have retreated to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds.  And with him out of the picture, the midterms could have just been about Joe Biden and the economy with normal Republican candidates instead of Trump forcing his hand picked candidates to constantly say that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the Republicans would almost surely have taken the Senate. 

Instead, as we all now know, Trump has decided to run again in 2024, and the Republican party is stuck with the choice of supporting him despite his losing streak of three straight election losses, or trying to find another candidate and alienating his cult like followers in the Republican Party.  Either way, McConnell looks like a fool for missing the opportunity to expunge Trump from his party, and there may be more losses coming soon.  I hope.

TRUMP LOSES AGAIN

 

The midterms elections yesterday looked like a sure thing for the Republican party: with inflation stubbornly persistent, violent crime increasing and Joe Biden's approval rating in the low 40's, a red wave looked inevitable.  And yet, with vote totals still coming in,  it really hasn't happened.  While the GOP is still favored to win the House, it will be by a much smaller margin than predicted, and the Democrats may hold  the Senate.  Putting it bluntly, this will be the weakest midterm election for a party out of power in the White House in decades.  While there are a number of reasons for this (the abortion issue is one of them), I think the main one is Donald Trump and his continuing influence over the Republican party.

Consider everything that has happened since Trump's unlikely victory in 2016: his party lost seats in the 2018 midterm, lost the presidency and both houses of congress in 2020, and have now underperformed in the 2022 midterms.  (And, because the former president seems obsessed with bragging about the size of his rallies, it should be pointed out that anger at his election inspired the 2017 Women's March, the largest single day protest in American history).  Add to that the fact that the former president has spent the last two years purging his party of anyone who doesn't publicly contest the 2020 election and pushing forward terrible, unqualified candidates like Dr Mehmet Oz, making this midterm election as much about him as his party,  and it's clear to see that Trump has little ability to reach beyond the rabid base of the Republican party that still worships him.

So what can the Republican party do, chained to an unpopular, wildly egotistical leader who's poised to announce his candidacy for 2024 any day now?  The answer may lie in Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis cruised  to an easy reecletion victory last night with one eye clearly on the White House.  Trump already clearly appears worried about a DeSantis run: not only did he not campaign for DeSantis in Florida, he held a competing rally there, and tried out a childish new nickname for the governor ("Ron DeSanctimonious").  While DeSantis is currently running behind Trump in primary polls, his victory in Florida and the party's poor showing nationally may push other Republicans to rally around DeSantis.  It will be interesting to see how it all plays out: DeSantis would probably have a much better chance at winning in 2024 than Trump, who is so divisive outside of his own party.  But will primary Republican voters choose him?  Watching the two men share a debate stage while agreeing on the issues and attacking each other personally will probably make for a low point in American politics, but then, that's where we've been stuck at ever since Trump first announced his candidacy in 2016.

Personally, while I think DeSantis is a terrible politician who recently used Venezuelan refugees as political chess pieces, I don't think he poses the deep, existential threat to democracy that another Trump presidential run does.  While I obviously hope neither of them wins in 2024, at least DeSantis doesn't make me think that the country could fall into outright fascism under him. 

WILL INFLATION RUIN DEMOCRACY?

 

Last summer, there was brief time period in which polls showed that the Democratic party might actually do well in the upcoming midterms.  President Joe Biden had just signed his Deficit Reduction Act into law, and the overturning of Roe Vs Wade was sparking anger against the Republican party.  But now, it seems, the pendulum has swung back in the Republicans favor, as Americans have accepted the overturning of Roe as not that a big a deal (even if a majority of them don't agree with it), and the economy has become the number one issue for voters.  And by the economy, they mean inflation and high gas prices, which, unfortunately for the Democrats. has remained stubbornly high in the past few months even as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates more than once. (Gas prices have gone down, but are still higher than they were when Biden took office). While the Republican party has claimed that they will somehow "fix" inflation, they have no real concrete plan to do so, because they don't need one.  Voters tend to blame a poor economy on the party in power, even though much of the economy is beyond the control of the president and congress.  (If Joe Biden had a "stop inflation" button on his desk, he would have pushed it by now).    While it is possible that the Democrats will hold onto the Senate, they are likely to lose the House of Representatives, which would lead to two years of the kind of gridlock that both Obama and Trump often faced during their tenures in the White House.

None of this is unusual: the party of the President in power almost always loses seats in congress in the first midterm election, from the public turning against Bill Clinton in 1994 to the rise of the anti Barack Obama tea party movement in 2010.  And, Biden can take solace in the fact a poor showing in the midterms doesn't mean that a President won't win reecletion, as we found out with both Clinton in 1996 and Obama in 2012.

But there is a bigger problem with possible upcoming Republican victories, and, once again, that problem is linked to former President Donald Trump.  Trump's continued unfounded assertions that he won the 2020 election is still embraced by a majority of Republican voters.  And that has lead to a stunning almost 300 different Republican candidates across the nation running for office who agree with his assertions (heck, 10 of those candidates actually attended the January 6th Rally!).  These candidates winning, especially in swing states, could lead to a truly frightening possibility: Trump could steal the 2024 election.  Remember that it was Republicans standing up to him (like former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Brett Raffensperger) that finally pushed Trump into leaving the White House.  With Trump election loyalists ensconced in offices like Secretary of State or the Governorship, there are any number of ways that our system of voting could be corrupted in swing states with close vote counts, with certain votes being rejected and Trump being named the winner, democracy be damned.

What can Democrats (and really, anyone who cares about American democracy) do?  Unfortunately, not a lot, with the Republican victory in a few days looking more and more assured.  If the Republicans do win, the best thing that can happen in the country before 2024 is that Trump may not feel up to another campaign run (he will be 80 in 2024 after all) or even that one of the several investigations into his possible criminal behavior will turn up an actual conviction (although several cynics have pointed out that there's nothing in the Constitution that says that you can't run from a jail cell).  But we can't bet on those things happening, and, as unbelievable as it may seem, a man who lied about losing an election and then set off a violent riot over it, could find himself back in power in 2024.