When it comes to the congressional elections in November, the conventional wisdom is that many Republican voters are probably not going to show up because they have become demoralized. The economy, the Iran War, the out-of-control cost of living – Donald Trump and the GOP said they’d fix them. They didn’t. Now these voters are going to stay home.
But that conventional wisdom has usually been about casual voters, who are sometimes known as “low-propensity voters,” which is to say, people who might vote during a presidential election but skip midterms, primaries and special elections. The Republican Party hopes that regular and reliable GOP voters – or high-propensity voters – will at least mitigate whatever advantage the Democrats have, given the demoralization of casual voters.
That’s where things get interesting.
A new survey suggests a “big chunk” of these regular and reliable GOP voters might also go AWOL – or do the unthinkable. On Sunday, the Post reported that data collected by Americans for Prosperity Action, a super PAC linked to Charles Koch, found that a fifth of Republicans in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Montana, New Hampshire and Michigan “are either saying they may stay home or are weighing voting for Democrats” (my italics).
“This is a scary number,” Nathan Nascimento, head of AFP Action, told the Post.
That 20 percent of the GOP base “does not take into account low-propensity conservative voters,” the Post said. That’s actually a “separate issue Republicans face in November.”
“We have a high-propensity base problem,” Nascimento said.
Let’s be real, though.
Regular and reliable GOP voters are probably not going to cast a ballot for a Democrat. “Low-propensity voters” might. They are not loyal to the party, though many chose Trump. If they do vote, they might vote for Democrats without feeling pangs of guilt. Regular and reliable GOP voters? Almost certainly not. They will stay home before betraying their party. (And lo, a deeper read of the Post report reveals this fact: “A recent door-knocking session in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale with AFP Action turned up voters critical of the war in Iran and high inflation, with a handful saying they planned to support Democrats in the fall.”)
Whether they vote for Democrats is beside the point. The question is about demoralization: how deep does it go? In the case of the GOP base, it runs deep. It’s not only putting off casual voters. It’s putting off loyal, partisan voters, too. If 20 percent of Republicans are feeling demoralized – still a big if – Democratic control of the Senate and House is in sight.
But what’s missing from the conversation is the effect of demoralization on Democrats. No one is talking about that, because Democratic voters are assumed to be highly motivated to vote against the Republicans, retake power, and restore law and order. But anti-Republican energy isn’t the same thing as pro-Democratic energy. Most polls show a lack of support for Trump and the Republicans, but some do not show a corresponding support for Democrats.
For instance, in commenting on the latest Pew poll, CNN’s Ronald Brownstein said that the new data “puts Trump approval at a brutal 34 percent, but gives Democrats only a modest plus-six generic lead (though, like other new polls, that’s a tick up.) Among the 49 percent who strongly disapprove [of Trump], it shows Democrats up just 76 percent in the generic [ballot]. They won 95 percent in 2018. Democratic weakness or false hope for Republicans?”
Brownstein added that the core problem “is that as Trump’s approval sinks lower than during his first term, [Republicans] are remaining close in generic and Senate races by winning far more voters who disapprove of him than almost any Republican did” during Trump’s first term. “Democrats are definitely weaker than 2018, but is that really sustainable?”
What Brownstein is saying is that thanks to Trump, Republicans are getting crushed, but less than they were before the 2018 midterms. Meanwhile, Democrats are not doing as well as they did back then. Disapproval of the president is not fully translating into approval for them. That could be temporary, as Brownstein suggests. But for me, the question is why?
Some say it’s the Democrats. They are doing too much to accommodate tyranny and not enough to oppose it. Other critics say the Democrats are not inspiring voters by offering them transformative policy. Others still say they lack the right attitude. Data journalist G Elliott Morris argued recently that attitude is why democratic socialists are gaining ground. Primary voters don’t care about ideology, Morris said. They care about the will to fight.
But I fear something bigger is going on and it’s escaping the attention of those who have an ax to grind with the Democratic Party. I touched on this fear last week in a piece about Trump’s new tariffs. They are a protection racket, a means by which a gangster president can hold an electorate hostage: we can vote Democratic and keep feeling the pain of criminal taxes or we can vote Republican and relieve ourselves of that pain, but also reward a gangster president. In combination with other criminal acts, Trump’s tariffs put voters in a no-win situation, and if voters believe they have no good choices, they might not believe there’s any hope. And if there’s no hope, that’s it – lights out for the American republic.
I admit that I am overstating this, but I’m doing so for a reason: There is not enough attention being paid to the fact that everyone is feeling demoralized, not just Republican voters, and that’s because demoralization is becoming so normal as to be invisible.
Trump’s second term is tantamount to a long series of punishments for the humiliation of defeat in 2020. Everything he does is transparently criminal, but too many of the institutions of democracy that we normally count on to speak for the people have surrendered to his impunity. What are workaday Americans supposed to feel in light of such vast complicity? Some will vote blue no matter who, of course. But many others will give up on hope.
Again, I’m overstating, and perhaps my jeremiad is premature. In response to Ronald Brownstein’s question – about whether the Republicans can count on a lack of Democratic support through the end – Brian Rosenwald, a media historian at the University of Pennsylvania, said no. However weak the Democrats look right now, he said, it’s illusory. “You’re seeing too many Democrats running competitively in very red places for the better generic ballot numbers for the GOP to hold (and we got four awful generic ballot numbers for them in the last 24 hours).” (One of those was Emerson, which I wrote about last week.)
Still, even if the Democrats take the entire Congress, winning will not stop the bleeding. Trump’s assault has been too destructive for anyone to assume that Democratic victory is the same as the restoration of trust and the revival of liberal democracy. If the Democrats do not make public faith a top priority, whatever success they do have will be short-term and, because they raised false hope, perhaps worse than if they had not won back power at all.