Jonathan Bernstein: Winning side not ready to govern

Democratic victories in two special elections Tuesday at the state level and this week’s embarrassments back in the nation’s capital shine a spotlight on two of the most important lessons of American politics: Losing one big election is a great strategy for winning a lot of smaller ones, and winning the big one doesn’t mean you can govern.

Democratic Party leaders and political pundits have fiercely debated how the party should react to losing the presidency in 2016 (and Congress and many other offices in the 2010 and 2014 Republican landslides). They’ve recommended going populist, or going more liberal, or going more conservative, or caring more about white working-class voters, or doing a better job of increasing black and Latino voter turnout, or 101 other things to fix what’s wrong with the party. As Matthew Yglesias suggests, however, the biggest electoral problem Democrats had from January 2009 up until January 2016 wasn’t failing to connect with specific groups of voters, or a too liberal or too conservative platform, or the wrong candidates or anything else. It was simply holding the White House.

Problem solved.

That’s not to say any of those other things are necessarily irrelevant or wrong, and after all it makes sense for political parties to concentrate on the things that they can control, not those they cannot.

But the extent to which out-parties almost always gain ground in midterm elections is a really important reminder that winning elections just doesn’t tell you very much about a political party, despite the natural inclination everyone has to attribute victories to actions by the victors. So, for example, it almost certainly just isn’t true that Bill Clinton won in 1992 because he and the Democratic Party solved their problems from the 1980s by modifying liberal positions; he won because of a recession. Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale likely would have won in the same circumstances.

The flip side of this is that while some parties reach the White House ready to govern, including Ronald Reagan’s Republicans in 1980 and Barack Obama’s Democrats in 2009 (and the Hillary Clinton campaign’s gigantic policy shop was a sign she was ready too), it’s equally possible for a badly dysfunctional party to win unified control of the federal government.

Which brings us to the Republican Party in 2017.

Republican electoral gains while Obama was in the White House were impressive. So is, unfortunately, what appears to be their appalling inability to formulate public policy. The budget Donald Trump submitted to Congress this week, whatever one thinks of the ideology behind it, simply doesn’t add up. At all. The Congressional Budget Office published another negative analysis of the House’s health care bill. And those are the things that are going well! There’s still no real tax plan, no infrastructure plan, no trade plan … let alone anything to deal with other real problems in the nation, whether it’s climate or productivity or income inequality or anything else.

This has been going on for a while, but it’s hardly inherent in liberal and conservative ideology; no one called the Republican fields in 1980 or 1988 incapable of discussing public policy.

The proof is in the pudding. When Obama was elected, he and congressional Democrats had an extensive policy agenda ready to roll out. When Trump was elected, Republicans had bupkis – indeed, at this point they seem to be hoping that at least they can make it through the first nine months without accidentally shutting down the government or defaulting, with any major accomplishments anytime soon increasingly unlikely.

What could change this? Christian conservatives show one path for Republicans. They’ve held firm to explicit policy demands for their party, generally tending to get much of what they ask for.

Far too many Republican groups appear satisfied with a different deal: reflexive opposition to Democrats along with scams and conspiracy talk while nothing else is getting done and even the basics of governing get lost. As easy as it is to blame Trump, that’s what happened during the last Republican presidency in Iraq, New Orleans, Tora Bora and Wall Street. As long as Republican groups are satisfied with that level of dysfunction, the party will continue to deliver it.

And a warning for Democrats: If they mistakenly believe Republicans have been winning because, not despite, their incoherence on policy, and start to accept knee-jerk opposition to anything Republicans say and flirt with conspiracy talk of their own instead of continuing to do the hard work of policy formation, they may still benefit from Trump’s unpopular presidency – but they’ll find themselves unable to govern the next time around.