If Donald Trump manages to win the Republican nomination this year, believe me, the House of Representatives is in the running. The lower chamber, which once had a solid Republican majority for perhaps a generation, could be destroyed by the billionaire tycoon, who faces defeat in November by a terrifyingly tender Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Polls show that Trump, like Clinton, would be tender candidate in the general election. David Wasserman from Cook Political Report I wrote earlier this month about Republican influence in the House of Representatives become more and more unstable.
Epitaphs have already been written for the Republican Senate majority, given that the Senate heavily favors Democrats in November, but even Charlie Cook noted that Trump’s “tremor” down the ticket could be…huge:
Of those seven competitive Senate races, four are in some of the closest presidential battleground states—Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Ohio. A gigantic move up the presidential race could easily shake up the Senate race below. If Republicans were to lose the presidency by a larger margin than McCain lost in 2008 and Romney lost in 2012, holding the Senate would be unlikely at best.
The House is no longer particularly sensitive to petite or moderate shifts in the political winds. Incumbents are protected by natural population patterns—Democratic voters concentrated in urban areas, inner suburbs, and college towns, and Republicans in petite towns, rural Americans, and outer-ring suburbs—through the political gerrymandering that both parties have practiced for generations. Democrats need a net 30 seats to win a majority in the House, a particularly hard feat given the current distribution of seats and the way district lines are drawn.
Cook Political Report House editor David Wasserman recently wrote that it’s now possible that the GOP majority in the House of Representatives could be in jeopardy. A much more likely scenario, assuming the GOP is tender, would be for Republicans to lose a dozen or more seats, which would cut the GOP majority in half. Given the GOP’s difficulty in getting legislation through even with its largest House majority since 1928, Paul Ryan will have a hell of a job if he loses that advantage.
All of this makes it captivating to see so many Republican congressmen sitting on the sidelines of this potentially pivotal GOP nomination contest. If the die-hard conservatives in the Freedom Caucus see Ryan and Boehner as supple moderates, what will they think of Trump, whose ideological roots are so shallow they don’t even amount to a political philosophy?
National Journal Josh Kraushaar is a bit more brutal in his analysis of Trump’s candidacy. In compact, everything the GOP has gained in the past six years could be washed away:
Trump is viewed favorably by fewer than a quarter of voters, despite being well-known to almost everyone. Even if he proves effective in winning over working-class voters, polls show he is alienating about a quarter of the GOP electorate and will be a mobilizing force for Democrats who were lukewarm about Clinton.
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In the Senate and House races, the combination of depressing Republican turnout and an energized Democratic base could make for a toxic brew in November. Using a favorable map, Senate Democrats have recruited solid candidates to run in 12 of the 13 GOP seats they’ve targeted, losing only in North Carolina. They’ve even picked up a respected lieutenant governor to run against entrenched Sen. Chuck Grassley in Iowa. If a wave election occurs, Democrats could not only narrowly regain control of the Senate, but could approach double-digit gains.
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In the House, Democrats would need to pick up 30 seats to regain the majority, but wave elections often go to outsiders. The Cook Political Report rates 31 GOP-held seats as competitive (either uncertain or Republican). Of those 31 districts, 23 are in urban or suburban areas where Trump’s populism is unlikely to be an asset.
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The truth is that Trump’s nomination has the potential to reverse the gains Republicans have worked to make over the past six years — after President Obama fell out of favor after 2016. You’d think party leaders would raise hell to protect their hard-fought gains. Instead, they’re whistling past the graveyard.
Yes, there are some Tea Party Republicans and Trump supporters who might think this is well-deserved. Republicans campaigned on stopping Obama, and Obamacare is still the law, Planned Parenthood is still funded, and we raised the debt ceiling for two more years in a budget deal that seems to be giving the House away. I have nothing good to say about the latter; the only brilliant spot is that we won’t have to go through a repeat of the government shutdown theater in an election year. Meanwhile, the conservative wing of the GOP, led by Rep. Mike Meadows (R-NC), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Ted Cruz (R-TX), tried to push a resolution to continue appropriations that would have defunded the Affordable Care Act in 2013, which led to the shutdown. It failed because Republicans a) did not have a majority in the Senate (so they had no chance of gathering the votes needed to override the veto) and b) President Obama would never sign off on defunding his greatest domestic achievement.
Like 2010, 2014 proved to be another wave election for the GOP, in which they amassed the largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1928 and gained nine seats in the Senate. In return, Congress was able to pass a bill through reconciliation that would have stripped key parts of Obamacare and defunded Planned Parenthood for a year. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would have reduced the deficit by $516 billion over the next ten years. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a step in the right direction. Of course, Obama vetoed the legislationand Republicans did not have enough votes to overturn it.
Again, it’s solid to win key victories if your party doesn’t control the White House. Could Congress have done more to stop Obama? Yes. But they were able to do what they are constitutionally allowed to do as legislators – pass a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood and defund key parts of Obamacare – and get it signed by the president after dozens of times it failed because of a Democratic-controlled Senate. That’s progress. That’s all Congress could do. They got a bill that met the needs of the conservative base, but of course they were torpedoed because we couldn’t get Obama back in 2012. Again, we could have done a better job, and some have argued that the 2012 presidential election was the last chance for a neat repeal before the law went into full effect. But it’s not true to say that Congress did nothing to stop Obama. They did what they said they would do within the constraints of the Constitution and the separation of powers. They got a repeal bill to his desk (which also targeted the largest abortion provider in the country). The next step is to elect a pro-life president to finish the job.
Changing laws takes time. This is something that some Tea Party members and Trump supporters fail to recognize; fixing a bad bill can take several election cycles. Updating or revising good bills can also take a similar time frame.
Heck, even in our judicial system it can take decades to reverse bad decisions; it took 58 years to throw out the unconstitutional “separate but equal” ordinance established by Plessy v Ferguson ruling.
Lethargic government pace is good. It means (in a general sense) that the mechanisms that keep us sheltered from abuse are working. Of course, if we win in 2016, the exploit of executive orders (and the revocation of Obama’s) should be a matter of debate. But generally speaking, government should move slowly, even when both sides want it to move at an accelerated pace.
The Republican Party is getting closer to erasing or severely limiting Obama’s legacy on Obamacare. That much was proven when the Reconciliation Act passed. All we need is a Republican president to sign it into law during the next Congress, but Donald Trump seems poised to destroy that progress. A Trump nomination could spell total disaster for the party (he doesn’t bring anything to the game), believe me. Maybe that’s what many Trump supporters are counting on, considering that many of them are Democrats.
Here’s what the map could look like in today’s election. Trump’s Rust Belt strength would aid him hold MO, IN photo:twitter.com/OYueYvWFpG
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 24, 2016
