Political Prognostications

Blaire Bartlett: It’s a crazy time in Washington. If you could give us five big takeaways from that presentation that you just gave, what would they be?

Well, thank you for having me. I think the biggest takeaways are, one, it’s an unusual election where, right now, the more traditional issues are what are driving this election, which are worries about the economy and more specifically about inflation.

In the race for the Senate and the House, I don’t think the conventional wisdom is wrong: that the Senate flips one way and the House flips the other. But I think the House flipping is a little less, I feel less confident about that than the Senate going Republican. Even at the Senate side, the split ticket thing is really interesting to me because we haven’t had it in a long time. We could see voters out there saying, look, I don’t like either of these candidates for president, and I want to make sure that the Senate and House provide a check on them, which I think will be really critical.

The final thing is the kinds of people who turn out matter…. We make the mistake sometimes that, when we compare one election to the next, we go, “These people voted this way in this election, but then they voted a different way in the last.” It’s like, no, they could be totally different people who turned out, right? So you say, “What did 18- to 29-year-olds do this year? What did they do the year before?” Remember, many of them probably aged out of that cohort. But as one person said to me, “You got to think about every election as a river kind of thing, where it’s going to change over the course of time. New people are coming in; people are going out.”

Bartlett: I want to go into some states, especially on the Senate side. I’m originally from Ohio. Ohio, to me, kind of seemed like Pennsylvania. You weren’t exactly sure what you were going to get. But I feel like the past two cycles Ohio’s been solidly red.

Yep.

Bartlett: You do have Senator Sherrod Brown, who is a great campaigner. He does constituent services really well. But Ohio is trending red. And then Maryland, where you have former governor Larry Hogan, who is running for the U.S. Senate. At the time when he was governor, he was the most popular governor in the United States—between him and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. I’d love to get your take on Ohio and Maryland.

I’m so glad you asked. I was just having this conversation this morning with my colleague Jessica Taylor, who covers the Senate and governors for us. We were talking about, because this is how dorky we are, the 1984 election. Now, that year, what most people remember is Walter Mondale got blown out. Didn’t he win one state? He won Minnesota, and that was about it. It was just crushing. But Democrats actually netted a seat in the Senate that year. I was like, is this going to be that kind of year where we maybe see something similar?

Like Sherrod Brown, right? Sherrod Brown’s been running in Ohio since 2006. He has a brand. He’s not some newcomer. But the difference between now and 1984 is that almost half the Senate, they represented states that the presidential candidate of their party had lost. So there were a lot of Larry Hogans and Sherrod Browns. There are only five of those now. I think about Ohio, and I go, well, Sherrod Brown [is] a well-known entity. The Republican, Bernie Moreno, nobody knows who he is. He’s starting really from scratch. Sherrod Brown has won even in 2018, after Trump had won that state. At the same time, Brown hasn’t had to run in a bad year, right? 2018 was a good year for Democrats. 2012, Obama carried that state. And then 2006 was a great year.

Then I look at 2022 and that Senate race in Ohio. Tim Ryan, the Democrat, ran a great race. J.D. Vance was not a strong candidate and had a lot of problems. Yet, even with all that, Ryan not only lost, but it wasn’t even really that close.

So that is a similar challenge. It’s a challenge that is somewhat similar in Maryland with a little bit of a difference. Hogan, as you said, he’s super-popular. In fact, I bet his approval rating among Democrats is higher than approval ratings among Republicans because he’s not a Trump Republican. So Democrats love that. The question is can he be seen as a check on not just Trump but on Republicans writ large. I just saw he had a new ad up. I don’t know if you guys saw this the other day, where he talks about I’m not going to be beholden to anybody.

I think his biggest challenge is people saying, “Look, we like you, we think you did a great job, we know that you’re not a Trump fan, we get that. But Mitch McConnell’s gonna call you and he’s gonna make you do stuff, and you’re just one more vote that Republicans have to pass stuff we don’t like. You think that you’re independent, but you’re gonna get pressured.” So he’s trying to get out ahead of that… maybe. Let me put it this way: the better and stronger that Trump looks, I think the harder it is for Hogan. The stakes become that much higher to putting him in the Senate.

Bartlett: We talked a little bit about third-party candidates—probably the question that Joel and I get asked second-most when we do our legislative policy updates for our member firms. The first one: is Trump going to win? Second one: is a third-party candidate even possible?

You mean, to ever win?

Bartlett: To ever win. And I'm like, Taylor Swift, maybe.

No, she’s polarizing! Literally, there is no one left. There was a time when you could be like, yeah, Taylor Swift, yeah, Oprah.

Bartlett: Could you go into what would need to happen for a third-party candidate to be viable rather than taking votes away?

We need to not have an Electoral College, maybe. I mean, really, that 270 is just the killer for a third-party candidate. The other problem is that we do essentially have four parties in this country. You’ve got your center left, your center right, and then the populist left and the populist right. And they have to coexist under one tent. One side wins out over the other constantly.

My answer to your question about third parties, can they win, is actually they already have. I mean, Donald Trump is not a Republican. He took the Republican Party banner, but he’s a third-party candidate. Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat. He almost became the nominee. So they do have tremendous influence. In fact, the party itself is weaker than it’s ever been. Look at them: they can’t anoint anybody, they can’t stop anybody for as much as they would like to. With the parties being as weak as possible, it means that a strong candidate can come in and basically take the wheel. So Bernie Sanders has been driving a lot; even though he didn’t win the nomination, he’s been driving policy for the Democrats, wouldn’t you agree? Or the progressives certainly have been in charge.

In another country, they would be either the Greens or, I don’t know, whatever most left-leaning party, and Donald Trump’s party, which would be the more populist-nationalist, becoming the leader of that Republican [party].

Kopperud: Is there a direct line from that phenomenon to the waning faith in institutions? You touched on that briefly in your remarks earlier.

That’s a really good way to think about it. I don’t know the chicken or the egg about which started first, but I think that the parties were seen as almost too strong. So there were efforts—and I think they were for the right reasons—to put more power in the hands of regular people and take it out of the hands of power brokers. So let’s have primaries instead of just having a bunch of dudes sit in a room and pick who their candidates are. Let voters have more say in that. Let’s change the campaign finance law so that it’s not just the parties giving unlimited money to candidates.

Of course, the internet changed all that, too, with Howard Dean. He was the guy who harnessed for the first time the power of small-dollar donors coming through the internet. All of that has destabilized that institution of the parties. In its place, what you have is this weird sort of Frankenstein—you still have the rules in place about how we nominate a candidate, and that’s where the parties are strong. But their power to move an agenda, their power to limit who gets a nomination or who gets money or who doesn’t, that has been curtailed greatly. I think the lack of faith in institutions has been building for a really long time.

It is, I think, a reflection of, and again, I keep pointing to the internet and our phones as a big driver of this, but you know what? Institutions helped answer questions for us and gave us some structure, and we trusted them because we didn’t have the answers ourselves, and we needed that. Now you say, I can just Google it. I don’t need you to tell me this. I can figure this out on my own, and I can be an expert, right? Why do I need doctors? I just went onto WebMD, and it looks like what I have is a rare form of tropical whatever disease. You might want a doctor to look at that before.

So we’ve all become experts. If you’re an expert, then I don’t need your advice on anything else. That’s quite something to see. Where this goes I do not know. We’re living at this weird time where we still have these institutions, and those of us of a certain age, it’s all we know, so we’re still holding on to them. Then you have these younger folks coming in like, “What is this?”

Kopperud: Burn the place down.

Right?

Kopperud: I want to fire ’em all and get it all on video. How many times do we hear that?

Start from scratch.

Bartlett: Get rid of that historical knowledge and not make the same mistakes.

And the guardrails. Should we get rid of the Electoral College? You say, yeah, it’s kind of anachronistic, this idea that one state, like Pennsylvania, why do they get all the power? What about other places? That seems silly.

Kopperud: Or that California has just as many votes in the Senate as Wyoming.

Right. So things that made sense at the time, or at least you can go through their reasoning for it, it’s really hard to make it work now. Because instead of just saying, oh, well, we have the Electoral College and people go, oh, OK. Now it’s, why? Why should we just keep doing it?