Pearl River Trying to sort everything out and make a plan for the future is a rocky and uneven road, while everything continues to settle. It’s important to keep our powder kind of dry while we figure things out.
Heck, even in this so-called “red wave” sweep, control of the House of Representatives is still not certain, even as most have conceded it to the Republicans, where they lead, so it’s logical to do so. With the margin today only about a dozen seats and almost 40 still up for grabs, control by either party will be tenuous. Given the fact that Speaker Johnson has had to depend on deals with the Democrats on key votes over his tenure, there’s no real reason to believe that situation will change dramatically. There will still be a harder, crazier caucus pushing farther and farther right, even while there will be some folks trying to plan for a dominant future post-Trump.
Remember this is a Trump victory, more than it is a Republican victory. The two might seem synonymous, given the way Trump has remade the party and dominates it totally, but the magnetic pull for everything, just as it was in Trump I, will be Trump himself and his hopes for an imperial presidency.
Party strategists and politicians who want to exploit the newcomers to their voting column will want to modulate some of the wildness to make this a watershed election, and not just an anomaly. Remember, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, are still not Florida or Mississippi. To hold on they will have to sell different stuff. Republicans in Texas will also want to hold on to their new found support along the border with Hispanics. This may mean more harshness on there, but less hate speech about mass deportation and how much Puerto Rico sucks. Republicans who think about the party’s post-Trump future will understand that this vote was a working and middle-class protest about the economy and a demand for change that found a vessel in the anti-everything, always aggrieved Trump candidacy. That’s not sustainable.
The next four years will still be all about Trump. He won’t and can’t deliver to the working class when the line out of his door will be filled with the megarich, business CEOs, tech overlords like Elon Musk, crypto-pirates, and autocrats around the globe. He’s a lame duck president with two years to muck around. It will be bad for unions, antitrust, the climate, and cities for sure. No doubt, this White House will be terrible, but, judging by his new chief of staff, it will likely be more competent, and that’s bad news for everyone.
The question is whether we can build in the base that he will disappoint? Progressives have lost the culture war. Intersectionality, done right, might work, but separate identity politics is a loser. We can win on issues, if we pick them well. Abortion is a good example. The issue was way more popular and deeply sturdy politically than candidate Harris. It’s not enough to build a party or a movement, but it’s now more a problem for Trump and Republicans, than for Democrats and others. Florida can manipulate the initiative with a 60% threshold, but they also know how to count the votes. When they lose 57% to 43%, they still know that’s a landslide loss. Moving to economic issues that might have the same kind of deep appeal and salience has to be a priority to rebuild the base forfeited to Trump. The issues have to build organizations and parties, not personalities and politicians. Trump has been brilliant at doing the opposite, but he’s sui generis.
Who knows? Let’s let it settle and see where we need to go from here.