What Would Advances by the Democrats Mean?

President Trump appears finally to be grappling with the prospect of GOP midterm losses and the threat to his agenda. “When you have a sitting president,” he lamented, “no matter how good they seem to be, they’re at a big disadvantage.” Any midterm gains by the Democrats are likely to beget rhetoric about a rebuke of Mr. Trump and his agenda. Yet as the midterm elections of 1986 and other years illustrate, such talk can turn out to be premature. In the midterms 40 years ago, the GOP lost eight seats in the Senate, returning control to the Democrats. It ceded five House seats. Speaker Tip O’Neill on the evening of Election Day crowed that “If there was a Reagan Revolution, it’s over.” Yet in the days following the voting a clearer-eyed appraisal emerged from pollsters Mark Penn and Doug Schoen. They questioned the consensus that the GOP losses amounted to “a rejection of the President’s policies.” The Republican setback in the 1986 midterms, Messrs. Penn and Schoen said, “represents a much more complicated result.” In their telling, the GOP showing then reflected “the institutionalization of the Reagan agenda in United States politics.” This was in part, Messrs. Penn and Schoen contended, because of the popularity of Reagan’s agenda. The Gipper in 1984 had just won re-election in a landslide, carrying 49 states. Nor were the Democrats seeking to reverse Reagan’s tax cuts or his deregulatory drive. This ended up helping the GOP’s opponents. Subscribing to “the same fiscal principles that have guided President Reagan,” Messrs. Penn and Schoen said, made it hard to suggest “that they are big spenders.” With a lack of ideological contrast on the hustings, the two pollsters argued, many of the midterm races came down instead to the candidates’ personalities.That said, the budget deficits of the Reagan era had also handed an advantage to the Democrats. Republicans, per Messrs. Penn and Schoen, “could hardly argue that they could do a better job on that issue,” one that “was uppermost in the voters’ minds.” Broadly, they suggested that the 1986 results, far from derailing Reagan, signaled the “institutionalization of an anti-New Deal consensus in American political life.” In Reagan’s case, loss of control of the Senate proved less damaging on the budgetary front, or to the president’s foreign policy, than in the arena of judicial appointments. Senator Joe Biden acceded to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. That helped to thwart, say, Reagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court of Judge Robert Bork, leading to the nomination of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Such a consequential setback could be echoed in the next two years.Yet it’s far from clear that the Democrats, even if they manage to capture control of one or both houses of Congress, will emerge with anything like a mandate — or even a coherent agenda. The Democrats are slated to recapture the House, Reuters reports, with a majority of between five and 20 seats. A former Clinton adviser, William Galston, now a Wall Street Journal columnist, says that would give Democrats “a working majority, but not a huge one.”A House under the gavel of Speaker Hakeem Jeffries would, in Reuters’ telling, find it difficult “to pass contentious legislation or claim the sweeping mandate associated with past wave elections.” Meantime, the question of control of the Senate after November 3 is far from settled. The Democrats would need four seats to capture the majority. Even if they do, the filibuster could bar a leftward legislative lurch — and deter a derailing of Mr. Trump’s agenda.

What Would Advances by the Democrats Mean?

What Would Advances by the Democrats Mean?

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