Enter the Loyal Opposition

            Perhaps you’ve noticed my recent silence. 

            I have never been a Trump supporter.  And I’ve written several blog posts leading up to the presidential election where I insisted that it was highly improbable that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton.  Like so many others initiated into the cult of big data, in making my predictions, I discounted voter enthusiasm and made assumptions about political behavior that simply weren’t supported by the facts.

            Mea culpa, mea culpa.

            I share the shock and disbelief that a man like Donald Trump could win the world’s most prominent office.  I still have trouble saying or writing the words “President Trump.”

            But I have never been much on emotional reactions to things, good or bad.  Perhaps I’m one of the last men in my generation to be able to emote publically.  Or maybe, while I was a child, I spent too much time admiring Mr. Spock over Captain Kirk.

            So I’ve held my tongue.  I haven’t taken to the streets to protest the election, nor have I written anything about the fear I feel for the non-white members of my family and for my country.  I’ve not insisted that Mr. Trump’s victory is illegitimate nor have I condemned his supporters.  I’ve written before, under happier circumstances, that democracy requires a degree of good sportsmanship, requiring the losers to acknowledge the winners and to accept the notion that elections have consequences.  I still believe that.

            But no one should mistake my silence for anything more or less than good sportsmanship.  On the day after the election, I resolved to give Mr. Trump a chance.  But I also realized that good sportsmanship does not require me to sit idly by when I know what Mr. Trump and his supporters have said they want to do.  Patriotism does not allow me to turn a blind eye to the potential use and abuse of state power to undermine the values I believe this country stands for.

            For me, the first order of business during my period of silence was to try to understand what happened, to see if I was still living in a place transformed by hate, racism, and selfishness.  The data tell me that the world of November 9 is fundamentally unchanged from the world of November 7.  As of today, Hillary Clinton won more than 2 million more votes than did Donald Trump.  But for the atavistic Electoral College, we would now be talking about President-elect Hillary Clinton, not President-elect Donald Trump.  Democrats have now won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.

            Democrats also added two new members to the Senate and six more members to the House.  Given that all of these new members campaigned on the same platform as Hillary Clinton, reading the results of this election as a repudiation of the Democratic party would be a mistake.  Except for the fact that Democrats lost control of the White House—and that’s not something that should be minimized—November 8 wasn’t a bad night for Democrats, at least at the national level.

            What apparently happened on November 8 was less a repudiation of the Democratic party and more a repudiation of Hillary Clinton.  My own analysis, depicted in Figures 1 and 2 shows that most of the people who won Senate seats on November 8 substantially outpolled the presidential candidates. 

Figure 1

Figure 2

Only five of the 20 Republican winners received fewer votes than did Donald Trump in their states, and only 3 of 11 Democratic winners received fewer votes than did Hillary Clinton in their states.  In a highly polarized country like ours, this is not what we expect to see.  Instead, we should expect to see a “coat tails effect” in which the presidential candidate—the main draw on the ballot—has about the same or more votes than the Senate candidate who is drawing from the same partisan constituency.

            In other words, assuming that 2016 was not an exception to the declining trend in ticket-splitting that has occurred since about 1980, it appears that a large number of people from both parties declined to vote for the person at the top of their respective presidential tickets.  Hillary Clinton, despite her large, experienced and professionally managed turnout operation, simply didn’t give that turnout operation enough to work with.  She didn’t excite blacks, millennials, women and other minorities to turn out in the same numbers as did Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  “I’m not Trump,” was not enough of a reason for these voters to show up at the polls.

            It’s true that there were some Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016. Relying on a New York Times analysis of Yougov.com data, Sean McElwee argues that not more than 7 percent of Obama voters flipped.  Much more important was the fact that “Trump was far more effective at getting non-voters and lapsed voters out than he was at converting Obama voters.”

            A  second order of business for me was to assess the likely damage Republican control of the White House and Congress for at least the next two years is likely to bring.  On economic matters, I think it’s not likely that the damage will be too extensive.  Despite what the small government types in the Republican party may think, the November 8 election results don’t presage a popular demand for less governmental intervention in the economy.  Four states—Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Maine—had proposals for increasing the minimum wage on the ballot.  Every one of these ballot issues passed.  While three of these states voted for Clinton, Arizona joins Alaska, Nebraska, South Dakota and Arkansas, red states that adopted minimum wage increases by ballot question in 2014. None of this is consistent with the “free market” approach to the economy the Republican small government crowd espouses.

            And, according to a PRRI/Atlantic survey taken after the election, almost 6 in 10 voters favor tax increases on people who make more than $250,000 a year.  Though only about 4 in 10 Republicans favor such a tax increase, when we focus on Republican voters who favored Trump in the primaries over fellow Republican Ted Cruz, almost half support the policy.  Trump’s also said he wants a tax cut, but like almost all of his predecessors, he’s likely to find that he simply can’t cut taxes and do the other things he’s promised without running up ruinous deficits.

            Given things that Donald Trump said during the campaign, I’m also not expecting big changes in the Medicare or Social Security.   Older people were a key Republican constituency, and I can’t imagine that they’ll sit on their hands if Republicans try to tamper with these programs.  In fact, now that Republicans have complete control of the government and can’t count on a Democratic president to backstop economic recklessness, I’m expecting that whatever support Paul Ryan had within his caucus for "voucherizing" Medicare and privatizing Social Security to evaporate.

            Obamacare, too, isn’t likely to fade quietly into the night.  Voters have long railed against Obamacare while simultaneously indicating support for its key benefits.  Once Republicans figure out that they can’t have those benefits without paying for them through something like the individual mandate, it strikes me as unlikely that Republican members of Congress will vote to take those benefits away from their constituents. 

            The real problem rests with the Supreme Court justice Donald Trump will be able to impose on us as well as with all of the actions he can take as president and those his appointees can take in his name.

            Fortunately, the seat Trump can fill formerly belonged to arch-conservative Antonin Scalia who had only moderate influence over the court.  The appointee will not change the court’s ideological balance from what it was prior to Justice Scalia’s death.  For Democrats, this appointment is a lost opportunity.  We have to worry if Justice Kennedy, Justice Ginsburg or Justice Breyer dies or retires.

            But Trump’s executive branch appointees, such as Jeff Sessions who has been tapped to become Attorney General or whoever he picks for Director of the Environmental Protection Agency can do a lot more mischief merely by deciding how to prioritize limited resources.  Sessions, for example, could hold back on enforcing civil rights laws or voting rights laws.

            And that brings me to my last reaction to this election: activism.  I’ve decided that while I’m ready to give Trump a chance, I’m going to be exercising a heightened level of vigilance.  I’ve already made new contributions to the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way.  I’ve drafted and sought signatories for a pledge obliging signers to stand up against hate and bullying.  I’m prepared to stand up against any plans to create a Muslim Registry and even to identify myself as a Muslim on such a registry despite the fact that I am a committed Jew.  I’m going to press for a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the Electoral College.  And you’re going to see a lot more writing from me when I see Donald Trump or his appointees taking actions that I think are contrary to our country’s norms and values.

            For my part, I’ve resolved to be part of what parliamentary systems call “the Loyal Opposition.”  As part of the “Loyal Opposition,” I stand firm in support of America’s Institutions, even though the Republicans now control them all.  But rather that sit silently, the job of the Loyal Opposition is to challenge the governing party, to hold its feet to the fire, and point out its broken promises and failures.  Progressives are in for at least two and probably four long years on defense.  The people are still with us, and Donald Trump isn’t and has never been an ideological conservative.  We just need to remember, in the words of college football coach Dave Thorson, it’s “offense that sells the tickets, but it’s defense that wins the championships.”

            I’ve been around long enough to know that election results like these don’t last.  Only 4 years after Republican Barry Goldwater suffered a landslide defeat to Lyndon Johnson, taking a large number of congressional Republicans down with him, Richard Nixon won two terms as president.  Six years after Watergate cut the number of congressional Republicans to the lowest level ever, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide with big enough coat tails to capture actual control of the Senate and working control of the House.  And, 8 years after Barack Obama and the Democrats won absolute control of the White House and Congress, the tables have turned, giving Republicans absolute control.  
   
           Let’s see what happens in 2018.