Ask Us Anything

1. What changes and what stays the same following the Todd Blanche confirmation? I’m seeing a lot of concern about it, and understandably so, but Trump’s boundless corruption is already pretty well established. Anyone he nominates is a sycophant who believes (or possibly pretends to believe) whatever nonsense he spouts. Wouldn’t Blanche continue trying to prosecute Trump’s political opponents as he and others have already been doing, and continue (hopefully) losing in court? Or am I missing something?

(Chris) I don’t think you are missing anything. I don’t think anything changes because Blanche is confirmed, and I don’t really think anything would have changed if he was not confirmed.

If Blanche had not been confirmed, then he would have stayed on as acting Attorney General. If Trump eventually nominated someone else who was confirmed, more likely than not that person would have been just as bad as Blanche, and just as much a puppet of Trump. I would expect the same level of corruption we are seeing now, and the same, endless, but consistently failing, efforts to prosecute Donald Trump’s political opponents.

So yeah, I agree with you. Nothing has changed, as far as I can tell.

2. Is there any politician out there that is truly neither left nor right but centrist? If so, does that politician have any chance of being elected?

(Matt) The problem with the concept of centrism is that it implies there is a middle position to public opinion. This may have been the case in the past, but in the age of Trump we are divided into two camps with opposite world views. What is the centrist position between the MAGA vision for America and everyone else? You can’t split the difference between supporting democracy on one hand and seeking to maintain power at all costs on the other. And while it is certainly possible to speak of politicians being more or less progressive and more or less conservative, these degrees of moderation fail to capture the center of the broad sweep of public opinion. This is why I’m reluctant to use terms like moderate or centrist to describe politicians at this moment.

3. If the Blue Wave comes and Democrats win back Congress, I have heard that Trump will try to pressure the current Republican Congress (and, of course, his lapdog Mike Johnson) to refuse to seat the incoming Congress. If such a thing happens, are we stuck with the Republicans despite our votes? Is there anything one citizen can do?

(Chris) The Constitution gives the House of Representatives absolute power to determine the winners of its own elections (Article I, Section 5, Clause 1). There is literally no recourse, not even to the Supreme Court, to what the majority of the House of Representatives decides when it comes to their own elections.

So, technically speaking, it is possible for a majority of the House of Representatives to go rogue and decide not to seat any members of their opposition—or, for that matter, any members of their own party that they don’t like.

That said, this is just not a realistic fear. To be honest, it is another case of progressives swallowing Donald Trump’s con job that he is all powerful.

Trump has been either president, or president-elect, when over 600 Democrats won elections to the House of Representatives. Did he try to refuse to have any of them seated? Was there a significant campaign from anyone not to seat any Democratic member of Congress? The answer to these questions, of course, is no.

The reason there has been no effort to prevent anyone from being seated is because there is unanimous consensus among members of the House of Representatives of both parties to seat the free and fair winners of House elections.

Before ABC News took it down, FiveThirtyEight had a great article showing the long-term trend in disputed elections for the House of Representatives by decade. Thanks to the wanderers of the Wayback Machine, you can view it, in snapshot form, by clicking here. The article shows that there used to be far more disputed elections to the House of Representatives, but that they have been in decline since the turn of the 20th century, and are now at their lowest point ever.

If you will forgive me, I would like to add that sometimes I find questions like this a little exasperating. People who think that every single Republican member of Congress will just do literally whatever Donald Trump wants, up to and including preventing Democrats from being seated in Congress, just seem to be living in a different world than I am. Trump is regularly rebuked by members of his own party, who regularly do not do what he wants. One of the things they definitely won’t do is refuse to seat any Democrats—because they actually believe in democracy, for the most part—and we know this because none of them have ever tried to do it!

4. Current polls keep showing that Trump’s approval ratings are cratering. We are supposed to draw hope from this. Going back to 2016, polls have consistently and repeatedly misrepresented the Trump voter, whether the polling misses those voters or whether they lie in their responses, or whatever. He and his minions have ended up with numbers that do not reflect the polls. How do we really stand with respect to the midterms, given this decade-long trend?

(Matt) Pollsters have had difficulty accounting for the percentage of Trump supporters in the voting population, and this has been an issue when Trump was on the ballot. That, of course, will not be the case—at least not in the literal sense—this November. Trump—like any incumbent president—will be the main driver of the midterm vote, because the public stands to pass judgment on his party for how they view his administration. But he will never be on a ballot again.

When I assess the likelihood of a blue wave, I look at a series of metrics that have proven reliable in previous midterms—including the 2018 election when Trump was the incumbent—to assess how the electorate is shaping up. These metrics are all pointing in the same direction, whether we look at Trump’s historically low approval rating, his dismal standing with independent voters, the Democrats’ strong standing in the generic House ballot, Democratic over-performance in special elections since the start of Trump’s second presidency, the disproportionate number of Republican retirements from Congress, the ability of Democrats to recruit stronger candidates than Republicans, greater enthusiasm among Democrats to vote, higher rates of participation in Democratic primaries, successful Democratic grassroots fundraising, or the large number of Republican House seats being targeted by Democrats.

That’s a lot of data, and it’s not all from polling. It suggests that Democrats are in an extremely strong position going into November.

5. I’d like to see progressives give a unified response to the ongoing “Democrats in disarray “narrative. Something like: “Democrats believe that each candidate should represent his or her constituents—in a diverse country that means a range of candidates and we embrace that.” What do you think and how would you phrase it?

(Chris) That’s a very nice idea. However, I have to be frank with you: there are powerful activist organizations, members of Congress, and influential media figures who do not favor a big tent in the Democratic Party. They expect everyone to take the same hard line, and variation and dissent are not tolerated. They believe in frightening people to stay in line by publicly destroying the careers of prominent dissenters.

And folks like that aren’t going away. As such, the factional fighting will continue unabated, and it will continue to dominate headlines about Democratic politics.

As individuals, the only thing we can do is to learn more about the political landscape so we can identify the main people and groups fueling these fights, and then choose whether to participate. Having had close contact with many of the groups and individuals involved with it, I can tell you right now that I want no part of it whatsoever.

(Matt) The “Democrats in disarray” narrative is a remnant of the long period when Democrats were a minority party composed of a range of groups promoting their particular agendas. You can go back to the Reagan years, when Republicans accused Democrats of being a party of “special interests” without a coherent national platform. This is not an unusual position for a party after a long run in the majority, because coalitions burn themselves out over time and are reduced to their component parts once the country no longer wants what they are selling.

The Republican party is currently in this situation. After setting the national agenda for the better part of four decades, it has been reduced to a rump reactionary party under Donald Trump and the country is in the process of rejecting it. This gives Democrats the ability to offer a vision and ask for a mandate to lead a post-Trump America. It may not put an immediate end to the disarray narrative, especially because the process that will shape that vision will be a presidential primary campaign that may well not be orderly. But it should give Democrats something much better—the opportunity to demonstrate they can lead the country. If they are successful, a new narrative will follow.