Republicans shouldn't be complacent about 2024

A tale of two polls
It’s not hard to understand why Republicans are optimistic about 2022. Things are going badly for Joe Biden. Democrats are, in the minds of lots of voters, the party of school closures and forever masking even as vaccines are widely available, cuts to police funding in a time of rising violent crime, massive public spending that coincides with the highest level of inflation in 40 years and toxic antiracism in an era of successful multiracial democracy.

Everything points to a red tsunami, including the recent Gallup survey that found that 47 percent…

A tale of two polls

It’s not hard to understand why Republicans are optimistic about 2022. Things are going badly for Joe Biden. Democrats are, in the minds of lots of voters, the party of school closures and forever masking even as vaccines are widely available, cuts to police funding in a time of rising violent crime, massive public spending that coincides with the highest level of inflation in 40 years and toxic antiracism in an era of successful multiracial democracy.

Everything points to a red tsunami, including the recent Gallup survey that found that 47 percent of Americans identify with the Republican Party versus 42 percent with the Democrats. As Spectator columnist Christopher Caldwell argues in the New York Times, the poll records the biggest reversal in a party’s fortunes that Gallup has ever seen and “portends a political earthquake.”

I agree. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that Republican bullishness is fast becoming Republican hubris. And that future victories, not just in 2022 but in 2024, are increasingly seen as signed, sealed and delivered.

What can guard against polling-induced complacency? Why, more polling of course. (What else will politicians and their advisers pay attention to?)

This week’s Morning Consult survey for Politico is the latest to ask voters about hypothetical 2024 contests. Here’s how Biden performs against various high-profile Republicans:

Joe Biden: 45 percent

Donald Trump: 44 percent

Joe Biden: 45 percent

Ted Cruz: 39 percent

Joe Biden: 45 percent

Mike Pence: 42 percent

Joe Biden: 44 percent

Ron DeSantis: 39 percent

With the caveat that the presidential race is obviously not decided on a straight popular vote, Biden beats them all. A Republican might respond to these numbers by referring me back to Biden’s atrocious approval ratings, or to the fact that the president increasingly looks to be a few french fries short of a Happy Meal. To which I say: exactly. You’re losing to this guy. In fact, you already lost to him once. And you could lose to him twice.

The story of recent American political history is the story of neither party doing what it would take to become an out-and-out majority party. Republican bullishness rests on signs that crucial cohorts are heading rightwards. They look at the inroads Republican candidates made in suburbs in 2021 and the trends among non-white voters in 2020 and get understandably excited. Parents are angry at a Democratic Party that has sided with teachers’ unions, while Hispanic voters are eschewing the assumptions the left made about an emerging rainbow coalition. These are important developments. But they are electoral opportunities, not a fait accompli.

Taken together, Biden’s dire approval ratings and his strong showing in hypothetical 2024 matchups are a reminder that the prevailing mood of this political era is loathing, not of one side or the other but of politics. Republicans may be the less-loathed side of the divide at present. That might even be enough to win. But it is a shakier foundation for future success than many Republicans seem to realize.

An outbreak of bipartisanship

Joe Biden might bemoan the lack of bipartisan action in Washington, but several cross-party initiatives on the Hill are gathering momentum.

The first is the push to reform the Electoral Count Act, the archaic legislation that handles the certification of Electoral College results. The main bipartisan group working on how to clean up to legislation, convened by Susan Collins, is growing. More than a dozen senators, including six Republicans, met on Monday. Mitch McConnell remains open to supporting the proposed measures. “I’m happy to take a look at what they come up with,” he said last week.

If reform to the Electoral Count Act is the area of staid cooperation among Senate old-timers, then the question of whether lawmakers should be able trade stocks is proving fertile common ground for a younger generation in both parties. Yesterday, a letter signed by 27 House members was sent to both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Republican counterpart Kevin McCarthy calling for a ban on lawmakers and their spouses trading stocks. Twenty-five signatories are Democrats and two, Matt Gaetz and Ryan Fitzpatrick, are Republican. In the Senate, Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff and Missouri Republican Josh Hawley have rival bills that would do the same thing.

Pelosi, who has announced she is running for re-election later this year, recently defended the status quo. “We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” said the wife of prolific trader Paul Pelosi. (If only she applied the same logic to other people’s economic freedoms.)

Sanctions against Russia is perhaps the most pressing area where bipartisan cooperation is underway. There are multiple Senate bills on either side of the aisle that would impose punitive measures on Russia. They differ in extent and timing, but it seems likely that lawmakers from both parties will coalesce around a proposal soon.

Failing upwards at the WHO

Multinational organizations aren’t exactly famous for democratic accountability, but it is nonetheless a surprise to see that World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is set to secure a second term in the job. From heaping praise on the totalitarian regime responsible for Covid-19 to issuing unscientific and confusing medical advice and policy suggestions, his organization hasn’t had a great pandemic. And yet he is running unopposed.

The only country to quibble with his reelection was Ethiopia, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Covid. Tedros, an ethnic Tigrayan, has condemned Ethiopia’s blockade of Tigray, which he says means the WHO has been unable to send humanitarian aid to the region.