If you want to
experience the full-on contempt of the leftist intelligentsia right now, go on
social media and suggest, as I did this week, that Donald Trump isn’t certain
to get crushed in November. (Trump, in case you hadn’t noticed, brings out
pretty much the worst in everybody.)
The way a lot of
partisan Democrats see it, Hillary Clinton — despite a loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana
Tuesday — will soon lock down her party’s nomination, and the only way she
finds herself even threatened by Trump is if the media decides to legitimize
him so we all have something to talk about. The word I keep hearing from liberals
is “layup.”
Clinton does, in
fact, enter the general election season with some serious structural
advantages. Having analyzed trends from the past six elections and factored in
demographic shifts, Third Way, the leading
centrist Democratic group, concluded that Clinton starts the campaign virtually
assured of 237 electoral votes — 46 more than Trump and just 33 short of a majority.
And as you’ve
probably heard, no candidate has ever overcome — or even tried to overcome —
the kind of ugly impressions Trump has
made on women and minority voters to this point. Next to him, Clinton polls
like Santa Claus.
But if history
is any guide, Clinton comes to the campaign with a structural disadvantage,
too, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked. It may explain why she can’t seem to
put Bernie Sanders away — and why the outcome in November is hardly assured.
I’ve gone through this history once or twice before,
but it bears repeating: In 1947, Congress passed the 22nd Amendment, which said
no one could be elected to the presidency more than twice.
In the 65 years
since the last state ratified that amendment — comprising 16 elections, and six
elections following an eight-year presidency — only one nominee has managed to
win a third consecutive term for his party. That was George H.W. Bush, who
overcame a double-digit deficit late in the campaign, thanks in part to one of
the most ineffectual Democratic campaigns in history.
(And before you
start with me, I know, Al Gore actually won, and in an alternate universe
somewhere they are building his monument on the Tidal Basin in a climate that
is, on average, four degrees cooler than the one we inhabit, but for purposes
of this discussion, let’s just live in the here and now.)
The important
question is why it’s proved so difficult for either side to win third terms.
The most common explanation has to do with voter fatigue. Essentially, we’re
told that voters get sick of having one party in office for eight years, and so
the pendulum swings back.
I don’t find
this theory especially persuasive. I’ve met an awful lot of voters over the
years, and rarely have I heard anyone make the case that it was time for the
other party to get a turn. It seems to me voters focus a lot more on the
candidates themselves than on the parties they represent.
And this may get
to the truer cause of the third-term conundrum. If you look back at elections
over the past half century, what you find is that the parties of two-term
incumbents almost always nominate the candidate who is nominally next in line.
Of the six candidates who have sought third terms since 1960, five had
previously served as either president or vice president. (The president was
Gerald Ford, who ran for election in 1976 after having held the job for
two-plus years.)
The outlier was
John McCain, who, like Clinton, had been the runner-up in the last open
election, and who ran in a year when the incumbent vice president was sitting
it out.
It’s not hard to
see how this happens. A two-term president has both the time and the muscle to
set up someone who will carry on his legacy — while effectively boxing out
challengers.
And because
presidents almost always lose congressional seats and governorships in off-year
elections, an eight-year presidency tends to decimate the ranks of worthy,
younger successors from outside the establishment, anyway.
In other words,
by the time a president gets done slogging his way through the peaks and
troughs of eight years on the job, there aren’t a lot of new, exciting
alternatives to whichever former rival or loyal No. 2 has been patiently
waiting on the edge of the stage.
The problem is
that the next-in-line — Gore, McCain, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon in 1960 —
is almost never as politically gifted as the president he (or she) has served.
If he were, he wouldn’t have ended up next-in-line to begin with.
And that
inferiority is only magnified by a dilemma that even the best politicians would
find damn near impossible to navigate. The next-in-line has to be loyal without
being small, embody the future while representing the past. He has to somehow
embrace continuity while at the same time putting distance between himself and
the inevitable disappointment a president leaves behind.
The next-in-line
always has more trouble than he should unifying the party, because the fissures
that were suppressed through eight years of a presidency — in the cause of
staving off the opposition — rise to the surface. The end of every eight-year
presidency is something like the fall of Tito, with disparate factions and
pent-up emotions finally unleashed.
Clinton —
runner-up in 2008, loyal soldier thereafter — is the prototypical next-in-line.
Thanks to a couple of dreadful midterm election cycles, she’s had to contend only
with a 74-year-old protest candidate who just recently joined the party, and
even then she hasn’t been able to excite enough of her own party’s base to lock
down the nomination by May.
She’s had to lash herself tightly to the president while at
the same time trying to co-opt the ideological fury among the party’s
dissatisfied factions. She will emerge from this process with her agenda
opaque, her convictions hedged.
Maybe Gore and
McCain, having gone through the exact same thing, have some sort of support
group she can visit.
Unlike both of
those guys, of course, Clinton seems to have gotten astoundingly lucky in her
opposition. It’s true: Trump’s appalling rhetoric will make for some whopping
TV ads. And yes, if his numbers hold, especially among women, Trump’s next
reality-show gig might be called “The Biggest Loser of All Time.”
But here’s the
thing about Trump: He’s run the flat-out most offensive, least substantive and
crassest campaign in memory, and national polls show him
trailing Clinton by 10 points, with six months yet to go.
Think about
that. In presidential politics, 10 points can fall away faster than Carly
Fiorina on a riser.
And while
voters’ impressions at this point in a campaign are normally hard to change,
what we don’t know about Trump — the big question, to my mind — is whether the
larger electorate will ultimately judge him by the standards of a politician
or, like primary voters, as a celebrity.
Politicians
aren’t allowed to simply shrug off their records and respawn entirely. The
voters, finely attuned to any sign of inauthenticity, won’t have it.
But entertainers
reinvent and redeem themselves all the time; it’s what gossipy magazines exist
for. And Trump is closer to inhabiting this realm than any candidate we’ve ever
seen.
Don’t expect the
Trump who takes the stage in Cleveland to be remotely like the Trump who
bragged about his genitalia in a debate.
And don’t assume, just because his bigotry and base antics are a matter of
record, that the rules of traditional politics will apply.
Next-in-lines
have been known (at least once) to win, and assuming she can nail down the
nomination, Clinton is as clear a favorite as we’ve seen in a while. But
Clinton shouldn’t delude herself into thinking she’s headed for a layup, and
neither should anyone else
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