It will be a stormy L.A. election day for the first time in years. Will rain hurt turnout? Will Republicans suffer a blow?
In theory, this is a perfect year for Republicans to capture the White House. Donald Trump hasn’t lost a single state — and, most of all, he is not a Republican — and, as the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, there are no Democrats on the ballot who can compete with him on the left.
In theory. In reality, this is quite a different story.
The party is in tatters. Its core support, which Trump has been able to tap into, has been weakened by four years of bad economic policy, a series of devastating Democratic losses, and a series of scandals.
Trump’s rise, in essence, is not about him being popular but about him being a uniquely awful candidate who attracts the worst voters. That makes his election a long shot for Democrats, even though they won a bunch of states in 2018. And it makes it hard for Republicans to win, even though they’re winning some states.
In the long term, though, Trump is about as much of a loser as George W. Bush was in 2000. His party is a year away from being a completely alien party that is unlikely to nominate a presidential candidate who can really compete against him in 2020.
And that matters. The GOP’s loss of the House this year signals a broader challenge for the party. The party in charge of writing the laws, the party that sets the rules, is losing relevance. A party can be as dominant as it wants, but if it no longer has the legitimacy to influence the laws that govern our lives, then it is irrelevant.
The Democrats’ collapse of 2018 is about a failure of leadership. When there was a moment of reckoning in 2017, though, Donald Trump managed to avoid it. There are two lessons to be drawn from that episode.
First, leadership matters. When you are down to one person as the only person in charge of shaping the laws of our country, it is very hard to keep the country together. Sometimes it is better to change the leader or the law at this stage
