The View from Right Field

Winning Elections in the Age of Trump

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel wrote about elections across the country, from Washington State’s Senate to gubernatorial elections in Kansas and Florida where Republicans are pushing education issues.  In Washington, long-time incumbent Patty Murray is ahead of her Republican challenger by only three points with Seattle teachers having recently voted to go on strike.

Ms. Strassel says that that “[a]ny Republican who isn’t making criticism of failed Covid education decisions – and promises of school choice and parental involvement – a lead message is committing an election foul.”  The problem is that Donald Trump doesn’t agree.  Former President Trump tells us there is only one issue: the stolen election of 2020.  And far too many Republicans agree with him.

Democrats for Trump

Back when they had campaign buttons, you would see buttons that said “Republicans for [Democrat]” or “Democrats for [Republican].  In fact, I think we still have some “Democrats for Nixon” buttons in our basement.

If they still had campaign buttons, a lot of Democrats, at least Democratic leaders and Democratic campaign advisers, would be wearing “Democrats for Trump” buttons – or at least they would if they were honest.  Because a lot of Democrats, and a lot of Democratic money, are trying to help pro-Trump Republicans win Republican primaries.  That is what happened here in Illinois.  The Democratic Governors Association kept sending me mail, the old-fashioned kind, via the Post Office, telling me that Darren Bailey was “too conservative” and that he liked Donald Trump too much.  Both of which were true, but both of which were designed to get pro-Trump Republicans to vote for Darren Bailey in the primary, instead of one of the other candidates who might have actually had a chance to beat our Democratic governor, who is running for re-election, in November.

Optimism for November?

Daniel Henninger wrote in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal about “The Conservative Case for Optimism.”  I wish I could be as hopeful as Mr. Henninger with respect to the Republicans’ chances in November.  Unfortunately, the Republicans’ ability to shoot themselves in the foot gives me pause.  When Barack Obama was president, it took the Republicans until 2014 to take the Senate, even though they won the House in 2010, largely because they nominated some terrible candidates in 2010 and 2012.  And they did it even without Donald Trump.

With former President Trump around, the Republicans’ chances to throw away victory in November are even greater.  As always, former President Trump is focused on himself, and his grievances about the “stolen” election of 2020, instead of party or policy – or country. 

Georgia On My Mind

With Georgia having a primary election on Tuesday, a couple of thoughts.  First, it will be interesting to see what the turnout is.  The left has said that the new election laws Georgia passed last year were designed to reduce minority turnout.  Among other things, Atlanta lost the All-Star Game because of it.  Let’s see whether turnout really is reduced.  Reports so far indicate turnout may actually be up.  If so, will MLB apologize?  How about the Democrats?

Second, I find it bizarre that former U.S. Senator David Perdue is running against Governor Brian Kemp in the Republican primary on a pro-Trump stolen election platform.  Regardless of whether you think Donald Trump was cheated out of Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020 (I don’t), there can be little doubt that former President Trump’s tactics and campaigning in the two Georgia run-off elections in early January of 2021 cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate – and David Perdue his Senate seat.¹
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¹ See “The Great Georgia 2021 Senate ‘What If?’” here.

The Great Georgia 2021 Senate “What If?”

November of 2020, there were 50 Republican senators and 48 Democrats.  But there were two races in Georgia where there had to be run-off elections because no candidate had gotten 50%+1 of the votes cast on election day (as required by Georgia law).  In both races, the Republican candidate got more votes than the Democratic candidate on election day, but the Republican had not gotten 50%+1.  So there were going to be two run-off elections on January 5, 2021.  The Democrats won run-offs, thus giving the Democrats a 50-50 “majority” in the Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But what if Donald Trump, instead of going down to Georgia in December of 2020 in a snit and complaining he had been cheated out of the election and saying there was no way any Republican would be allowed to win anywhere, even in Georgia¹; what if President Trump had gone to Georgia in December of 2020 and tried to rally Republicans to vote for the Republican Senate candidates, telling his supporters that they needed to get out and vote so we could keep the Democrats from controlling the Senate?²  And what if, therefore, even one of the Republicans had won?  The Republicans would have controlled the Senate.  But what more might have happened?

Donald Trump Praises Vladimir Putin – As Putin Invades Ukraine

One would like to think that Donald Trump’s praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the very moment Russia is invading Ukraine would be enough to finally put enough Republicans off former President Trump, but I fear it may not.

Note: I will leave it to others to explain why former President Trump said these things.  I don’t know if there is a reason other than, for former President Trump, everything is always about him.  I doubt there is another reason, but if somebody can come up with one, more power to them.

An Alternate Covid History

Here’s a thought experiment or maybe, more accurately, a possible alternate history of Covid in the United States:

• Donald Trump wins re-election in November of 2020.  (It was possible.  As I noted here, Joe Biden’s margin of victory was only 66,000 votes.¹)

Other Countries Can Get Competent Leaders. Why Can’t We?

You would think that a country as big as the United States, with as many people as we have, could have really good people at the top of its government.  But look at our current president and his predecessor.  They are both embarrassing.

Compare them, either of them, with Sir John Key, former Prime Minister of New Zealand (from 2008-2016), who spoke on “Walking the path to the next global financial crisis” in this panel discussion hosted by The New Zealand Initiative:

The Republican Party’s Got Trouble

To paraphrase (poorly) Robert Preston singing Meredith Willson’s song “Ya Got Trouble” in “The Music Man”:  

“[The Republican Party’s] got trouble!
Right here in River City
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for … former President Trump.”

Donald Trump is going around telling everybody that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  He calls it the “Presidential Election Fraud of 2020.”  Except the election was not stolen from him.  He lost because Joe Biden won a majority in the Electoral College.¹  But former President Trump can’t seem to handle that fact.  He wrote a long letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday listing all kinds of problems with the vote count in Pennsylvania.  The WSJ listed just some of the errors in former President Trump’s list in an editorial on Friday, but it is impossible to respond to all of his claims.  But that doesn’t mean they’re right.  He just says things.  Trying to respond to them all is a fool’s errand.

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.²