The voters want centrist policies, which no candidate can offer and still win. We the People are stuck having to alternate between liberals and conservatives just to get any meaningful middle-of-the-road consistency.
I predict Mike Pence wins in 2020 as the incumbent. A healthy dose of Upper Midwest conservatism would be good for this country.
Pence is stuck in the ideals of 1950’s America. That doesn’t go over well with todays younger voters and certainly won’t fly when they become older and wiser.
The modern electorate is different than the electorate of a hundred years ago. Since FDR, it’s rare for political parties to win 3 consecutive terms. I think people of today, especially that elusive, highly-pursued chunk of independent centrist voters, are just more prone to “change for change’s sake,” whereby 12 straight years of red or 12 straight years of blue is enough to make them hit the “change” button.
Unless Hillary turns out to be a remarkably popular president then 2020 is fraught with peril. We can hope that Trump has so destroyed the foundation of the GOP that they can’t nominate a strong candidate, but we have to worry that they’ll build a coalition that could get someone like Cruz elected in the face of a public demand for change. We have to hope that circumstances favor a stronger but more politically diverse Democratic party.
I don’t know about that. They skew older, and four years is a long time.
There have only been 25 presidential elections in the last 100 years. How many runs of 4 or more would you expect to see in an experiment with 25 iterations?
The point is, it’s really easy to find patterns in random noise when you have a very small data set. You’ve only got 25 coin flips here.
If we go back to the founding of the Republican Party in 1860, our dataset is:
R R R R R R D R D R R R R D D R R R D D D D D R R D D R R D R R R D D R R D D.
Find me a meaningful pattern in that. The only pattern I can see is that if an incumbent president is doing an even halfway decent job they’re very likely to be re-elected. Lots of two term presidents in there.
As for the notion that parties don’t choose centrists any more, what do you think Obama is? Or Clinton, for fuck’s sake. Obama and Clinton are firmly centrist politicians. And whatever you can say about Trump, he’s no conservative.
You are right about that. Obama (pleasantly) surprised me with how centrist he became as soon as he took office. That pissed some Progressives and ultra-liberals off but he was never anything but that.
I always say that Hillary Clinton is the only semi-decent, old-school Republican running. Hell, she used to be a Republican until she met Bill and he is a Southern Democrat, not a liberal activist on the fringe. They each have their own integrity issues but they have never been radical. Hillary Clinton is very similar to Mitt Romney and it would work equally well if she went back to putting an R next to her name.
Of course, to some of use, all the people you named are as clown car as the bunch of jokers the party ran this year…Tom Cotton, the leader of the “Down With Diplomacy!” faction in the Senate? Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver (hat tip to Charles Pierce)? Really?
Incumbent Vice President?
Hillary Clinton’s electoral chances in 2020 will be entirely determined by what kind of President she is, and by the events that transpire over the course of her presidency, whether or not they have anything to do with her. Once you’ve done a stint as president, what you did before then becomes largely irrelevant, as you now have an actual track record to run with or to run away from, depending on how it goes.
For those of you writing off the Republicans, it’s really important to notice that the Republicans have been killing the Democrats in statewide elections. Since Obama was elected, Republicans have gained 10 governorships over the Democrats, and now have governors in 31 states as compared to 18 for Democrats. In the state houses Republicans have done even better, and Republicans now control a record 68 out of 98 state legislative chambers. More shockingly, in 23 states the Republicans hold the Governorship and BOTH houses of the legislature.
What this means for the future is that the Republicans are developing a deep bench of politicians with serious governing experience. In the meantime, the Democrats seem to have a very thin back bench, and that state of affairs is not improving. The Democrats are also getting old - Republicans in Congress are on average about four years younger than the Democrats, but when you look at the leadership, the governors, and the other up and comers in the Republican party, they are all quite young. Nikki Haley, Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton and others. All people who are very young and will have decades on the political stage.
But again - election 2020 will hinge on what happens between now and 2020, and how Hillary responds to it. Other than that, it’s all completely unpredictable.
All this “male” talk suddenly out of nowhere is very disturbing. Get that out of here. Women are in leadership to stay.
More politically diverse Democratic Party? What is it that you value? Ideas or party success?
I have two points.
One, there is a nonzero chance that Clinton dies before 2020. It wouldn’t be unusual for a woman her age to die of natural causes in this time frame. There is also the horrifying possibility that one of the many people who have been conditioned for three decades to think of Clinton as the personification of evil snaps and successfully assassinates her.
Two, I think there’s a chance that Trump will run again in 2020. He believes that America is on the brink of collapse and that he alone can fix it. I don’t think losing an election will make him stop believing these things and his supporters are extremely loyal. He’ll still be able to get 30% - 40% of the primary vote. The only way the Republicans can keep things playing like they did this time would be to unify around one other candidate before the start of the primaries. Herding cats would be easier.
With fear and trembling, I would respectfully disagree with my esteemed colleague. The advantage is always with the incumbent, and assuming she is elected, my default expectation is that she will be re-elected as well.
While it is entirely true that she could find herself involved in a Watergate-sized scandal, and even though she is very far from a uniter, all other things are usually more or less equal. Also barring health issues.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Hillary has the kind of prickly paranoia that is reminiscent of Nixon. It is quite possible that she will get caught covering something up, and getting impeached, or losing in 2020. Absent that, she isn’t exactly a lock, but I would put the odds at better than 50-50 of her winning re-election.
This is true. The GOP will need to revamp its selection process so that it doesn’t pick a nutcase again next time.
Regards,
Shodan
I think that there are four major contenders for the Republican nominee in 2020:
1&2: The Republicans get their act together, and manage to unite behind one of the establishment candidates. It’s either Kasich or Ryan, and Clinton will have to face a real opponent.
3: The Religious Right faction realizes that they’ve been abandoned, and forcibly takes back control. It’s Cruz, and it’ll depend on whether the public gets to know him well enough to hate him, like everyone who knows him well does.
4: The Republican rank and file decides that they just didn’t go far enough this time, and doubles down. It’s Arpaio, and with current demographic trends, he turns Texas blue.
What are you responding to? I can’t figure out what “male talk” you’re referring to; no one has mentioned the sex of any candidates unless I missed it.
Anyway, I’m very concerned that Clinton will be a one-termer. She’s unpopular enough that she wouldn’t be able to beat a normal Republican this year and is extraordinarily lucky that Trump is her opponent. Republicans are not going to come around to her side in the next four years no matter how successful her term is; if anything they will spend the next four years redoubling their efforts to unseat her. I don’t like her chances.
If this were years ago and you had said Mitch Daniels I would’ve just gone on to the next post. But Pence? What about Pence’s record would lead you to believe he would be appealing to an American electorate that is, according to you, looking for centrist policies? He had a controversial and divisive tenure in his own red state specifically because of his disruptive, hard right social policies. Anecdotally, I’ve met several Trump supporters here who hate the guy for making Indiana a national embarrassment.
As I’ve asked before, WHO is there among GOP contenders that you can see selling Trump’s populist message successfully?
He is NOT the first guy to run on an anti-immigrant platform, you know. Tom Tancredo did. So did Pat Buchanan. So did Scott Walker. NONE of them got anywhere. That suggests that Trump’s success was attributable at LEAST as much to his celebrity status as to his message.
WHAT saner, more rational, more articulate Republican is there who could sell Trump’s message more successfully than he did? In my opinion… no one.
This. The only way Clinton loses in 2020, as all incumbents lose, is if the economy is in recession or she fouls up bigtime in some other way, such as if her vast experience turns out to have made her completely unprepared to manage a government and she gets exposed by a Katrina-type event.
The real challenge for Democrats is in 2024, assuming 16 years of Democratic rule and assuming Republicans have decided what kind of party they are by then. The longer you hold onto power, the more demotivated your voters become and the more motivated the opposition becomes, assuming they see hope. Meanwhile, true swing voters start looking for change. I think the real issue by 2024 will be whether Tim Kaine is the man or whether the shrinking but loud white progressive minority tries to challenge him.
You are a real optimist. I figure that not only will Hillary get as much obstructionism as Obama, but even more. For instance, the day after the election, one or, more likely, a group of them will file the paperwork to start impeachment proceedings against her. Yep, they’ll try to impreach a President-elect. It may or may not be constitutional, but they’ll try anyway. If that fails, they’ll try again on the day after the inauguration. And just like there’s been one investigation after another on Benghazi, there’ll be one impeachment attempt after another when she’s President.