The Collapse of the American Two-Party System

The more interesting question Is what happens to the Democrats.

A Republican Party Leader Bets on November

It is hardly unusual for the chairman of the Republican National Committee to argue with a Democratic strategist about who will win the November midterm elections.

The more interesting question is this: Can the Democratic Party take power — and keep it — if democratic socialists increasingly take control of the party itself?

RNC Chairman Joe Gruters and longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, who worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, recently offered sharply different predictions about November’s congressional elections during separate appearances on Fox News.

Carville called the coming election a “wave election,” predicting that Democrats would win both chambers of Congress. He expects Democrats to defeat Republicans in at least 25 House districts — perhaps as many as 45 — while also making substantial gains in the Senate. The Democratic majority there, he predicts, would be narrow but reasonably secure, perhaps two or three seats.

Gruters rejected that scenario. “Everything points to” Republicans retaining control of both chambers, he argued.

He acknowledged the obvious historical disadvantage facing the party in power during midterm elections, but insisted that Republicans are prepared to “defy history.”

Gruters also pointed to a recent New York Times essay by veteran Democratic strategist David Plouffe, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. Plouffe’s assessment was considerably less encouraging for his own party: Democrats, he argued, “are still in crisis.”

At present, Plouffe wrote, Democrats have no realistic path to durable control of both the Senate and the White House.

Looking ahead to 2028, he made an even more sobering calculation. Even after the Electoral College is reapportioned following the next census, a Democratic presidential nominee could potentially win every state Kamala Harris carried, along with the traditional “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and still fall short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

There is an obvious problem with that kind of arithmetic.

In 2016, roughly the same sort of calculations were being made about Donald Trump. Some Republican analysts were saying that their nominee had “no path to 270.”

Trump, as it turned out, won.

So yes, the Democratic Party is in crisis.

But the Republican Party may be in an even deeper one.

And that brings us back to Gruters.

He says Republicans have a “secret weapon.”

What is it?

Donald Trump.

“Our secret weapon is Donald Trump,” Gruters says.

That is less a political strategy than an article of faith. It suggests that the party’s confidence rests less on measurable results — or on the work being done by the party itself and its chairman — than on loyalty to the president.

But there is a much more consequential debate taking place beneath the horse-race numbers: What happens to the Democratic Party if democratic socialists begin arriving in Congress in large numbers?

Writing in The Hill, Amherst College professor Austin Sarat points to the historical ambiguity of political rebellions. Sometimes insurgents capture control of a party and lead it to electoral success. At other times, they produce little more than chaos and crisis.

Recent polling, he argues, should serve as a warning.

If democratic socialists take control of the Democratic Party, they will have to work hard to explain to voters what democratic socialism actually means — and, above all, to persuade them that it does not mean the collapse of America’s capitalist economic system.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a political analyst writing in The New Yorker, identifies the dilemma somewhat differently.

The Democratic Party’s defining challenge, he argues, is how to manage a movement whose populist appeal and generational energy are perfectly suited to this anti-institutional moment, while whose underlying principles the party itself does not fully share.

There is a simple answer to that problem:

Obama will explain it.

And even if the explanation is difficult to follow, many Democrats will believe him anyway.

Why?

Because, to borrow Gruters’ phrase, Barack Obama has a secret weapon of his own.

Donald Trump.

Trump can make Obama persuasive.

Obama can tell Democrats that even with the socialists, their party is still preferable to what the country experienced during Trump’s second term.

That argument may be enough.

Indeed, if democratic socialists merely created the feeling of an “anti-institutional moment,” they would represent a serious problem for Democrats.

But that is not quite what is happening.

For now, they are creating the impression that Obama still has everything under control.

That could change. And it could change quickly.

If a global financial and economic crisis, combined with a collapse in logistics and supply chains, becomes part of Trump’s record, the political consequences could be almost impossible to predict.

At the extreme, one could imagine anything from a constitutional crisis to political violence on a scale that Americans would find difficult to contemplate. At a minimum, pressure could build for an attempt to reconfigure the Republican administration before 2028 — potentially even through the 25th Amendment.

Everything would depend on the severity of the crisis and the extent of the economic and logistical breakdown.

Without such a shock, however, the more conventional forecast remains straightforward:

Democrats take the House.

They may take the Senate as well.

And democratic socialists arrive on Capitol Hill in numbers large enough to matter.

That may be the real story of November.

Not simply whether Republicans lose Congress.

But whether Democrats, after winning it, discover that the people who helped them take power are the very people who make governing it much harder.