Harris Should Prepare To Govern Around MAGA Sabotage
Harris Should Prepare To Govern Around MAGA Sabotage
No counting chickens; one thing at a time; but America's pro-democracy majority needs to be vindicated beyond just defeating Donald Trump.
If you were a gambler who didn’t make risky wagers, you’d bet on Kamala Harris winning the presidency, Democrats winning back the House, and Republicans taking over the Senate.
Harris’s lead in national popular vote polls is large enough to overcome the Electoral College’s Republican lean (which seems to have shrunk, but is not gone). Survey respondents strongly prefer a Democratic House to a Republican one. They probably prefer a Democratic Senate to a Republican Senate, too, but the Senate biases for the GOP even more strongly than the Electoral College, and the contested seats this cycle are very red.
So that’s the most sober-minded forecast. And we’re close enough to the election now to start thinking through what government divided along those lines would mean.
Obviously a great deal would depend on what Republicans do, how they’d choose to conduct themselves having lost yet another election with Trump at the helm. Would Trump again try to overturn the result? Seems likely! Would Republicans in Congress go along with him (or plunge their heads in the sand) the way they did four years ago? Also seems likely! If and when the effort fails, would Trump face justice? Would he go to prison for his past crimes? Would he reassert control over the GOP, either directly or through a chosen successor?
The fate of a Harris-Walz administration would turn on the answers to these questions. It is possible (though I believe very unlikely) that Republicans will finally engineer a clean break from Trump. That they’ll recognize his political method—his relentless lying and abuse—is as much to blame for their political misfortunes as their policies, and thus begin dialing back their extreme partisanship. The political style brought mainstream by Newt Gingrich 30 years ago will fade.
But as an enjoyer of safe bets myself, I think I’d bet on the divided government scenario I already described and a GOP that remains Trumpified. Yes, the right-wing billionaires who view the GOP as a loss-leader for trillions of dollars in tax cuts will be sick of losing. But who’s left, really, to impose the changes that might make the GOP more nationally competitive? Trumpists have infiltrated and in many cases remade all the institutions that might have had a moderating influence after Trump lost in 2020. He’s been at the helm of the American right for a very long nine years.
And so, if I were Harris, I would want a team of strategists and lawyers, cut from a different cloth, to game out governing in that environment. What do you do if you win the presidency, but the Senate is run by a figurehead who answers to Donald Trump?