RALLYING THE FLOCK
When credit is due, it should be bestowed, even if the recipient is Donald Trump. Of the mantles conferred on presidents, not least is to serve as their party’s leader. And this is more than a formality. It calls for joining the political rough-and-tumble; in particular, seeking to influence elections. After all, programs will only be enacted if there is support in legislative chambers. So it seems reasonable to expect that presidents will extend themselves to fill the needed seats. Yet it’s revealing how rarely this occurs. It isn’t easy to recall presidents who traversed the nation to aid colleagues at the polls. Until Donald Trump.
On forty-six mornings from March through November 2018, he flew from the White House, often to remote terrain, to ignite Republican rallies. Of course, these events were unabashedly partisan, thronged with friendly faces. Indeed, that was their point. These conclaves had a singular purpose: to loft the party’s midterm aspirants. The sheer number of these occasions, heightened by his personal presence, was unique in presidential annals. No other chief executive of any party had invested that level of energy or commitment.
Barack Obama had this opportunity in 2010 in facing his first midterm, as had Bill Clinton in 1994. Both presidents had policies they sought to advance, for which they needed congenial spirits on Capitol Hill. Yet neither essayed anything like Donald Trump’s grand tour. Whether for this reason or others, both lost their House majorities in their first midterm. (Clinton lost the Senate as well.) Trump had to be concerned that this could happen to him.
If his arenas were reserved for his faithful, the agenda was not just adulation. There was a practical intent. It was to rouse enough votes in 2018 for Republicans to keep full control of the Congress and state capitals. So Trump’s entreaty to his audiences was to return home and urge friends and neighbors and anyone else to be at the polls on November 6. His tour would be a test of the extent and depth of his influence.
In all, the president touched down in twenty-three states, where Republicans hoped to gain or retain sixteen Senate seats and fourteen governorships. Not to mention retaining the party’s majority in the House of Representatives. Hence our question: how far, if at all, did Trump’s presence help in tipping the scales for his party? Agreed, there’s no scientific way to tie effects to a single cause. Still, we can record what happened after the president’s interventions.
• The Republicans’ chief 2018 accomplishment was to retain control of the Senate. They did this by taking seats from Democrats in four states: Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. Hence a question: How much, if at all, were those shifts due to the eleven rallies that Trump held in those states?
• As it happened, he also made eleven visits to four other competitive states: Montana, West Virginia, Arizona, and Nevada. But despite the president’s intercessions, Democrats retained the first two, and wrested the others from Republicans. Indeed, it could be argued that his appearances boomeranged, by moving Democrats to vote.
• Trump had seven rallies in five states where Republican governors were vulnerable: Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Democratic opponents flipped all five.
• Altogether, he intervened in thirty-one statewide contests. Republicans won fourteen of them, and Democrats carried seventeen. From another angle, Republicans flipped four seats while Democrats seized seven. Trump made a total of fifteen trips to Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. In none of them did Republicans win the state.
• Republicans lost forty-two House seats in 2018. Twenty of them were in states Trump visited, and twenty-two where he didn’t. Despite his three rallies in Pennsylvania, Republicans lost four of their thirteen districts. In Florida, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan, where he also campaigned, ten seats also turned.
• Indeed, over a third of the House flips—sixteen seats in all—were in four states that he openly eschewed: California, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. While they are largely blue turf, they contain red enclaves, some of which have long won House seats. If they were vulnerable in 2018, they weren’t scheduled for the tour. The reason is obvious: the president prefers audiences where he can count on the cheers.
Measured by popular votes and offices that changed hands, the 2018 midterms had to count as a Democratic success. In all, Trump’s efforts coincided with four Republican statewide wins. But in seven other states on his tour, his party’s entrants lost.
What’s worth adding is that that the Democrats didn’t attempt to mount a counterpart of Trump’s tour. The party had prominent figures such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who could have appeared before cheering throngs. It’s not as if they were shyly waiting to be asked. It wouldn’t have hurt to fly to Florida, North Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana, which is where their party lost the Senate.
True, Trump’s kind of demagoguery is not the Democrats’ style. But Obama’s 2008 campaign proved that mass events were both feasible and helpful. Hillary Clinton apparently felt that things were on track without them. Would that be wise for 2020?
That the Senate remained a GOP stronghold had to be disturbing. (One result: Justice Brett Kavanaugh.) So those four Democratic defeats warrant a postmortem, if only to see if there are lessons for 2020, when that chamber will again be on the ballots. The first fact was that the four losers—Bill Nelson, Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill, and Heidi Heitkamp—had carried their states six years earlier in 2012. True, Barack Obama, who did well nationally, headed their slates. Yet, beguilingly, he lost decisively in three of the states. He ended up ten points behind in Indiana and Missouri, and by nineteen points in North Dakota. In Florida, he barely slipped in by 74,309 votes of the 8,474,179 that were cast, a fraction of 1 percentage point.
So all four essentially got to the Senate on their own. Bill Nelson had the good fortune to draw a scapegrace opponent, Connie Mack, whose history of bar fights and divorce defaults put off even confirmed Republicans. Nelson won by thirteen points. Joe Donnelly in Indiana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri had similar luck. While campaigning, their opponents made expected attacks on abortion, but then followed them with these remarks on sexual assault: “Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen” and “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”
Many observers felt this was why Donnelly won by six points and McCaskill by sixteen.
While in 2012, Obama got only 39 percent of the total in North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp managed to come in 2,881 ahead in the 321,144 cast in the race, just under 1 percent. There was a time when her state was safe for Democrats. Quentin Burdick and Kent Conrad served in the Senate from 1960 through 2013. But that era seems at an end. Even Heitkamp’s support for pipelines and disapproval of deficits weren’t enough for reelection.
If Nelson’s loss in Florida was perturbing for Democrats, 2018’s other statewide race was promising. Their party’s mayor of Tallahassee, Andrew Gillum, came within 32,464 votes—of 8,220,561—in the race for governor. And he came that close despite conducting an openly liberal campaign, the kind Republicans like to tag as socialist. Not to mention that Gillum was African American, in a state where 85 percent of the residents have other ancestries.
In much of the country, the majority of white voters make Republicans their party of choice, and that has long been so in Florida. Yet CNN’s exit poll for the state found that 39 percent of all white voters went for Gillum, rising to 47 percent of white women, and further to 57 percent for white women with college degrees. These ratios—especially intertwined with gender and education—suggest that the GOP can’t count on its dominant race as assuredly as it once did.
If Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota are well settled in the Republican column, Democrats in these states do not lack for fortitude. Here’s one indicator. The percentages in the table depict the votes cast for Donnelly, McCaskill, and Heitkamp, set against their states’ totals for Hillary Clinton in 2016. As can be seen, the Democrats’ rates in the 2018 midterms equaled or exceeded those for president.
| SHOWING UP FOR THE SENATE | ||
| 2018 Turnouts in relation to 2016 | ||
| Democrats | Republicans | |
| 99% | Indiana | 74% |
| 105% | Missouri | 79% |
| 154% | North Dakota | 83% |
When citizens show up in such numbers, even though they know they’re likely to lose, that expresses a depth of commitment. Heitkamp’s followers were clearly there in force. Apparently, Republicans were so sure they would win that more of them stayed at home. That kind of complacency may take a toll in 2020.