Interregnum Ends, Fall Campaign Begins

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway.

The week that was expected to see the race tighten didn't. Biden leads Trump by anywhere from 7 to 10 points nationally. Fox News polls show Biden ahead by 9 in Arizona, 8 in Wisconsin and 4 in North Carolina. ⁦@AsteadWesley⁩ ⁦@anniekarni⁩ https://t.co/Eur97pRAVh

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) September 5, 2020

Harry Enten at CNN:

A new CNN/SSRS poll has former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by a 51% to 43% margin.

That 8-point margin matches a Grinnell College/Selzer & Co. poll published this week as well and is in-line with the national polling average.

What's the point: The big question coming out of the major party conventions would be if they would reset the 2020 campaign. Could Trump's efforts to refocus the campaign on crime and law and order help him close what has been a consistent deficit?

The answer seems to be a no, for the time being. While it doesn't seem that Trump's messaging on law and order has hurt him to any large degree, it's pretty clear that it hasn't helped him in any significant fashion.

...

As my colleagues Gregory Krieg, Dan Merica and Ryan Nobles noted back in June, Trump's law and order messaging harkens back to Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign of trying to appeal to White voters. Just like then, protesters for civil rights have been marching in the streets. In some cases, riots have broken out.

The polls show, however, that, for a Republican, Trump is very much struggling with White voters. Trump is ahead of Biden by just 3 points in an average of live interview polls taken since the conventions. That matches the longer term trend since the beginning of the summer of Trump leading by 4 points among this group

,,,
Trump won White voters by 13 points in the final pre-election polls in 2016. Mitt Romney won them by double-digits in 2012.

In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1996 for a Republican to have done as poorly among white voters as Trump is right now.

That's the opposite of what you would expect if Trump's law and order campaign was successful at stroking White backlash.

.Alexander Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

No president has entered Labor Day weekend — the traditional kickoff of the fall campaign — as such a clear underdog since George Bush in 1992. Mr. Trump has not led in public polls in such must-win states as Florida since Mr. Biden claimed the nomination in April, and there has been little fluctuation in the race. Still, the president’s surprise win in 2016 weighs heavily in the thinking of nervous Democrats and hopeful Republicans alike.

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The best chance for Mr. Trump, Republicans say, is to drive at a singular message linking Mr. Biden to the far left.

“He has to continue focusing on the network of anti-American lawlessness,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said of Mr. Trump, urging him to “emphasize American patriotism and history versus the left’s anti-Americanism” and to “turn Biden into McGovern.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers maintain that their private surveys are more encouraging than public polling. But while Mr. Trump’s swerve toward a strident law-and-order message has helped him consolidate conservative support, his rhetoric about rioting in a handful of cities does not appear to have swayed moderates, strategists in both parties said.

That is a serious problem for the president, given the lack of significant third-party candidates in 2020, which raises the pressure on Mr. Trump to win over new voters.

My latest: The Trump campaign has canceled it's Phoenix TV ads next week -- and they may not resume until early October.https://t.co/LIvvHlF6zK

— Jim Small (@JimSmall) September 4, 2020

Blue Tides and Blank Checks

Almost twenty years ago to the very day, Adam Clymer reported in The New York Times:

House Republicans, implicitly conceding Bob Dole's defeat in the Presidential race, are undertaking a television advertising campaign to argue that a Republican Congress is needed to deny President Clinton ''a blank check.''

The National Republican Congressional Committee plans to spend about $4 million in 50 tough House districts on a spot reminding voters of what Mr. Clinton and the Democrats did or tried to do in 1993 and 1994, before the Republicans took control of Congress.

The advertisement begins with an announcer saying: ''What would happen if the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House? Been there, done that.'' Then it shows newspaper headlines from 1993 and 1994 involving Mr. Clinton and taxes, health care and waste in Washington.

While the picture on the screen shows men around a table with money on it, the announcer says, ''The liberal special interests, aligned with Clinton, desperately want to buy back control of Congress.''

The decision to run this advertisement followed moves earlier in the week to have field operatives from the national committee tell embattled candidates that they should effectively write off Mr. Dole's chances in their own campaigns and urge voters to send them and other Republicans back as a check on Mr. Clinton.

(Also see p. 126 of Losing to Win.)

Republicans are again playing the "blank check" card ... against a Clinton. Alex Isenstadt reports at Politico:

Republicans, desperate to salvage their congressional majorities amid Donald Trump’s collapse, are increasingly presenting themselves as checks on a Hillary Clinton presidency – a final argument that, if only implicitly, concedes the White House to Democrats.

The offensive, which has been under discussion for months and is only now being unleashed, is designed to win over voters who want to see Clinton’s powers curtailed – even as she closes in on a potentially sweeping national victory.

The message is taking different forms in different parts of the country. In Minnesota’s Iron Range, Republican Stewart Mills has begun airing a TV commercial that says his opponent, Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan, is “standing with Hillary Clinton, not Minnesota families.” Nolan, the ad says, “would give Hillary a blank check to run up trillions in new debt and job-destroying taxes.”

In upstate New York, the National Republican Congressional Committee has been running a TV ad that says a Democratic candidate, Kim Myers, would “fast-track” Clinton’s agenda in the House. It urges voters to support Republican Claudia Tenney – who will “stand up to Hillary Clinton.” Another spot warns that Myers and an independent candidate, Martin Babinec, would “rubber-stamp Hillary Clinton’s agenda in Congress.”

Republican Sen. John McCain, facing the toughest reelection fight of his political career, is taking a similar approach. Following his primary victory, McCain released a face-to-camera video in which he called his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick, a “good person,” but added: “If Hillary Clinton is elected president, Arizona will need a senator who will act as a check, not a rubber stamp, for the White House.”

At The Cook Political Report, Jennifer Duffy writes:

Senate Republicans had been doing a pretty solid job of maintaining their distance from GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump by running their own campaign that focused largely on more local issues or those issues that motivate their base. The strategy was working fine and it looked as if Republicans would be able to keep their losses low. That is until October 7 when The Washington Post reported on the existence of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump described sexually assaulting women. Then things started to unravel, albeit slowly.
...

History shows that races in the Toss Up column never split down the middle; one party tends to win the lion’s share of them. Since 1998, no party has won less than 67 percent of the seats in Toss Up. While the 2016 election has broken every political science rule and trend, we’d be surprised if this becomes one of them.

S

The Minimum Wage as an Issue

At The New York Times, Jonathan Martin and Michael Shear report:

Democratic Party leaders, bruised by months of attacks on the new health care program, have found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014: an increase in the minimum wage.

The effort to take advantage of growing populism among voters in both parties is being coordinated by officials from the White House, labor unions and liberal advocacy groups.

In a series of strategy meetings and conference calls among them in recent weeks, they have focused on two levels: an effort to raise the federal minimum wage, which will be pushed by President Obama and congressional leaders, and a campaign to place state-level minimum wage proposals on the ballot in states with hotly contested congressional races.

With polls showing widespread support for an increase in the $7.25-per-hour federal minimum wage among both Republican and Democratic voters, top Democrats see not only a wedge issue that they hope will place Republican candidates in a difficult position, but also a tool with which to enlarge the electorate in a nonpresidential election, when turnout among minorities and youths typically drops off.

...
Of course, for the overall strategy to work for the Democrats they need Republicans to oppose an increase, and history suggests that is not a given.

At the meeting this month in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Mr. [Gene] Sperling, who was an adviser in President Bill Clinton’s White House, recalled that in the election year of 1996 Republican leaders decided that fighting a minimum-wage increase was not worth the political trouble and let a bill raising the rate pass after inserting some provisions helping small businesses. 

In 2012, only 4.7 percent of all hourly paid workers made the minimum wage.  Even though voters express support for raising the minimum wage, its direct impact on the electorate is very small.  Health care, by contrast, does affect the electorate in a very direct way.

"A Lifetime of Experience"

In Epic Journey and After Hope and Change, we write about the role of experience in presidential elections. Stuart Stevens writes at The Daily Beast:

Prompted by a New York Times article Monday,“Republicans Paint Clinton as Old News for 2016 Presidential Election” (which opens with a quote from me), there seems to be a great rush among the large professional class dedicated to defending all things Democratic to deny that age and experience will be an issue for Hillary. Which seems a bit silly since in her last run, she did everything she could to use both to her advantage.

“I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House,” she declared on March 3, 2008. “Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he'd bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

She told Newsweek, “I wouldn't be in this race and working as hard as I am unless I thought I am uniquely qualified at this moment in our history to be the president we need starting in 2009 … I think it is informed by my deep experience over the last 35 years, my firsthand knowledge of what goes on inside a White House.”

This prompted Timothy Noah in Slate to respond, “Oh, please. Thirty-five years takes you back to 1973, half of which Hillary spent in law school, for crying out loud.”

And there’s the rub. When you ran in 2008 as the candidate of experience based on 35 years of experience and lost to a candidate of the “new,” don’t be surprised if it happens again eight years later.

In recent decades, the candidate who put the most emphasis on experience was Bob Dole.  He lost the vice presidency in 1976, GOP nomination in 1980 and 1988, and general election in 1996.

On November 7, 1987, he used the very phrase that Clinton used:  "I want to lead America into an even greater era of opportunity for our people and security for our nation. And so I offer a lifetime of experience and a record that shows not merely where I stand, but the hopes of a lifetime rooted here in Russell."

Losing to Win, Continued

A new survey confirms that many people favor divided government.  National Journal reports:

Whoever wins the presidency, voters don’t want to give the winner’s party a blank check to run the federal government. A solid majority of likely voters (55 percent) said that if Obama is reelected, they still hope that Republicans keep at least one chamber of Congress. Similarly, more than six in 10 voters said that if Romney wins, they prefer that Democrats keep at least one chamber “so they can act as a check” on his agenda.

The desire to curb whichever party is in power is shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. Among Romney supporters, 32 percent still hope for Democrats to control at least one chamber. And among Obama backers, 23 percent want Republicans to wield the gavel in the House, the Senate, or both.

Notably, fewer than one in 10 likely voters said they didn’t want a check on either the Romney or Obama agenda.

Losing to Win, 2012

Previous posts have discussed the "Losing to Win" dynamic that Ceaser and Busch analyzed in their book of the same name.  At National Journal, Charles Cook explains that GOP prospects in the Senate have dimmed, though mainly for reasons other than Romney's problems.  As for the other chamber...

In the House, we have not yet seen any signs of deterioration for the GOP majority. Even if Democrats were to win every seat currently rated solid Democratic, likely Democratic, or lean Democratic, as well as every toss-up, they would still come up short of a majority. The canaries in the coal mine are GOP seats currently rated as lean Republican or likely Republican. Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman points out that with Democrats likely to lose perhaps 10 of their own seats, they would have to gross 35 seats to hit the 25 net seats necessary to win a majority. That’s a very tall order.

House Republican strategists have been preaching the “balance message” to their candidates: If the top of the ticket starts to go south on them, then Republicans need to argue that the party must keep the House in GOP hands to have a firm check in place to balance against a second-term President Obama. [emphasis added]

The next week or 10 days are thus critical for Romney and the GOP. If things don’t turn around, a stampede could ensue reminiscent of 1996, when Republicans realized that Bob Dole was not going to defeat President Clinton. History could repeat itself.

On October 28, 1996, AP reported:

Republicans are putting out a new TV ad warning voters that electing a Democratic Congress could amount to a blank check for President Clinton _ a tacit admission that the president may be on his way to a second term.

The spot, which the party says will be shown in 50 House districts across the country, opens with a woman looking into a crystal ball and the question, ``What would happen if the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House?''

It goes on to recite the Republican version of events from the first two years of Clinton's term, when both the White House and Congress were in Democratic hands: tax increases, ``wasteful Washington spending,'' and Clinton's unsuccessful universal health care proposal.

``The liberal special interests aligned with Clinton desperately want to buy back control of Congress,'' the ad asserts, concluding, ``If we give the special interests a blank check in Congress, who's going to represent us?''

The 30-second spot seeks to capitalize on an issue that polls show could be among the most helpful for Republican candidates for Congress: voter fears of putting all of the levers of power into the hands of one party.

In 2012, however, there is a big complication, as Gallup reports:

A record-high 38% of Americans prefer that the same party control the presidency and Congress, while a record-low 23% say it would be better if the president and Congress were from different parties and 33% say it doesn't make any difference. While Americans tend to lean toward one-party government over divided government in presidential election years, this year finds the biggest gap in preferences for the former over the latter and is a major shift in views from one year ago.