Build That Wall

Unlike many other Trump critics during the 2016 primary and general election seasons, I was never opposed in principle to the idea of a wall along the southern border. Trump’s presentation of the idea was ridiculous, to be sure, as was his suggestion that Mexico would pay for it. But the concept of a wall itself was a good one, for both practical and psychological reasons. There can be no doubt that the border was far from secure during Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, and though things have improved somewhat since then, much work remains.

But Trump’s spotty record of keeping his promises and staying consistent on the issues, from his professional life to his public political statements, made it seem at the time that his pledge to build a wall would likely be quickly forgotten, should he ever achieve the presidency. There was no evidence that Trump, beneath all his bluster, had the ability to fight both the Democrats and the bipartisan caucus of limitless-immigration advocates in Washington, to the point necessary to change the border situation to any meaningful degree.

That situation has improved, to be sure, more than we had reason to hope. But that improvement is only temporary, unless the Trump administration can find a way to make a large-scale, tangible, and permanent change at the southern border. Something big and beautiful, maybe.

The wall seems to have faded in priority within the Trump administration. Aside from it being politically stupid for the administration to let such a major campaign promise go unfulfilled, it would be a border enforcement measure that future administrations would find next to impossible to reverse. It needn’t stretch along the entire border, either—just an added, highly visible security measure along the most troublesome portions. But it would send a clear message to all those who seek to enter the country illegally: America is a country of law and order.

Policy Spotlight: The United Nations

Following the Obama administration’s recent colluding to ensure an anti-Israel resolution passed the U.N. Security Council unanimously, all the old complaints from the Right about the United Nations began bubbling up once again. They should by now be familiar—systemic anti-Israel and anti-American bias within the membership and leadership; the amount of dues paid by the United States every year, with little to show for it; the joke that is the U.N. Human Rights Council, which counts such noted defenders of liberty as Cuba, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia as members; and the framework for international law and government that U.N. leadership seems insistent on setting up, at the expense of national sovereignty.

The question must be asked, and indeed has been asked with increasing frequency: What, exactly, does America gain by continuing its affiliation with the U.N.? Would it be a better use of both taxpayer money and national influence to simply withdraw entirely, and simply let the rest of the nations introduce an increasing number of useless resolutions?

It’s a valid point. But even though withdrawing from the U.N. entirely would feel good in the short term, in the longer run it would only harm American interests. We would lose the ability to exert any meaningful influence over the international community. For instance, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham recently introduced a bill to bar federal funding of the U.N. until the anti-Israel Security Council resolution is revoked—no small threat, as the U.S. currently provides over 20% of the overall U.N. budget, the largest single contribution by far. If we withdrew from the organization we would no longer have any leverage to stop or reverse bad decisions.

Plus, the U.S. has veto power over any Security Council resolution. It depends on a brave American representative and administration to exert it, and there’s no doubt that with Nikki Haley as U.N. ambassador, things will be much different in New York than they have been over the past eight years.

Or take another example—the effort by Iran, several years ago, to name as it’s U.N. envoy a former member of the Iranian radical group that sparked the Tehran hostage crisis in 1979. Ted Cruz sponsored a bill that put a stop to the effort, but if America were to withdraw from the U.N., the group could well decide to relocate from New York, rendering future legislative remedies to similar issues impossible.

The U.N. is a flawed organization, no doubt about it—seriously flawed. But a total withdrawal would only make it worse.

Farewell, Barack Obama

Finally, after eight long years, it has come time to say goodbye. Today is the last full day of the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. Tomorrow, Donald John Trump will be formally sworn in as the 45^th President of the United States.

On 60 Minutes last Sunday, Obama gave his farewell interview. Near the end, he was asked what he thought his legacy would be, ten years from now, and he declined to answer. Much can change in ten years. But it seems clear, with his eight years almost up and only days from the inauguration of a fervent political opponent as his successor, that the Obama legacy will be one of failure and wasted opportunity.

The 44^th President entered office with a landslide victory, sky-high approval ratings, and a Democratic supermajority in both houses of Congress. He could have achieved nearly anything. Instead, his signature legislative achievement was a health care bill that became a national joke and will soon be repealed entirely. He presided over one of the weakest economic recoveries on record, one that still feels like no recovery at all to millions of Americans. He gained office in part by railing against George W. Bush's high spending and expansive use of presidential power, and promptly doubled the national debt and made the pen and the phone the new symbols of the imperial presidency. And in foreign affairs, he presided over the rise of ISIS, the weakening of Israel, and the emboldening of Iran and Russia.

Even now, in the last months of his presidency when one would think he couldn’t possibly get any worse, he stabs Israel in the back at the United Nations, and commutes the sentence of a traitor that put American lives at risk all over the world. Perhaps the Founders would have given more serious discussion to curtailing the pardoning power, had they known a future President would use it in such an egregious way.

It is now far too late for Obama to turn his presidential legacy around, with almost exactly twenty-four hours left in his term. But he had eight years to get things right, and he failed. His tenure may have been groundbreaking as the first black President, but history will not look favorably on the results.

Post-Partisanship Is All The Rage Now

When Barack Obama was first elected President, eight long years ago, it suddenly became fashionable to lionize him as the “post-partisan president”. Members of the mainstream media tripped over themselves to exclaim how he was transcending the two-party system and ushering in a new era of American politics.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we can see how foolish those exclamations were. Almost every action Obama has taken, from the stimulus to Obamacare to the Iran deal and executive amnesty has increased partisanship and division to a level not seen in decades. It is hard to overstate how big of a deal it is that at the final vote on the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation, not a single Republican member of Congress, out of 40 Senators and 178 members of the House, could be convinced to vote for the bill. Even moderate and liberal Republicans like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Olympia Snowe ultimately could not be persuaded to support it.

Now many commentators are saying something similar about Donald Trump, that he has blown apart traditional standards of partisanship with his embrace of issues as diverse as ending illegal immigration, curtailing free trade deals, and endorsing a massive new infrastructure bill. Personally, I think the evidence that Trump will upend traditional notions of partisanship is much more compelling than any similar evidence regarding Obama, although I think that he will merely redefine it more than transcend it. But still, there is a case to be made.

But “post-partisanship” of this sort is not, in my honest opinion, not all that it’s cracked up to be—at least as it’s generally been defined. Lessening tensions between the two major parties is good. Honest, friendly dialogue is good. But muddying the ideological waters is not. For at least the past several decades, if not longer, America’s two major parties have been essentially organized around two different interpretations of the Constitution, and the valid role of the federal government.

If Trump follows through on many of his campaign pledges, and ignores the natural conservative bent of many of those in his new Cabinet, a new dynamic could emerge—a Democratic Party of expansive government and a broad reading of the Constitution, and a Republican Party of nationalistic government and less of a careful adherence to the Constitution. The limited government view would no longer have a natural home in either major party.

It is for that reason that I’m praying that Trump will not be a post-partisan president. Less partisan, absolutely. Putting principles before party is laudable. But if post-partisanship means surrendering ideology in the name of pursuing the deal of the moment or achieving a short-term goal at the expense of Founding principles, count me out.

Great Expectations

Senate Republicans have officially taken the first formal step to repealing Obamacare, approving a budget resolution that lays the groundwork for a later vote on full repeal.

This is, obviously, a good thing. I can think of no campaign pledge more defining for Republican candidates over the past six years than the promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, and being handed all the levers of power in the federal government and then failing to follow through would be an unforgiveable betrayal of the voters. And while I understand Rand Paul’s concerns about cutting spending, the chance to repeal Obamacare is one that is too important to conflate with any other issue, even something as important as federal spending. With Obamacare repeal, speed is key.

And yet repeal is only the first item on a lengthy wish list conservatives have for the new Republican government. Tax reform, approving the Keystone pipeline, cutting spending, instituting Congressional term limits, securing the border, guaranteeing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come… The list goes on and on, and has had Republicans practically drooling for months. In just four years, the thinking goes, we can make it as if Barack Obama’s presidency never even happened.

But those big dreams seem to forget one of the biggest lessons of President Obama’s tenure: Many, indeed most, Republicans in positions of power in Washington are not as committed to sweeping changes as they claim to be on the stump. Republican and conservative goals do not always align. And many candidates who talk big about eliminating departments and slashing the national debt change their tune once in office.

This may seem like an obvious statement of fact to many, just over a year after John Boehner was forced to give up the Speakership. But for others, the headiness of unexpected Republican victory will cause memories to quickly fade. The draw of belonging to a team, especially a winning team, is strong, and it will be easy for many who proudly proclaimed their loyalty to principle during the Obama years to set those principles aside for greater personal power.

Personally, I expect Obamacare to be repealed. The promise to do so was so firm, was repeated so often, that it would now be suicidal not to. Whether it will be fully eliminated is another issue; the few popular provisions of the law, combined with the way other portions have already permanently altered the health-care industry, make the single-line repeal, “The Affordable Care Act of 2010 is hereby repealed,” of conservative dreams all but impossible.

On other issues, voters would do well to control their expectations. In four years, we will have the same number of federal departments as we do now. Federal spending will still be going up, though the rate of that increase may slow—hardly an achievement to get excited about. Keystone may be approved, if it is not already too late, and tax reform may pass, though it will be nothing like the flat tax of an ideal world. And there will be no federal term limits amendment passed by Congress.

I hope I’m wrong. Everything on the conservative wish list is possible. A radical pivot back to Constitutional basics could happen. But Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are not the men to lead that charge. A more reasonable, and still hopeful, expectation for the next four years is for a competent administration and Congress to limit what new damage the federal government can cause, while laying the groundwork for a future President and Congress to more aggressively shrink the government back within Constitutional boundaries.

Israel: America's Most Vital Ally

There has been no shortage of critical articles and blog posts from the Right, condemning the Obama administration’s shameful betrayal of Israel at the United Nations—followed by John Kerry’s equally shameful farewell speech. And I agree with all of them. But I think it important to briefly lay out why it is so important for America to stand strongly with Israel, from both a strategic and idealistic viewpoint.

From a strategic (or realist) point of view, the arguments are simple. The simple fact is that Israel is the only stable democracy in the Middle East, which makes it the only country in the region generally favorable to American interests. The importance of such an alliance cannot be overstated. One hardly needs to be reminded about the number of threats to American interests currently lurking in the region, from Iran to ISIS to al-Qaeda and a variety of other groups dedicated to radical Islamic terrorism. (And, Israel is one of only a few world powers to—allegedly—possess nuclear weapons.)

Israel is the only nation in the region that shares the same goals as the United States, primarily because all of those actors hate Israel almost as much as they hate us. A relatively stable island of democracy and Western values in what for centuries has been a sea of wars, coups, and general turmoil, Israel serves as a beacon of peace and promise for the Middle East.

Which leads to the idealist’s reasons for steadfast support of Israel. Having a stable democratic partner in the Middle East is not only good for American interests, it is good for humanity’s interests. Just as America has become, as Ronald Reagan famously put it, “a shining city on a hill”, so too Israel has the potential to become, and indeed is already becoming, a shining city and a model for the rest of the Middle East.

Most of the Middle East would vehemently deny that, of course. But over the past several years, as the rise of ISIS and the prospect of a nuclear Iran has rattled Israeli and Muslim governments alike, nations that once refused to recognize Israel’s very right to exist have begun reaching out—most notably Saudi Arabia. Israel’s willingness to engage with former adversaries has won it points with many of those same countries, and its political stability has likewise earned respect from those who assumed the tiny state would be quickly swallowed up by its many Arab neighbors soon after its founding.

At the heart of the matter is the fact that for many Americans, the story of Israel is also the story of the United States. We may have played no formal role in the founding of Israel as a nation, but many American Jews did—and they brought with them the ideals of freedom and democracy that have made this country so great. We inherited many ideas from Great Britain, our parent country, and adapted them. Through some of the many people who made the modern state of Israel a reality, we passed on those same ideas.

Political New Year's Resolutions

In the spirit of the New Year, I’d like to make some political commitments and goals, both for this site and for myself personally, to work toward in 2017.

1.      Give Trump a chance. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating—I was intensely critical of Donald Trump during the campaign, and with good reason. I take none of it back. But the fact is that he is now the President-elect of the United States, has not yet undertaken any formal action as President, and therefore deserves a chance to prove all the doubters and naysayers wrong once more.

2.      Give Democrats and liberals a chance. This one will be harder. But it is important to remember that liberals are people too, with sincerely held beliefs just as strong as conservatives. Those beliefs may be wrong or stupid, but there is usually a rationale behind it—and a difference between the idea and the person holding it. If Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have as strong of a friendship as they did for so many years, and yet disagree so vociferously on the bench, in such a public setting, we can do the same with liberals we may know and work with. Politics is never an excuse to destroy friendships and relationships.

3.      Be careful about attacking liberal ideas and actions unless you have a better solution. It may be stupid, but at least they are presenting a solution. Don’t mock liberal proposals unless you have a better, conservative answer. Leaving an argument at “that’s stupid”, without any follow-up, is a good way to lose both the argument and personal relationships.

And finally…

4.      Remember that there is more to life than politics. This will be the hardest resolution to keep to in 2017, but also the most important. Not every family gathering has to be defined by politics. Not every chance encounter in the store has to lead to some political discussion. If it does, fine, great—but keep it civil. And if it becomes ugly, pivot to something that unites rather than divides. Even today, there are plenty of things to talk about that have absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump or Barack Obama.

A New Year also brings new opportunities and possibilities. Let’s not waste it on the sniping that made so much of 2016 so tedious.

Changes Since 1992: California

Following Donald Trump’s victory, the dominant media narrative on the two major parties has quickly gone from “Republicans are nearing extinction” to “Democrats are no longer a national party,” and understandably so. Just about the only thing we heard in all election coverage of the past four years, from the end of the 2012 campaign until last month, was how Republicans were facing demographic ruin. The minority, Democratic coalition was ascendant. The GOP must embrace identity politics or be washed away by ever-growing numbers of liberal Hispanic voters.

Now, of course, the demographic focus is all on how the Democrats have abandoned the white working class. But just as those voters were wrongly ignored during the Obama years, it would be a mistake to think that just because Republicans won this election, changing demographics are no longer an issue for them and vital swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will ultimately trend in their direction. Many states are trending red, as I’ve written about over the past month, but states are also trending blue, far more dramatically than Virginia.

Many people forget that California, the home of both Nancy Pelosi and Ronald Reagan, was once a Republican stronghold. And many of those who remember this fact, don’t realize that the state was still widely competitive for Republicans, even conservative ones, as recently as 2000. The transformation of California from conservative stronghold to battleground state to liberal bastion should be a warning that, just as Democrats ignored the white working class at their peril, Republicans ignore Hispanics and other minorities at theirs.

Although California has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, it is an interesting fact that before 2008, the nominee consistently won by less than thirteen points—and that margin was falling:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +13.4	Clinton +12.9	Gore +11.6	Kerry +10.0	Obama +24.0	Obama +21.0	Clinton +28.8

These were all still convincing victories, to be sure. But the trend in favor of Republicans, post-Obama, is intriguing. And for comparison’s sake, Kerry’s ten-point margin in 2004 is almost identical to Bush’s concurrent 9.8% margin in… Arkansas.

Statewide races paint an even more interesting picture. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have served as California’s two U.S. Senators since 1992 (Feinstein won in a special election that year, and won her first full term in 1994). Both have been would I would term fairly generic liberal Democrats, so one would expect them to regularly win California by fairly wide margins. And indeed, they have generally won reelection handily, but there have also been interesting exceptions.

In 1992, Feinstein won her Senate seat by more than sixteen points, but Boxer won by less than five points. Two years later, when Feinstein was up for election to her first full term, she won by less than two points. And in 1998, Boxer won by ten points.

That year marked the last time either faced a truly competitive reelection fight until 2010, when Boxer won another term (against Republican nominee Carly Fiorina) by just 9.6 points. This year, Boxer retired, and under California’s new “top-two”, all-party primary voting system, two Democrats advanced to the general election—Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who won by a twenty-five point margin.

But no electoral analysis of California would be complete without looking at attorney general and gubernatorial elections, and that’s where things really start getting interesting. Several times since 1992, California has seen competitive, high-profile races in which a Republican has either won or come close to winning—most recently in 2010, when Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General by just two-tenths of a point.

California Gubernatorial Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Wilson +14.9	Davis +19.6	Davis +5.0	Schwarzenegger +16.9	Brown +11.4	Brown +18.8

California Attorney General Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Lungren +14.4	Lockyer +9.1	Lockyer +11.0	Brown +18.2	Harris +0.2	Harris +13

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger also won a special election for governor in 2003, by a margin of 17.1%.

This is where Democratic dominion of California begins to look much less permanent. Schwarzenegger’s candidacy was obviously a special case; there were many voters who would presumably have voted for a generic Democrat over a Republican, but the possibility of having the Terminator as governor was just too good to resist. But some of the other recent Democratic margins are shockingly low (looking at you, Kamala Harris), and every single Democratic victory over the last twenty years has significantly underperformed the margin we’ve come to expect from Democrat presidential candidates in the state. Obviously, a governor who enters office with a five-point margin of victory is just as powerful as one who enters in a landslide. But only one will be looking over his shoulder as reelection looms, and seek to reach out to independents and Republicans accordingly, at the risk of upsetting his own party.

Overall, however, and particularly at the presidential level, California is a warning that in politics, nothing is eternal—and today, Democrats in Arkansas and Republicans in California find themselves in almost identical positions. Neither state is permanently out of reach for the minority party, but they will have to fight for every inch of what they once took for granted. New coalitions will have to be formed, new outreach efforts aggressively pursued, and new strategies tested, because just as the current electoral map began to take shape in 1992, so to could the winner of the 2032 presidential election be decided by actions taken by the California Republican Party in 2017.

Changes Since 1992: Wisconsin

Previously, I wrote about two states separated by hundreds of miles, Arkansas and West Virginia, which due to similar circumstances have experienced a dramatic shift from Democratic to Republican control over the past two decades. The voters at the heart of that shift are working-class whites, moderate Democratic-leaning voters for decades who feel marginalized by an increasingly urban, liberal national party.

But while those two states are perhaps most emblematic of the dramatic shift, the revenge of the working class can be felt in more subtle ways in other areas across the country—most notably Wisconsin, the state that before 2016 had last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984.

Unlike West Virginia or Arkansas, where the shift was rapid and didn’t allow for much time as true battleground states, Wisconsin has generally been considered a presidential swing state for years, even though it ultimately would support the Democrat in the end. Here are the winning presidential margins of victory from 1992 on:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +4.3	Clinton +10.3	Gore +0.2	Kerry +0.4	Obama +13.9	Obama +6.7	Trump +1.0

Over the past seven elections, the state has been decided by one percentage point or less four separate times. And in most, the winner’s margin of victory has been under ten points: Only Clinton in 1996 and Obama in 2008 managed to win a truly decisive victory, on their way to equally solid wins nationally. But in the end, Democrats always came through, in the state that birthed such progressive icons as Robert La Follette and Russ Feingold. Conventional wisdom held that the polls might be close, that the final result might be a nailbiter, but Wisconsin would always ultimately serve its role as the cornerstone of the electoral blue wall.

Clinton was so convinced that history would hold that she famously never visited the state during the general election. And, judging only by the public polls, her campaign had a point—the final RealClearPolitics average had her ahead by six and a half points. The argument that the polls were all wrong isn’t exactly true—in the end, they predicted a narrow Clinton victory, and what we got was a narrow Trump victory (with Clinton winning the national popular vote)—but one place they were clearly wrong was Wisconsin.

Maybe they should have paid more attention to state politics. In 1992, the state House of Representatives had a narrow 51-47 Democratic majority; today, Republicans hold a commanding 64-35 majority. Republicans had a 17-16 majority in the state Senate in 1992; today that majority is a more robust 20-12. And, in 1992, the two U.S. Senate seats were both held by Democrats, with Russ Feingold defeating incumbent Republican Bob Kasten by more than six points; in 2010, Feingold lost reelection by five points to Ron Johnson, and lost a rematch to Johnson this year by a little over three points.

These numbers might seem unremarkable after looking at the sudden shifts experienced in Arkansas and West Virginia over the same period. But unlike those states, whose residents tend to share many attitudes about a variety of cultural and economic issues, Wisconsin has always been a state deeply divided between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, and even a small change in the balance of power can have deep and lasting consequences.

After the election, Jim Geraghty at National Review posed an interesting rhetorical question, summing up the past six years of Wisconsin politics:

“…after a victory by Trump, two victories by Ron Johnson, three victories by Scott Walker, a persistent 5-3 split in favor of the GOP in the state’s Congressional delegation, and consistent GOP majorities in the state House and Senate since 2010, it seems fair to ask: Is Wisconsin now a red state?”

There was speculation, which turned into conventional wisdom, following the GOP’s 2010 successes in the state, that it was merely an outgrowth of momentary Tea Party anger, which would eventually fade away. Following Scott Walker’s victories in 2012 and 2014, this became a belief that only certain types of Republicans, like Walker himself, could win major statewide offices consistently. Now, following wins by Walker, Johnson, and Trump, all very different types of people, all within two years of each other, it is apparent that the conventional wisdom will have to change once more.

Unlike West Virginia and Arkansas, Wisconsin is not yet a state that has shifted convincingly from one party to another. I think it would be a mistake to consider it as anything other than a battleground at all levels, from presidential elections on down, at least for now. But at the very least, the days of Wisconsin being classified as a “blue-leaning swing state” are over, or should be. Wisconsinites have now shown a willingness to vote for Republicans of all different types, at every level. It is time for Democrats to accept the fact that Wisconsin is a true purple state, no different from Florida or Virginia—and they ignore working-class white voters at their peril, lest the Badger State become the Arkansas of the Midwest.

Changes Since 1992: West Virginia

Last week, I wrote about the rapid changes the state of Arkansas has undergone over the last two decades, shifting from a state in which Democrats could be expected to win virtually every statewide office, usually by double digits, into what is practically a different state altogether today—one in which Republicans now hold every statewide office, control a supermajority in the state legislature, and the GOP presidential candidate won 61% of the vote.

There is only one other state that has experienced a shift comparable to Arkansas’ over the same twenty-year period, and in the same direction. In the 1992 election, West Virginia voted for Bill Clinton by double digits, and Democrats had complete control of the Congressional delegation and nearly every other major elected office. Two decades later, similar to what happened in Arkansas, the roles of the two major parties in the state were reversed, and Republicans are now well on their way to becoming the dominant party.

The shift is still occurring at a different pace than that of Arkansas—Democrat Joe Manchin, who is pro-life, favors gun rights, and supports a constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment, won reelection to the Senate in 2012, and this year Democrat Jim Justice narrowly won a hard-fought gubernatorial race—while Donald Trump was carrying the state by more than forty points. But taken together, there is perhaps no better example of how Democrats have abandoned their former base of white, working class voters since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign than the twin states of Arkansas and West Virginia.

Looking at the shift in presidential results, the similarity between Arkansas and West Virginia is immediately apparent—and even more notable in the case of the latter, which unlike Arkansas has had no major public figure run for president in recent elections.

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +13.0	Clinton +14.3	Bush +6.3	Bush +12.9	McCain +13.1	Romney +26.8	Trump +42.2

I want to head off the inevitable racism argument, which many people would use to explain both West Virginia and Arkansas, which saw some of the most dramatic surges toward Republicans during the Obama years. But even a cursory look at the topline results show such arguments are full of holes. Why, then, was there such a large shift toward Republicans in 2000, despite all-white tickets on both sides? Why did McCain, running in 2008 against the man who would become the first black president, have a margin of victory in West Virginia almost identical to that of George W. Bush in 2004? Why did Trump, running against a white woman, best Mitt Romney’s showing against that same black president by sixteen points?

The answer, watered down in the interest of space, is that in states like Arkansas and West Virginia there are essentially two Democratic parties—the national, liberal party, which runs people like John Kerry and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president; and the more conservative state party, of which people like Senator Joe Manchin and incoming governor Jim Justice are a part. The state party can get away with nominating people who are, while not Tea Party Republicans, significantly to the right of the national party, and more to the middle of the political spectrum overall. They establish themselves as trusted, independent voices.

But ticket-splitting has also become more rare over time, which is why there is often a lag time between when a state begins voting for the opposite party in national and statewide elections, but eventually the two indicators will begin to line up once more. Democrats can still win the governorship in West Virginia—but they have to fight for it now. The right Democrat can still win a Senate seat in the state—but it is becoming increasingly difficult for even a moderate Democrat to win. Secretary of State Natalie Tennant ran for an open Senate seat in 2014 with this ad as a hallmark of her campaign—and still lost to Republican Shelley Moore Capito by twenty-seven points. In 1992, Democrats controlled the State House of Representatives 79-21. Republicans now control it 63-37.

The national Democratic Party has so fully embraced its liberal, anti-coal, regulatory image that voters in once reliably blue states are beginning to reflexively vote against anyone who has even a whiff of association with them. And if Democrats are going to change, they’d better hurry before voters’ opinions are baked in for a generation or more. The clock is ticking in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In Arkansas and West Virginia, it may already be too late.

2016 Was The Perfect Storm For Trump

It was often wondered during the election, especially by many in #NeverTrump, by how much Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would be leading in the polls at any given moment. This mainly stemmed from the fact that many of us were convinced that Trump would lose to Clinton in the end, probably in a landslide, and was a natural daydream to have about “what might have been”.

But Trump won after all. And the natural next question becomes, If he won, could any of those sixteen other Republicans also beat Clinton? Or was Trump unique?

I think the answer is complicated. On the one hand, the evidence—Trump’s unique appeal to working-class white voters, his rhetoric and policy positions on trade and immigration, etc.—and my own gut feeling tell me that more than likely, only Trump could have won, with the map as it ultimately appeared. Only Trump could have picked up enough working-class voters to win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the three states that put him over the top, while also taking the more traditional battlegrounds of Ohio and Florida and holding the Republican South.

But this observation also comes with the reminder that there was more than one path to victory, for Trump or any Republican candidate. Obviously these scenarios will remain forever unproven, but I believe that Rubio could have held the traditional Republican states (those that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012), carried Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and perhaps Virginia, and also won Nevada and Colorado, while being competitive in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Cruz would have had a narrower path, but against Clinton he too could have conceivably carried Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, and made a play for either Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. That map, too, while offering a narrower path to the White House than Trump’s ultimately did, would still have counted as a win.

Or take Scott Walker as yet another example. Had he made it through the primaries and become the nominee, he too would have likely carried the Romney states, plus Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, would likely have carried Wisconsin, and could have made a decent attempt at winning Nevada, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.

As I said, it’s safe to make these sorts of predictions after the fact, because we will likely never see a Cruz vs. Clinton or Walker vs. Clinton matchup in order to prove or disprove them (and if we do, and Hillary runs again, heaven help us). But my point is that all of the maps I just described would be well within the realm of possibility, which is as close to provability as we are likely to get. Hillary Clinton was fundamentally a weak candidate. Many of the Republicans who stood on that first debate stage last August could well have beaten her—just not in the same manner as Trump ultimately did.

It was a combination of many factors that led to Trump’s ultimate success. If he had run against a stronger Democratic nominee, one who could have appealed to the same base of working-class whites, Trump would have lost. If that base was not coming off of eight years of disappointment and resentment following Barack Obama’s two victories—who was initially supported by many Trump voters—he would have lost. If he had run against a smaller field of candidates in the primary, instead of the sixteen rivals who served to divide the vote enough so that, at least at the beginning, Trump could consistently win states with just 25 or 30% of the vote, he would have lost. In short, if he had run in any year other than 2016, Trump would not have even gotten close to the nomination.

This assertion does actually have some evidence to back it up. In 2012, when he was considering running for President, Trump’s name was included in some early primary polls. At first he did well, but his numbers soon tanked and he ultimately decided not to run. This year, everything had to align perfectly for him to win it all, and everything did.

We’ll see in 2020 whether those factors, combined with a new incumbency factor, line up once again for another Trump victory.

Changes Since 1992: Arkansas

This is the first of what will be a semi-regular series over the next few weeks, detailing the changes in party power in certain states since the 1992 elections.

“I was born in a little town called Hope, Arkansas,” begins an ad for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. The ad, like much of the campaign, played up Clinton’s history as a working-class Southerner and popular governor. In the end, Clinton won Arkansas by over seventeen points in the 1992 election, and by 16.9% in 1996.

Two decades later, his wife would lose the state, where she had been First Lady for a combined twelve years, by over twenty-six points.

Arkansas’ swing from a Democratic stronghold to reliably Republican has been one of the most dramatic in the country over the past several decades, in either direction. The South as a whole has been trending toward the GOP since at least the 1960’s, but Arkansas is unique. It still saw reasonably close races at the presidential level through 2000, had a Democratic governor and two Democratic Senators as recently as 2010, and only gave Republicans narrow control of the state legislature in 2012, for the first time since Reconstruction.

Just look at the swing in presidential results in the state, from 1992 to 2016:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +17.7	Clinton +16.9	Bush +5.4	Bush +9.7	McCain +19.1	Romney +23.7	Trump +26.6

But of the equation is of course the rapid shift of the South as a whole toward Republicans, a shift which has essentially been finalized during the Bush and Obama years. In that sense, Arkansas is a microcosm of the entire region.

But even compared to election results from neighboring states over the same time period, the rate of change in Arkansas is staggering. Bill Clinton won Kentucky by three points in 1992 and less than one in 1996; four years later, the state went for George W. Bush by double digits and never looked back. Clinton lost Mississippi to the Republican nominee in both 1992 and 1996; in 2000, Bush won by seventeen points there and the Republican margin of victory has stayed fairly constant ever since. But the GOP’s growth in Arkansas shows no sign of slowing down or stabilizing.

Clinton’s status as a “favorite son” in 1992 and 1996 certainly account for some of these noted shifts. But one would think that at least some of those benefits would rub off on his wife, perhaps causing her to lose by a smaller margin. Instead, she did several points worse than Barack Obama, himself wildly unpopular in the Natural State.

And the rapid shift toward Republicans is glaringly obvious in far more than just presidential contests. Below are three more sets of election results for the state, since 1992: U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Governor. With all of them, the shifts are rapid and stunning.

Arkansas Senate Seat, Class 2:

1996	2002	2008	2014
Hutchinson +5.4	Pryor +7.8	Pryor +59.0	Cotton +17.0

Arkansas Senate Seat, Class 3:

1992	1998	2004	2010	2016
Bumpers +20.4	Lincoln +12.9	Lincoln +12.0	Boozman +21.1	Boozman +23.6

Party Composition of U.S. House Delegation, Arkansas:

1992	1994	1996	1998	2000	2002	2004
Split (2-2)	Split (2-2)	Split (2-2)	Split (2-2)	Democrats (3-1)	Democrats (3-1)	Democrats (3-1)

2006	2008	2010	2012	2014	2016
Democrats (3-1)	Democrats (3-1)	Republicans (3-1)	Republicans (4-0)	Republicans (4-0)	Republicans (4-0)

Arkansas Governor:

1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Tucker +19.2	Huckabee +21.1	Huckabee +7.0	Beebe +14.3	Beebe +30.9	Hutchinson +13.9

A special irony for Republicans to enjoy is the fact that Asa Hutchinson, the state’s current governor, is a former U.S. Representative who in 1998 was key in prosecuting the case for the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton—an Arkansas native and former governor. A microcosm of how dramatically the state has changed over the past twenty years.

I didn’t include full charts showing shifts in state attorney general and state legislature races, in the interest of space, but they tell the same story—an 88-11 margin in favor of Democrats in the state House following the 1992 elections, compared to a 73-27 Republican majority after the 2016 elections.

And, if the recent past is any indication, the best days for Arkansas Republicans may still be ahead.