This is an election less about policy and more about the character of the candidates and the character of the country, with one being a reflection of the other. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replied by email:
Prompted by the stark difference between these two approaches - the first dispassionate and analytic, the second almost verging on the apocalyptic - I asked a number of experts the question, “What is at stake this year?” Under Republican control for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, Congress proved more of a willing accomplice to, than a check upon, the President’s assault upon the rule of law. One would hope that the other branches of the national government would check the President’s assault upon it, but this has not happened. “President Trump poses a greater threat to the rule of law than anything Americans have witnessed in generations,” Klarman writes: Just as Donald Trump found a way through Obama’s supposedly invincible “blue wall,” and Bill Clinton triangulated his way out of the Reagan era, Republicans would eventually find a way around a Biden majority.Ī less politics-as-usual perspective about where we are headed - a more vivid and embattled way of looking at this election - is put forth by Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, in his recent essay “ Trump, the Republican Party and the Rule of Law.”
If Biden successfully builds the emerging Democratic majority, Republicans will find some way to push back. In his view, the center-left and center-right coalitions represent a structural aspect of contemporary democratic political competition and that they are likely, over time, to alternate control of the government: Judis and Teixeira contended that a moderate “progressive centrism” - something, in other words, that looks a lot like Bidenism - could gain majority status, consistently taking “professionals by about 10 percent, working women by about 20 percent, keep 75 percent of the minority vote and get close to an even split of white working-class voters.”īyler makes the case that Biden and the Democrats are very likely to emerge from the 2020 election with the backing of this progressive-centrist coalition, positioned to “secure a large, balanced majority capable of enacting new progressive laws and possibly able to mitigate losses in a low-turnout midterm” in 2022.īut Byler cautions that the success of any single partisan coalition is likely to be short-lived. How will the winning candidate piece together a victory in 2020?ĭavid Byler, a data analyst for The Washington Post who anticipates a Biden victory, sees the presidential election as the first true affirmation in this century of the “ The Emerging Democratic Majority,” an argument developed by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in a prescient 2002 book.
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