ONCE AGAIN, IT’S ABOUT THE MATH

Perhaps you’ve read the predictions about what a second Trump Administration might look like, including the reintroduction of an Executive Order known as Schedule F, which could reclassify as many as 50,000 civil service employees out of approximately 2 million. 

Schedule F stems from a Trump Executive Order (no longer in effect) in which tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as "Schedule F" employees. These employees would lose their employment and union protections upon re-assignment, making them functionally at-will employees and therefore far easier to fire. Further, Schedule F defies merit principles and instead would require political loyalty to a President. NFFE [National Federation of Federal Employees] is taking action to ensure Schedule F cannot be imposed by future Presidents.

The Saving the Civil Service Act (H.R. 1002 / S. 399) would prevent a future Schedule F and would ensure the civil service system cannot be politically manipulated.

As of the end of September, the Bill has not passed either in the Senate nor in the House.

Also in the news lately is Project 2025, a blueprint for the next conservative administration.  The Project 2025 website describes its raison d'etre and mandate thusly (emphasis added in bold):

The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. 

This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.

If you are an interested conservative, the website has a job application page:

Please fill out the questionnaire below and upload your resume for inclusion in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project Talent Database if you would like to be considered for positions in a presidential Administration.

Project 2025 is the effort of a massive coalition of conservative organizations that have come together to ensure a successful Administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government. Project 2025 is being organized by The Heritage Foundation.

To learn more about positions in the Executive Branch, please refer to the 2020 Plum Book.

There is nothing improper about Project 2025, and kudos to these motivated and well-organized conservatives for planning ahead.  But those who are troubled by Project 2025 should be advised that this is not a game.  It’s not a fantasy.  It’s a carefully considered plan.  If Trump or another conservative Republican wins the 2024 election, Project 2025 will be ready with the policies and the people to implement their vision of America.

There has been much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands over “What if he actually wins?”  Grim scenarios range from  the threat is real:

A system of checks and balances is built into our way of government by the Constitution. Let us see clearly that what Trump is promising is to demolish as much of that as he can — in short, a version of one-man rule.

To the fear of a looming Trump dictatorship:

In an interview with CBS aired Sunday, [Liz] Cheney lamented the extent to which the Republican Party had been “co-opted” by Trumpism and said she feared the potential of a vengeful Trump presidency in 2025.

“One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States,” Cheney said.

In her CBS interview, Cheney said a Trump victory could mark the end of the American republic. “He’s told us what he will do,” she said. “It’s very easy to see the steps that he will take.”

This isn’t mere hyperbole. As my colleagues have reported over the past year, Trump has made clear his stark, authoritarian vision for a potential second term. He would embark on a wholesale purge of the federal bureaucracy, weaponize the Justice Department to explicitly go after his political opponents (something he claims is being done to him), stack government agencies across the board with political appointees prescreened as ideological Trump loyalists, and dole out pardons to myriad officials and apparatchiks as incentives to do his bidding or stay loyal.

To how the courts could be used to further a conservative agenda:

Then there are the courts, which the former president stacked with a huge number of loyalists.

“A conservative litigant can guarantee a sympathetic judge by filing their lawsuit in a federal court in Texas, where a handful of hard-right judges have exclusive control over the docket,” noted the New Republic’s Matt Ford.

“From there they go on to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where conservatives have a clear majority — Trump alone appointed almost half of its members. And then the last stop is the Supreme Court, where half of the conservative super majority are also Trump appointees.”

To musings on why a second Trump presidency may be more radical than his first:

In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Most of the West, across traditional partisan lines, was aghast at the crackdown that killed at least hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed.

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Donald J. Trump said in an interview with Playboy magazine the year after the massacre. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

It was a throwaway line in a wide-ranging interview, delivered to a journalist profiling a 43-year-old celebrity businessman who was not then a player in national politics or world affairs. But in light of what Mr. Trump has gone on to become, his exaltation of the ruthless crushing of democratic protesters is steeped in foreshadowing.

Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.

Then there are the fears that Trump would pull out of NATO, emboldening Vladimir Putin:

 “I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” NATO, founded in 1949 and supported for three-quarters of a century by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike, has long been a particular focus of Trump’s ire. As president, Trump threatened to withdraw from NATO many times—including, infamously, at the 2018 NATO summit.

Institutionally, and maybe even politically, leaving NATO could be difficult for Trump. As soon as he announced his intentions, a constitutional crisis would ensue.

But none of that would necessarily matter, because long before Congress convenes to discuss the treaty, the damage will have been done. That’s because NATO’s most important source of influence is not legal or institutional, but psychological: It creates an expectation of collective defense that exists in the mind of anyone who would threaten a member of the alliance. If the Soviet Union never attacked West Germany between 1949 and 1989, that was not because it feared a German response. If Russia has not attacked Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania over the past 18 months, that’s not because Russia fears Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania. The Soviet Union held back, and Russia continues to do so now, because of their firm belief in the American commitment to the defense of those countries.

And finally, perhaps the darkest warning of all comes from Robert Kagan’s lengthy opinion piece in the Washington Post, which urges Americans to stop pretending, because a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable:

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. The next phase is about people falling into line.

Frightening?  To some, yes.  Inevitable?  No.  Anything can happen, but if the polls are any indication—and polls taken this early in the election cycle should certainly be taken with a grain of salt--in my opinion the Democrats have an uphill voter turnout challenge.  Let’s take a look at the polls.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll found:

Trump leads President Biden among registered voters, 47% to 43%, in a national head-to-head match-up (margin of error: ±2.5 points.) 

Trump's lead expands to 6 points, 37% to 31%, when five potential third-party and independent candidates are added to the mix. They take a combined 17% support, with Democrat-turned-independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drawing the most, at 8%.

A guest essay by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times cites a poll by Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group:

From Nov. 5 through Nov. 11, Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, surveyed 2,500 voters in presidential and Senate battleground states as well as competitive House districts.

The study…found that collectively, voters in the Democratic base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.

There is some evidence that the weakness is with Biden, as opposed to Democrats in general.  Referring to the Democracy Corps survey and other polls, the New York Times essay says:

The survey found, for example, that Democratic candidates in House battleground districts are running even with their Republican opponents among all voters and two points ahead among voters who say they are likely to cast ballots on Election Day.

Along similar lines, a November 2023 NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden by two points, 46 to 44, but when voters were asked to choose between Trump and an unnamed Democratic candidate, the generic Democrat won 46 to 40.

In a reflection of both Biden’s and Trump’s high unfavorability ratings, NBC reported that when voters were asked to choose between Biden and an unnamed generic Republican, the Republican candidate led Biden 48 to 37.

Edsall asked the founder of a center-left Progressive Policy Institute, “Trump is kryptonite for American democracy, so why isn’t President Biden leading him by 15 points?” 

Marshall’s answer:

Biden’s basic problem is that the Democratic Party keeps shrinking, leaving it with a drastically slender margin of error. It’s losing working-class voters — whites — by enormous, 30-point margins — but nonwhites without college degrees are slipping away, too.

The ascendance of largely white, college-educated liberals within party ranks, in Marshall’s view, has

pushed Democrats far to the dogmatic left, even as their base grows smaller. Young progressives have identified the party with stances on immigration, crime, gender, climate change and Palestinian resistance that are so far from mainstream sentiment that they can even eclipse MAGA extremism.

A Harvard political scientist queried by Edsall said that, if the election were held today, Biden would lose, but:

During the campaign, “Biden’s numbers will improve,” Enos wrote, but Biden faces a large number of idealistic young voters who may

never come back to him because they believe that he has abandoned the core values that animated their support in the first place. Faced with the reality of surging immigration across the southern border, Biden has largely failed to liberalize his administration’s approach to immigration — in fact, he has left much of the Trump-era policies in place. To many young voters, who were first attracted to Biden’s social progressivism, such moves may feel like a betrayal. Additionally, Biden has seemed to greenlight Israel’s campaign of violence against civilians in Gaza. Especially for young voters of color, this seems like a betrayal and could cost Biden crucial states such as Michigan.

A report by Gallup taken after the 2022 midterms explains why these polls and the loss (potential and actual) of its base should be of great concern to Democrats.  Gallup polled voters on their party preferences, asking these questions:

The latest results are based on combined data from 2022 Gallup telephone surveys, which encompass interviews with more than 10,000 U.S. adults. In each survey it conducts, Gallup asks Americans whether they identify politically as a Republican, a Democrat or an independent. Independents are then asked a follow-up question about whether they “lean” more toward the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The combined measure of partisan identification and leanings gives an indication of party strength in the U.S. population.

Gallup reported these results:

Independents:                         41%

Democrats:                              28% + 16% Ind. =             44%

Republicans:                            28% + 17% Ind. =             45%

Totals:                                       97%                                    89%

Non-leaning Independents:                                             08%

Reconciliation:                                                                    97%

The percentages do not add up to 100%.  That means that 3% of those surveyed either didn’t identify as Democrat, Republican, or Independent, or they identified with a third party or they chose not to express a voting preference. 

The takeaway is that only 8% of voters polled were truly Independent.  This 8% (and the other 3% of non-identifiers) are the people each party fights over—11% in all.  That’s very, very tight, and it means that every vote counts.

Democrats used to have a slight edge over the years, but they’ve lost that edge to Republicans, at least for now.  According to the 2022 Gallup poll, Democrats lost a 1% advantage, and Republicans gained a 1% advantage.   With such razor-thin margins, neither party can afford to lose a single vote, which is why both parties engage in gerrymandering, some state legislatures have enacted laws designed to make it either more difficult or much easier to vote, and since 2020, the Republican leadership has mounted an unrelenting campaign to undermine people’s faith in election security by endorsing the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen. 

It isn’t just politics, though.  The economy also plays a big role.

As noted in my last post, average disposable income (adjusted for inflation) has decreased since the 1960s and continued its slide by about $2,000 since the end of Trump’s term.  Inflation, although easing, is still a problem, particularly for young people between the ages of 18 and 29, about 45% of whom now live at home, because they cannot afford to buy a house.  This percentage is about where it was in the 1940s, according to Bloomberg.

Axios reports that in October, the number of pending home sales—those that went under contract, neared their lowest point in history.  As mortgage rates hovered around 8%, prospective buyers needed to earn $115,000 per year to afford a typical home.  This, plus unprecedented levels of student loan debt and the increased use of credit card debt to try to make up the shortfall in purchasing power, bode poorly for the Democrats who, historically, have held this 18-29-year-old demographic.

But it’s not just about the economy, either.  Many Americans have simply, and sadly, lost faith in their government’s ability—or interest—to make their lives better.  How they will vote, or if they will vote, remains to be seen.  

Keep it real!

Marilyn