It’s Almost Spring, But Both Parties Act Like Winter Is Coming

Even though the official first day of spring is still a few weeks away, this is supposed to be the annual period of time when people are happiest. Major League Baseball’s Spring Training schedule kicks into high gear, and all 30 teams at least can look forward to the upcoming season thinking if they catch a break and stay healthy, maybe they have a chance in the Fall Classic. 

March Madness gets underway soon, the annual two-week college basketball tournament that presents the stage for several Cinderella teams to compete in the spotlight for a national championship. 

The Daytona 500’s Speed Week is just around the corner. The cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. are expected to bloom a little earlier than normal. In fact, when I visited the Beltway a couple weeks ago, you could begin to see the first inkling of spring to come with some buds breaking out on the trees. With all of this upside to spring, with apologies to Game Of Thrones, it feels like winter is coming. It’s reflected in how Americans view the direction of the country, and there are indications that both political parties are souring on their electoral chances this fall. They may talk a good game about their prospects, primarily because of how bad the other side’s frontrunner is, but their actions speak volumes.

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There have been four national polls released in February that track what Americans think about the trajectory of the country. Monmouth’s right track/wrong track survey showed only 18% of Americans think the country is on the right path, compared to 69% who think it’s not. Economist/YouGov’s poll is only a statistical tick better at 29/62. Rasmussen’s survey shows a very similar result to Economist/YouGov – 29/65. And Harvard/Harris completes the doom quartet, registering a 32/62 tally. If you’re an incumbent president running for reelection and the best poll you can point to shows you’re upside down by thirty points, that’s not exactly the recipe for electoral success.

Americans also are less confident about the economy as reflected in the underperforming Consumer Confidence Index released yesterday, decreasing for the first time in three months. 

Politics is downstream from culture. That’s the Andrew Breitbart doctrine, and it does remain true today. Both parties will tell you that they plan on winning the election and that the future is so bright, they’ve gotta wear shades, but behind the rhetoric, behind the happy talk, the Democrats and Republicans are both preparing in their own way for life after losing in November. 

Donald Trump’s primary campaign for the GOP presidential nomination continued unabated this week, beating Nikki Haley handily in Michigan. On the upside, Republicans in the Wolverine State turned out to vote in much larger numbers than Democrats did. Nearly 400,000 more voters cast ballots for a Republican than for a Democrat. 

Also on the plus side for the former President is the fact that Emerson/The Hill teamed up for a series of swing state polls that include the most likely scenario of Trump, Biden, Jill Harris, RFK, Jr., and Cornel West all being on the ballot. The swing states include Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona. Trump leads all but two outside the margin of error, and the other two are right at the outer edge of the margin of error. At this date in 2016 and in 2020, Trump did not hold a lead in any swing state, let alone national poll. So while polling is just a snapshot, and sometimes a blurry one at that, Trump is well ahead of where he’s ever been before. And yet…

Four out of 10 Republicans, on average, continue to vote for someone else besides Donald Trump, even knowing the former President is a lock for the nomination. That’s not a good sign for the fall. Will some of them come home and hold their nose in the booth and pull the level for Trump? Almost certainly. Will a lot of them never come back so long as Trump is at the top of the ticket? Probably. That gap is going to have to be made up by Trump overperforming with Blacks, Latinos, maybe even with the labor vote, as Frank Luntz declared to Wolf Blitzer on CNN Wednesday was entirely possible. 

House Republicans are signaling that they aren’t at all confident about the upcoming election, either. 23 members of the razor-thin Republican majority conference in the House of Representatives have indicated they are retiring from Congress and not seeking reelection. That’s a lot, especially with a majority and at least the possibility of winning the presidency and the coat tail effect thereof increasing their margin. But included in that 23 are five committee chairmen – Cathy McMorris Rodgers at Energy and Commerce, Mike Gallagher at the Select Committee on China, Patrick McHenry at Finance, Mark Green at Homeland Security, and Kay Granger at Appropriations. Again, talk is cheap. That many chairs retiring, positions that took many years of service to build seniority in order to obtain those gavels, suggests that they believe the House is going to flip in the fall, and none of them want to return to the life of being a ranking member. 

The Democrats, meanwhile, are dropping subtle hints that they think all is lost this fall in a very different way. In Michigan’s primary yesterday, 13.1% of Democrats voted uncommitted instead of voting for Joe Biden. It was a protest vote of the anti-Semitic wing of the Democratic base, and not too much should be read into it other than just the number of raw vote totals. It was still 100,000 Democratic votes not for Joe Biden. That’s about one out of seven Democratic votes cast were specifically uncommitted, and a ton more than the protest vote baseline of 20,000 in 2012 against Barack Obama. Most of those will also hold their nose and vote for the President this fall, but some won’t. Even long-time Democratic strategist James Carville recognizes the anti-Semitic bloc of the Democratic base is a problem, and he’s not looking forward to the DNC convention in Chicago if Israel is still prosecuting its war against Hamas and perhaps Hezbollah. 

If Democratic voter dissatisfaction with Joe Biden is still of any significance by Labor Day, he loses in November. And Biden staffers in the administration are beginning to act on that likelihood by maneuvering to cement in place Biden agency rules and policies in order to prevent Trump’s team from coming in and undoing them all.

Issues and Insights takes a Politico story and analyzes in much more detail Biden administration officials in a mad dash to jam down final rules by April at several different federal agencies in order to keep a Republican Congress and Republican president from repeating their 2017 strategy of deploying the Congressional Review Act to wipe out a ton of bad policy. 

The story is about how, if regulators can get rules finalized by April, it won’t be so easy for Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to overturn them, as they did with the regulations Barack Obama imposed just before leaving office.

Federal law – the 1996 Congressional Review Act, to be specific – lets Congress vote to overturn regulations within “60 congressional session days” of when they are finalized. After that, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of them. 

“The scramble to finish the regulations is crucial to determining how much of Biden’s ambitious legacy may survive past the November election,” Politico reports.

The two most recent analogs in history are George W. Bush’s reelection year of 2004 and Barack Obama’s reelect in 2012. In 2004, Bush administration officials issued fewer final rules than the year before. Obama’s team also issues fewer final rules 2011. Why? Both teams expected, and did, win reelection fairly easily. Biden’s team? Not so much. 

So why are Biden’ people in a rush? Only one reason: They’re betting Biden isn’t going to be president in 2025.

…

Biden’s last-minute effort to get massively expensive rules through the pipeline is yet another reason to pray that he loses in November. When left-wing groups say they are feeling “anxious excitement” over the pile of regulations Biden has in the works, as Environment America’s Lisa Frank, told Politico, you know the country is headed for trouble.

Those rules – to force electric cars on the market, hamstring energy development, regulate home appliances out of existence – would have a devastating effect on the economy, no matter who is president. And if they take effect in time to beat the Congressional Review Act deadline, getting rid of them will be extraordinarily difficult.

The good news about the Congressional Review Act is that Republicans in 2017 rediscovered it, and it was darned effective in undoing a lot of Obama era policy damage. The bad news? The Biden team are fully aware of what the Republicans did, even if Biden himself isn’t fully aware of anything these days, and are ensuring that rules are made before 60 more legislative days pass, taking the CRA out of play as an arrow in the quiver. 

Winter is coming. Both parties want to sit on the Iron Throne. Neither one thinks they will 8 months out. Welcome to 2024.