The Next Four Years

Respected election analyst Charlie Cook makes some interesting observations about the election in National Journal to the effect that

1. Hillary Clinton will probably win the election.

…it is hard to look closely at the oth­er data and say that her lead is not mean­ing­ful; clearly some of it is very real and prob­ably dif­fi­cult to chip away. Us­ing the Real­Clear­Polit­ics.com av­er­ages as a yard­stick, Clin­ton is ahead by 7 points in the two-way tri­al heat, 6.6 points in the three-way with Liber­tari­an Gary John­son in­cluded, and 6.5 points in the four-way, with both John­son and Green Party can­did­ate Jill Stein thrown in­to the mix, pulling 8 and 4 per­cent, re­spect­ively. Clin­ton is at 43.2 per­cent and Trump at 36.7 per­cent.

Just for the sake of sim­pli­city, let’s just say that half of Clin­ton’s cur­rent mar­gin is real and half is froth (ad­mit­tedly this is a very ar­bit­rary po­s­i­tion, and I sus­pect a very small “c” con­ser­vat­ive one). That puts Clin­ton’s lead roughly com­par­able to Pres­id­ent Obama’s 2012 3.9 per­cent vic­tory mar­gin over Mitt Rom­ney. Look­ing at state-level polling, Trump does not cur­rently lead in a single state that Obama car­ried last time.

2. She won’t have much in the way of coattails.

While I think that Clin­ton’s neg­at­ives are too high for her to win by a big, let alone land­slide mar­gin, oth­ers are talk­ing up that chance and cal­cu­lat­ing the im­plic­a­tions. People are of­ten quick to re­mem­ber the big Re­pub­lic­an gains that ac­com­pan­ied Ron­ald Re­agan’s 10-point, 51-41 point win in 1980, when he car­ried 44 states over Pres­id­ent Carter, res­ult­ing in a 34-seat House gain and 12-seat Sen­ate gain for Re­pub­lic­ans. They tend to for­get what happened in the oth­er three big land­slide pres­id­en­tial years.

In 1964, Pres­id­ent John­son beat Barry Gold­wa­ter by 22 points, 61 to 39 per­cent, car­ry­ing 44 states, ac­cord­ing to Vi­tal Stat­ist­ics on Con­gress, but while Demo­crats did pick up 37 seats in the House, their gain in the Sen­ate was a single seat. In 1972, when Pres­id­ent Nix­on was pound­ing George McGov­ern by 23 points, 61 to 38 per­cent, and car­ry­ing 49 states, Re­pub­lic­ans gained only 12 House seats and ac­tu­ally had a net loss of two seats in the Sen­ate.

3. That’s likely to be the case even if she wins by a very large proportion of the popular vote.

Two factors make me sus­pect that even if Clin­ton wins by a much lar­ger mar­gin than, say, Obama’s win over Rom­ney four years ago, I don’t think the down-bal­lot im­plic­a­tions would be that huge. In the House, there are few­er com­pet­it­ive dis­tricts than at any point in our life­times; between nat­ur­al pop­u­la­tion sort­ing and ger­ry­man­der­ing, there just isn’t much elasti­city in the House these days. In the Sen­ate, the GOP ma­jor­ity is ab­so­lutely on the line; my guess it will end up 50-50, give or take a seat or two, but giv­en voters’ doubts about Clin­ton, the “don’t give Hil­lary Clin­ton a blank check” ar­gu­ment may well be a polit­ic­ally po­tent one, and a lot of hold-their-noses Hil­lary voters may well look for a check and bal­ance down-bal­lot.

If he’s right, the next four (or, heavens forfend, eight) years are likely to resemble the last seven years quite closely. If you think that’s a good thing, you will no doubt be delighted. Otherwise…