The two party mess

One party can win elections but can't govern. The other can govern but can't win elections.

Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

We live in a nation with two dysfunctional political parties, but their problems are almost mirror opposites of one another. One party can’t win national elections but knows how to run the country. The other wins elections but can’t govern. It’s left us with whiplash.

The cycle began in 2008 when Barack Obama had to fix the country after eight years of Republican rule left us with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, 45 million Americans without health insurance, and two wars with no end in sight. While he righted the ship, he didn’t hold anybody accountable for the mess caused by a greedy banking system, creating fuel for populist resentment while making the Democratic Party more attractive to the financial class.

Obama didn’t fix the broken immigration system that animated the GOP base, though. With an increasingly browning America and a growing population of educated people in urban/suburban areas who eschewed traditional Christianity, a hostile uprising in the Republican Party nominated a carnival barker and demagogue in 2016. The old guard establishment folded with barely a whimper instead of fighting to preserve the Party of Reagan.

Democrats, for their part, nominated the one person in the country who couldn’t defeat Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was despised and demonized by the far-right. She had been the subject of conspiracy theories and distortions for more than two decades by the time she got the nomination. She also lacked the common touch that defined her husband’s demeanor, leaving her few tools to combat rising populist anger. To the surprise of nearly everyone but the ascendant MAGA, she lost the election, even though she won the popular vote.

Trump inherited an economy on the rise, a new health care system that was quickly providing coverage to millions of Americans, and only one war instead of two. With control of both Houses of Congress, Trump achieved the only legislative victory of his presidency in 2017. He passed a massive tax cut that disproportionally benefited the wealthy and big corporations while exploding the deficit and adding trillions to the national debt. The establishment Republicans felt vindicated, proving that tax cuts are their only core value and, despite their rhetoric, they don’t really care about fiscal responsibility.

Though Mitch McConnell delivered him three Supreme Court Justices, including stealing an appointment that should have been Obama’s, Trump suffered setback after setback in his administration, . He didn’t build the wall. He didn’t get us out of Afghanistan. He didn’t kill the Affordable Care Act. He lost control of the House of Representatives in a Blue Wave election in 2018. And in 2020, as he began the last year of his term, Trump was totally unprepared to govern when a pandemic struck.

After a year of mismanaging the COVID crisis, Democrats finally booted Trump from office. They also took control of the U.S. Senate. However, they lost a good portion on their House majority, holding on by just a few votes.

Democratic victories in 2018 and 2020 had less to do with their message or campaigns and more to do with the incompetence of the GOP. As Trump took control of the party, Republicans began electing a collection of grifters, conspiracy theorists, ideologues, and intellectually challenged misfits who appealed to the Republican base in heavily gerrymandered districts. Instead of trying to fight for their party, the establishment again folded, ceding power to people with little interest in, or understanding of, governing.

Joe Biden came into office facing a deep recession and a deeply divided nation, torn apart by the division fomented by his predecessor. Despite narrow majorities in Congress, Democrats pulled off a host of legislative victories during Biden’s first two years. They passed legislation that put money in the pockets of struggling families. They passed the first gun control legislation in 30 years. They passed a bill to increase technology manufacturing in the country. They passed the most significant infrastructure bill in more than a generation. They implemented a significant program to speed up the transition to renewable energy and fight climate change. They passed a budget that raised taxes on corporations, went after tax cheats, lowered the deficit, and stopped the growth income inequality.

While inflation dogged the nation and interest rates rose, the economy took off, growing almost every quarter of Biden’s term and at a higher rate than Trump’s administration. Wages have outpaced inflation for almost two years and the unemployment rate has hovered around historic lows.

Democrats, though, never argued for their successes. They assumed people would see improvement, not realizing that rising prices and interest rates are better understood than GDP, wages, unemployment rates, or clean energy. Workers assumed they got raises because they deserved them, not to keep up with inflation. Nobody said, “Hey, we’ve made progress, but we still got a long way to go.” There were no victory laps to celebrate successes, no explainers to tell the American people how the legislation would help them personally.

The right-wing media ecosystem was able to control the dialogue, pushing issues that had been once been relegated to conservative channels into the mainstream. Throughout Biden’s administration, the country spent far more time listening to arguments about rising prices, high interest rates, DEI, the border, and transgender issues than the strength of the economy and how it affected American families.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, angering women across the political spectrum. The decision muted the GOP victory in November that year, but Republicans still won a narrow majority in the U.S. House while Democrats held the Senate.

Functionally, Democrats controlled the House, too, because the extreme nature of the GOP caucus kept Republicans from effectively governing. Fist fights almost broke out among Republicans as they struggled to elect a Speaker and then they toppled him just a few months later. They had to rely on Democrats to pass anything significant, from keeping the government running to raising the debt ceiling to providing funding to Ukraine.

In 2024, Democrats lost the election a year and half before the first votes were cast. Not unlike 2016, Democrats anointed a candidate instead of letting voters choose one. It turns out that an 82 year old candidate, even an incumbent, is too old for most voters to stomach. Switching to Harris might have prevented a blowout that would have given Republicans a much larger House majority, but sticking with a president who said he wouldn’t run in the first place was the death knell of Democratic chances to hold the White House.

As 2024 draws to a close, we’re about start a new cycle of Republican incompetence. The GOP controls Congress by an even narrower majority and Trump’s only clear agenda is self-enrichment for his family and friends. Without another election in the offing, Trump is tossing MAGA overboard and lining up with the billionaires as open warfare breaks out between the racist and grifter wings of the GOP (Read Heather Cox Richardson’s summary). He’s suddenly pro-immigration as long as it’s the immigrants who benefit people like his new BFF, Elon Musk.

In Congress next week, Mike Johnson may have to fight to keep his role as House Speaker. Another ugly brawl could damage him more even if he keeps his seat and further expose the GOP’s weakness as a governing party. If they can’t govern with the White House and both Houses of Congress, they’re essentially an impotent party.

As for Democrats, they need to figure out to talk to Americans who work for wages again. They no longer have a large, enthusiastic base. Voters support them more as the lesser of evils because Democrats have failed to articulate a clear vision of what they stand for and have failed to communicate what they’ve accomplished.

Instead of waiting for Trump and the Republicans to screw up, Democrats need to figure out who they are and tell Americans. Like the right, they should be communicating across platforms on a daily basis, not just in ads during election years. Winning the news cycle is no longer about the morning headlines or six o’clock news shows. It’s about what the podcasters and social media influencers are talking about, too. For better or worse, campaigns are no longer restricted to the year of the election and they aren’t made in the context of a media environment. They are about creating the media environment itself.

Democrats should have surrogates going on Joe Rogan’s show to talk about the H-1B visa dispute, making sure people understand the contempt that Trump’s billionaire buddies have for working Americans. They should recruit people from outside politics to deliver the messages on social media and podcasts. And they need to deploy Pete Buttigieg. Hell, give him his own podcast. The legacy media is no longer reaching enough Americans to shape elections and Democrats should quit relying on it to inform the public.

(That’s not to say we don’t need news organizations like the Washington Post and New York Times. We need more of them, especially at the local level. They just have limited reach and their information is going reach broader audiences through amplifiers like social media and podcasts. People, especially young ones, are no longer picking up a morning paper or tuning into the six o’clock news.)

Finally, to break the cycle of losing national elections, or winning them by far narrower margins than they should, Democrats need to invite people into the process and quit anointing nominees. If the phenomenon of Donald Trump has proved anything, it’s that the electorate is unpredictable and that elites are out of favor with average Americans. Let the primaries play out without powerbrokers interfering.

Our two party system is struggling. We may have outgrown it as a country, but changing it is more difficult than reforming it. Democrats are operating under control of a political elite that knows how government and governing work, but excludes or alienates too many people from the process. Republicans have become a party of people who either want to plunder the system or burn it down. Their elites have surrendered power to the mob. One of the parties needs to fix itself.