Stubborn Things

Democrats are on track to win the midterms by 13 or 14 points which will be the largest win for Democrats since 1974. The loses for Republicans were catastrophic, but the reasons are clear. Trump was unpopular. He asked voters to pretend as if he was on the ballot, and people did. What this election seemed to highlight for Sean and Jay the most, is how strong the President’s approval or disapproval sways voters. The vice president even went so far as to call out Trump on the Iran war, and pointed to it as the cause of the GOP loss. In the last two years, the president has a choice: keep going his own way or start compromising to increase approval for his final days in office.

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We’ve always had two parties and we’ve always had people who hate it. Some point to Madison as the reason why our government favors two strong parties over a dozen weaker parties. But Madison and Jefferson’s support of the Republican party was to sound the alarm to voters about bad actors in Congress. In large part, it seems like our parties do just that: shine the light on how the other party is flawed. Why two parties?
Some hypothesize that our representational government gives way to two-way arguments in which the coalitions form the two stronger parties. Sean points out that it’s not like third parties have always been unsuccessful, such as Ross Perot of the Reform Party. But Jay reminds us, the third party fades as soon as it rises since one of the major parties assumes the energy and motivation of the new group and often their platform gets put into law, as we saw with how Clinton and the Republicans handled the debt in response to the Reform Party.
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In many ways the beginning of the musical Hamilton, is quite historically accurate. But to Sean, the precision gets loose… especially the election of 1800. So today Sean and Jay are here to set the record straight.
Start with James Madison, who isn't even in the capital in 1800; he'd retired to Montpelier. Then John Adams, whom the musical writes off entirely. Adams' New England base secured him against Hamilton's repeated attempts to dislodge him, and the race was far closer than the musical lets on, a few hundred votes in New York and he's re-elected. Hamilton, meanwhile, belonged to the High Federalist faction agitating for war with France; what Adams actually does in 1800 is negotiate the peace that infuriates them.
Aaron Burr had no separate faction either. He was a core Republican organizer who out-hustled Hamilton in New York City and helped build what became Tammany Hall. And when the Electoral College tied -an artifact of the pre-Twelfth Amendment ballot- it wasn't "up to Hamilton" to instruct anyone. It went to the lame-duck Federalist House, voting one vote per state, and took 36 ballots.

The midterms are in view, and Sean and Jay try not to treat the tea leaves like gospel. Although Jay got into the limelight through election blogging, he’s realized that it’s difficult to differentiate what he wants to happen and what will happen. This bias doesn’t just influence Jay but is ingrained in the practice of forecasting itself, making election predictions all the more difficult. Nevertheless, what politicians are doing now and how voters are feeling might give us a glimpse into November. Sean notes that unless you’re a wartime president or a great economy president, the ruling president will likely lose house seats, so we might see a wave of Blue representatives. The Senate? Only God knows for certain.

Our founders did not want all of American governance to diverge from England. In fact, the founders were inspired by Parliament's structure, which attempted to represent the desires of the people. Congress was perhaps well constructed but is not currently functioning well. As Wallach argues in his book, Congress is functioning well when the people trust that their interests are properly represented in the legislature. That trust and reciprocal relationship may not currently exist in spades. However, Wallach offers some potential solutions to not only empower better representation but also inspire Congress to pass bi-partisan legislation for the betterment of the whole country.

Wallach, Philip A. Why Congress. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Why-Congress/dp/B0C446NBP5

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