The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America’s history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee’s choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions of primary voters, the choice of the vice presidential nominee has devolved from smoke-filled rooms of bosses who represented large constituencies to the choice of a single person.

Consider the 47-year-old Barack Obama’s selection of 65-year-old Joe Biden in 2008. For 2016, Obama shoved Biden aside in favor of the rival he bested in the February 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton. The Biden family and many others think their man would have beaten Donald Trump and would be in the twilight of an eight-year presidency now.

Obama has continued to affect Democrats’ candidate choices. In 2020, in the wake of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), he squelched the candidacy of 77-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and crowned the 78-year-old Biden. This year, in the wake of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), he shoved aside Biden for Biden’s own one-man 2020 vice presidential choice, Kamala Harris.

Obama’s continued role in designating Democratic presidential nominees echoes, perhaps faintly, the records of two historic Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, who, after two terms, effectively chose their successors for the rest of their lives.

Roosevelt’s choice, through behind-the-scenes manipulation in the 1940 and 1944 national conventions, was himself — a wise decision in my view given his brilliance as a war leader. Similarly, Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes choice in the 1944 Democratic convention of Harry Truman over the pro-Soviet Union incumbent Henry Wallace had enormous consequences after the 63-year-old Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.

Jackson’s choice, in 1836 and 1840, was Martin Van Buren, who had set up and run the first Democratic national convention, in 1832 (188 years ago!). After Van Buren was defeated in 1840, Jackson expected to support him again — until April 1844, when the usually loyal Van Buren came out against the annexation of Texas. The 78-year-old Jackson switched to his fellow Tennesseean James K. Polk, who four weeks later became the first “dark horse” presidential nominee.  

With enormous consequences. Polk beat Henry Clay by carrying New York, then a quarter-century into its 140-year run as the nation’s most populous and politically consequential state, by exactly 5,106 votes. As president, he completed the acquisition of Texas engineered by the outgoing (and 1840 Whig vice presidential nominee) John Tyler and his secretary of state John C. Calhoun. Then in 1846, Polk ordered American troops into the disputed zone between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, and when they were fired on by Mexican troops, he got the House and Senate to declare war.

Opponents of that war elected to Congress in 1846 included the 80-year-old former President John Quincy Adams and the 38-year-old future President Abraham Lincoln. But despite their efforts, the United States obtained from Mexico the then-mostly unpopulated New Mexico, Arizona, and California plus Mormon Utah. Had Polk, Andrew Jackson’s choice, not prevailed, would the U.S. have obtained California after gold was discovered at Sutter’s mill in 1848? No one knows.

Voters this year are faced with weighing the consequences of electing either a Democratic nominee picked for vice president by Biden in 2020 or a Republican nominee who beat the Democratic nominee picked as his successor by Obama in 2016 and who was headed to beat the Democratic nominee picked by, among others, Obama in 2020.

Some consequences are reasonably predictable. The parties’ positions on domestic issues are fairly well known, and presidents in office are constrained by congressional majorities and economic developments. It’s not clear that the nominees will be able to put into effect their more outré policies, such as Harris’s 2019 promises to ban fracking and abolish private health insurance, or Trump’s recent endorsement of 10 percent tariffs on all imports.

Presidents have more leeway to set policy on our borders and beyond, as Polk and Roosevelt did to great effect. I find it difficult to predict what Trump or Harris would do about Ukraine or Taiwan, but prediction seems easier on two other issues.

One is the border. Harris would surely continue the Biden open borders policy, which has flooded the U.S. with millions of illegal immigrants. Trump would limit the inflow, as he did with his 2018 “Remain in Mexico” policy, the consequences of which were indicated accurately on the chart to which he turned his head as the would-be assassin fired his rifle in Butler County, Pennsylvania.

The other is the Middle East. As vice president, Harris has been outspoken in lamenting the consequences of Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and has said little in support of Biden’s sometimes limited assistance to Israel. She seems likely to be the least pro-Israel president since the Six-Day War in 1967 and might well pursue the policy, which Obama initiated and Biden made some effort to follow, of seeking a rapprochement with Iran.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

In contrast, Trump can be expected to support Israel strongly and to encourage, in line with his Abraham Accords success, cooperation between the Sunni Arab states and Israel. His recent threat to retaliate forcefully to terrorists who hold Americans as hostages recalls President-elect Ronald Reagan’s statements that prompted Iran to release American hostages on the day of his inauguration in January 1981.

Some 160 million voters will have a chance to make judgments on these and other issues as they choose between these candidates in the months ahead. But many of the consequences that will flow will have been set in motion by decisions made, in some cases years ago, by presidents who, under our system, more or less singlehandedly designate their successors.

2024-07-23 23:49:00, http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fopinion%2F3096729%2Ffacing-consequences-presidents-choosing-their-successors%2F?w=600&h=450, The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America’s history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee’s choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions,

The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America’s history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee’s choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions of primary voters, the choice of the vice presidential nominee has devolved from smoke-filled rooms of bosses who represented large constituencies to the choice of a single person.

Consider the 47-year-old Barack Obama’s selection of 65-year-old Joe Biden in 2008. For 2016, Obama shoved Biden aside in favor of the rival he bested in the February 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton. The Biden family and many others think their man would have beaten Donald Trump and would be in the twilight of an eight-year presidency now.

Obama has continued to affect Democrats’ candidate choices. In 2020, in the wake of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), he squelched the candidacy of 77-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and crowned the 78-year-old Biden. This year, in the wake of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), he shoved aside Biden for Biden’s own one-man 2020 vice presidential choice, Kamala Harris.

Obama’s continued role in designating Democratic presidential nominees echoes, perhaps faintly, the records of two historic Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, who, after two terms, effectively chose their successors for the rest of their lives.

Roosevelt’s choice, through behind-the-scenes manipulation in the 1940 and 1944 national conventions, was himself — a wise decision in my view given his brilliance as a war leader. Similarly, Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes choice in the 1944 Democratic convention of Harry Truman over the pro-Soviet Union incumbent Henry Wallace had enormous consequences after the 63-year-old Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.

Jackson’s choice, in 1836 and 1840, was Martin Van Buren, who had set up and run the first Democratic national convention, in 1832 (188 years ago!). After Van Buren was defeated in 1840, Jackson expected to support him again — until April 1844, when the usually loyal Van Buren came out against the annexation of Texas. The 78-year-old Jackson switched to his fellow Tennesseean James K. Polk, who four weeks later became the first “dark horse” presidential nominee.  

With enormous consequences. Polk beat Henry Clay by carrying New York, then a quarter-century into its 140-year run as the nation’s most populous and politically consequential state, by exactly 5,106 votes. As president, he completed the acquisition of Texas engineered by the outgoing (and 1840 Whig vice presidential nominee) John Tyler and his secretary of state John C. Calhoun. Then in 1846, Polk ordered American troops into the disputed zone between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, and when they were fired on by Mexican troops, he got the House and Senate to declare war.

Opponents of that war elected to Congress in 1846 included the 80-year-old former President John Quincy Adams and the 38-year-old future President Abraham Lincoln. But despite their efforts, the United States obtained from Mexico the then-mostly unpopulated New Mexico, Arizona, and California plus Mormon Utah. Had Polk, Andrew Jackson’s choice, not prevailed, would the U.S. have obtained California after gold was discovered at Sutter’s mill in 1848? No one knows.

Voters this year are faced with weighing the consequences of electing either a Democratic nominee picked for vice president by Biden in 2020 or a Republican nominee who beat the Democratic nominee picked as his successor by Obama in 2016 and who was headed to beat the Democratic nominee picked by, among others, Obama in 2020.

Some consequences are reasonably predictable. The parties’ positions on domestic issues are fairly well known, and presidents in office are constrained by congressional majorities and economic developments. It’s not clear that the nominees will be able to put into effect their more outré policies, such as Harris’s 2019 promises to ban fracking and abolish private health insurance, or Trump’s recent endorsement of 10 percent tariffs on all imports.

Presidents have more leeway to set policy on our borders and beyond, as Polk and Roosevelt did to great effect. I find it difficult to predict what Trump or Harris would do about Ukraine or Taiwan, but prediction seems easier on two other issues.

One is the border. Harris would surely continue the Biden open borders policy, which has flooded the U.S. with millions of illegal immigrants. Trump would limit the inflow, as he did with his 2018 “Remain in Mexico” policy, the consequences of which were indicated accurately on the chart to which he turned his head as the would-be assassin fired his rifle in Butler County, Pennsylvania.

The other is the Middle East. As vice president, Harris has been outspoken in lamenting the consequences of Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and has said little in support of Biden’s sometimes limited assistance to Israel. She seems likely to be the least pro-Israel president since the Six-Day War in 1967 and might well pursue the policy, which Obama initiated and Biden made some effort to follow, of seeking a rapprochement with Iran.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

In contrast, Trump can be expected to support Israel strongly and to encourage, in line with his Abraham Accords success, cooperation between the Sunni Arab states and Israel. His recent threat to retaliate forcefully to terrorists who hold Americans as hostages recalls President-elect Ronald Reagan’s statements that prompted Iran to release American hostages on the day of his inauguration in January 1981.

Some 160 million voters will have a chance to make judgments on these and other issues as they choose between these candidates in the months ahead. But many of the consequences that will flow will have been set in motion by decisions made, in some cases years ago, by presidents who, under our system, more or less singlehandedly designate their successors.

, The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America’s history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee’s choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions of primary voters, the choice of the vice presidential nominee has devolved from smoke-filled rooms of bosses who represented large constituencies to the choice of a single person. Consider the 47-year-old Barack Obama’s selection of 65-year-old Joe Biden in 2008. For 2016, Obama shoved Biden aside in favor of the rival he bested in the February 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton. The Biden family and many others think their man would have beaten Donald Trump and would be in the twilight of an eight-year presidency now. Obama has continued to affect Democrats’ candidate choices. In 2020, in the wake of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), he squelched the candidacy of 77-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and crowned the 78-year-old Biden. This year, in the wake of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), he shoved aside Biden for Biden’s own one-man 2020 vice presidential choice, Kamala Harris. Obama’s continued role in designating Democratic presidential nominees echoes, perhaps faintly, the records of two historic Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, who, after two terms, effectively chose their successors for the rest of their lives. Roosevelt’s choice, through behind-the-scenes manipulation in the 1940 and 1944 national conventions, was himself — a wise decision in my view given his brilliance as a war leader. Similarly, Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes choice in the 1944 Democratic convention of Harry Truman over the pro-Soviet Union incumbent Henry Wallace had enormous consequences after the 63-year-old Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Jackson’s choice, in 1836 and 1840, was Martin Van Buren, who had set up and run the first Democratic national convention, in 1832 (188 years ago!). After Van Buren was defeated in 1840, Jackson expected to support him again — until April 1844, when the usually loyal Van Buren came out against the annexation of Texas. The 78-year-old Jackson switched to his fellow Tennesseean James K. Polk, who four weeks later became the first “dark horse” presidential nominee.   With enormous consequences. Polk beat Henry Clay by carrying New York, then a quarter-century into its 140-year run as the nation’s most populous and politically consequential state, by exactly 5,106 votes. As president, he completed the acquisition of Texas engineered by the outgoing (and 1840 Whig vice presidential nominee) John Tyler and his secretary of state John C. Calhoun. Then in 1846, Polk ordered American troops into the disputed zone between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, and when they were fired on by Mexican troops, he got the House and Senate to declare war. Opponents of that war elected to Congress in 1846 included the 80-year-old former President John Quincy Adams and the 38-year-old future President Abraham Lincoln. But despite their efforts, the United States obtained from Mexico the then-mostly unpopulated New Mexico, Arizona, and California plus Mormon Utah. Had Polk, Andrew Jackson’s choice, not prevailed, would the U.S. have obtained California after gold was discovered at Sutter’s mill in 1848? No one knows. Voters this year are faced with weighing the consequences of electing either a Democratic nominee picked for vice president by Biden in 2020 or a Republican nominee who beat the Democratic nominee picked as his successor by Obama in 2016 and who was headed to beat the Democratic nominee picked by, among others, Obama in 2020. Some consequences are reasonably predictable. The parties’ positions on domestic issues are fairly well known, and presidents in office are constrained by congressional majorities and economic developments. It’s not clear that the nominees will be able to put into effect their more outré policies, such as Harris’s 2019 promises to ban fracking and abolish private health insurance, or Trump’s recent endorsement of 10 percent tariffs on all imports. Presidents have more leeway to set policy on our borders and beyond, as Polk and Roosevelt did to great effect. I find it difficult to predict what Trump or Harris would do about Ukraine or Taiwan, but prediction seems easier on two other issues. One is the border. Harris would surely continue the Biden open borders policy, which has flooded the U.S. with millions of illegal immigrants. Trump would limit the inflow, as he did with his 2018 “Remain in Mexico” policy, the consequences of which were indicated accurately on the chart to which he turned his head as the would-be assassin fired his rifle in Butler County, Pennsylvania. The other is the Middle East. As vice president, Harris has been outspoken in lamenting the consequences of Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and has said little in support of Biden’s sometimes limited assistance to Israel. She seems likely to be the least pro-Israel president since the Six-Day War in 1967 and might well pursue the policy, which Obama initiated and Biden made some effort to follow, of seeking a rapprochement with Iran. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER In contrast, Trump can be expected to support Israel strongly and to encourage, in line with his Abraham Accords success, cooperation between the Sunni Arab states and Israel. His recent threat to retaliate forcefully to terrorists who hold Americans as hostages recalls President-elect Ronald Reagan’s statements that prompted Iran to release American hostages on the day of his inauguration in January 1981. Some 160 million voters will have a chance to make judgments on these and other issues as they choose between these candidates in the months ahead. But many of the consequences that will flow will have been set in motion by decisions made, in some cases years ago, by presidents who, under our system, more or less singlehandedly designate their successors., , , https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/obama-biden-harris.webp, Washington Examiner, Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-favicon-32×32.png, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feed/, Michael Barone,

The partisan political landscape today would never have been predicted a dozen years, or two dozen days, ago. And yet the current alignment, I would argue, is in line with the Republicans’ and Democrats‘ longstanding basic character as the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world.

As I argued in my 2019 book How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), the Republican party has always been centered on a core group which has been considered, by its members and by others, as typical Americans, but who are not by themselves a majority of an always diverse nation.

The core group of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans was white Northern Protestants, enough to win him 52 percent of popular votes in free states and almost all their electoral votes. Republicans’ protectionism, opposition to high taxes and foreign allegiances added support from immigrant and foreign workers in the early twentieth century,

Republicans’ regional base shifted as Eisenhower and Nixon won 50 percent of Southern votes in 1952-60, but Republicans didn’t get a higher percentage of the popular vote for Congress in the South compared to the North until 1992. At the same time, evangelical Protestants trended Republican, but the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich party’s base still tilted toward the affluent and highly educated.

But that Republican party is part of history. Unsuccessful presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum and the Tea Party movement were the harbinger, and Donald Trump, though winning only 46 percent of primary and caucus votes in 2016, was the wave of the future. Trump accelerated the movement of affluent college grads out of, and the movement of (the much more numerous) non-college and non-metropolitan whites into, the Republican party.

Only one of the party’s previous national nominees, the late Bob Dole, showed up at any of the three Trump conventions. But after comparing the Trump and Biden presidencies, millions of Hispanic and black non-college grads have followed their white counterparts into a Republican party that, for the first time since the Depression of 90 years ago, shows signs of outnumbering the Democrats.

And Republicans definitely out-enthusing Dems. A downscale party depends on high turnout, and Trump’s less-than-an-inch escape from assassination enthused a party in a nation which many citizens, since the death of the second and third presidents on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, have considered the beneficiary of divine guidance.

Since 1832, when Martin Van Buren organized its first Democratic national convention in 1832 to nominate Andrew Jackson for a second term (and Van Buren for vice president), the Democratic party has been a coalition of outsiders, disparate peoples not considered by themselves or others as typical Americans, but who when working together can make a mighty national majority.

In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, it was a coalition of white Southerners and the immigrant masses of great Northern cities, split down the middle on civil rights, but able to stick together to vote for the economic interests of family farmers and unionized factory workers.

As the country changed, the Democratic coalition frayed. The Southern governors, big city bosses and industrial union leaders who dominated mid-twentieth century Democratic conventions saw their constituencies fall away a generation later.

The Southern charm and adept triangulation of Bill Clinton, plus cultural issues like abortion, brought affluent college grads into the Democratic tent, and Barack Obama’s election produced a top-and-bottom coalition that seemed enduring, momentarily.

But the Clinton-Obama Democrats may have stage-managed things too cleverly. Bill Clinton cleared the field for Al Gore in 2000, and after the one close and extended fight for the nomination in 2008, Barack Obama cleared the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the meantime, the pro-defund-the-police left, which has shown its clout in big city mayor and prosecutor elections, threatened to grab the 2020 nomination for self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie Sanders.

Blacks, one-fifth of the party’s primary voters, determined the Democratic nominations in 1992, 2008 and 2017, and, steered by South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, did so again for Joe Biden in 2020.

Now that Biden has been driven off the ticket by party leaders, including former president Barack Obama, the substitute nominee must almost certainly be Kamala Harris, chosen as vice president by Biden after he promised to select a black and a woman.

A party that is a coalition of disparate constituencies can scarcely afford to disrespect a constituency so large and assertive as black Americans, given their history, have been and are. And yet, before Biden dropped out, a larger percentage of blacks appeared set to vote Republican for president than in the sixty years since the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater 60 years ago–and all for a rookie politician who is far from a consensus-builder.

2024-07-22 04:06:00, http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fopinion%2Fcolumnists%2F3093110%2Famid-it-all-the-parties-are-where-they-should-be%2F?w=600&h=450, The partisan political landscape today would never have been predicted a dozen years, or two dozen days, ago. And yet the current alignment, I would argue, is in line with the Republicans’ and Democrats‘ longstanding basic character as the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world. As I argued in my 2019 book,

The partisan political landscape today would never have been predicted a dozen years, or two dozen days, ago. And yet the current alignment, I would argue, is in line with the Republicans’ and Democrats‘ longstanding basic character as the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world.

As I argued in my 2019 book How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), the Republican party has always been centered on a core group which has been considered, by its members and by others, as typical Americans, but who are not by themselves a majority of an always diverse nation.

The core group of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans was white Northern Protestants, enough to win him 52 percent of popular votes in free states and almost all their electoral votes. Republicans’ protectionism, opposition to high taxes and foreign allegiances added support from immigrant and foreign workers in the early twentieth century,

Republicans’ regional base shifted as Eisenhower and Nixon won 50 percent of Southern votes in 1952-60, but Republicans didn’t get a higher percentage of the popular vote for Congress in the South compared to the North until 1992. At the same time, evangelical Protestants trended Republican, but the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich party’s base still tilted toward the affluent and highly educated.

But that Republican party is part of history. Unsuccessful presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum and the Tea Party movement were the harbinger, and Donald Trump, though winning only 46 percent of primary and caucus votes in 2016, was the wave of the future. Trump accelerated the movement of affluent college grads out of, and the movement of (the much more numerous) non-college and non-metropolitan whites into, the Republican party.

Only one of the party’s previous national nominees, the late Bob Dole, showed up at any of the three Trump conventions. But after comparing the Trump and Biden presidencies, millions of Hispanic and black non-college grads have followed their white counterparts into a Republican party that, for the first time since the Depression of 90 years ago, shows signs of outnumbering the Democrats.

And Republicans definitely out-enthusing Dems. A downscale party depends on high turnout, and Trump’s less-than-an-inch escape from assassination enthused a party in a nation which many citizens, since the death of the second and third presidents on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, have considered the beneficiary of divine guidance.

Since 1832, when Martin Van Buren organized its first Democratic national convention in 1832 to nominate Andrew Jackson for a second term (and Van Buren for vice president), the Democratic party has been a coalition of outsiders, disparate peoples not considered by themselves or others as typical Americans, but who when working together can make a mighty national majority.

In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, it was a coalition of white Southerners and the immigrant masses of great Northern cities, split down the middle on civil rights, but able to stick together to vote for the economic interests of family farmers and unionized factory workers.

As the country changed, the Democratic coalition frayed. The Southern governors, big city bosses and industrial union leaders who dominated mid-twentieth century Democratic conventions saw their constituencies fall away a generation later.

The Southern charm and adept triangulation of Bill Clinton, plus cultural issues like abortion, brought affluent college grads into the Democratic tent, and Barack Obama’s election produced a top-and-bottom coalition that seemed enduring, momentarily.

But the Clinton-Obama Democrats may have stage-managed things too cleverly. Bill Clinton cleared the field for Al Gore in 2000, and after the one close and extended fight for the nomination in 2008, Barack Obama cleared the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the meantime, the pro-defund-the-police left, which has shown its clout in big city mayor and prosecutor elections, threatened to grab the 2020 nomination for self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie Sanders.

Blacks, one-fifth of the party’s primary voters, determined the Democratic nominations in 1992, 2008 and 2017, and, steered by South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, did so again for Joe Biden in 2020.

Now that Biden has been driven off the ticket by party leaders, including former president Barack Obama, the substitute nominee must almost certainly be Kamala Harris, chosen as vice president by Biden after he promised to select a black and a woman.

A party that is a coalition of disparate constituencies can scarcely afford to disrespect a constituency so large and assertive as black Americans, given their history, have been and are. And yet, before Biden dropped out, a larger percentage of blacks appeared set to vote Republican for president than in the sixty years since the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater 60 years ago–and all for a rookie politician who is far from a consensus-builder.

, The partisan political landscape today would never have been predicted a dozen years, or two dozen days, ago. And yet the current alignment, I would argue, is in line with the Republicans’ and Democrats‘ longstanding basic character as the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world. As I argued in my 2019 book How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t) , the Republican party has always been centered on a core group which has been considered, by its members and by others, as typical Americans, but who are not by themselves a majority of an always diverse nation. The core group of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans was white Northern Protestants, enough to win him 52 percent of popular votes in free states and almost all their electoral votes. Republicans’ protectionism, opposition to high taxes and foreign allegiances added support from immigrant and foreign workers in the early twentieth century, Republicans’ regional base shifted as Eisenhower and Nixon won 50 percent of Southern votes in 1952-60, but Republicans didn’t get a higher percentage of the popular vote for Congress in the South compared to the North until 1992. At the same time, evangelical Protestants trended Republican, but the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich party’s base still tilted toward the affluent and highly educated. But that Republican party is part of history. Unsuccessful presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum and the Tea Party movement were the harbinger, and Donald Trump, though winning only 46 percent of primary and caucus votes in 2016, was the wave of the future. Trump accelerated the movement of affluent college grads out of, and the movement of (the much more numerous) non-college and non-metropolitan whites into, the Republican party. Only one of the party’s previous national nominees, the late Bob Dole, showed up at any of the three Trump conventions. But after comparing the Trump and Biden presidencies, millions of Hispanic and black non-college grads have followed their white counterparts into a Republican party that, for the first time since the Depression of 90 years ago, shows signs of outnumbering the Democrats. And Republicans definitely out-enthusing Dems. A downscale party depends on high turnout, and Trump’s less-than-an-inch escape from assassination enthused a party in a nation which many citizens, since the death of the second and third presidents on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, have considered the beneficiary of divine guidance. Since 1832, when Martin Van Buren organized its first Democratic national convention in 1832 to nominate Andrew Jackson for a second term (and Van Buren for vice president), the Democratic party has been a coalition of outsiders, disparate peoples not considered by themselves or others as typical Americans, but who when working together can make a mighty national majority. In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, it was a coalition of white Southerners and the immigrant masses of great Northern cities, split down the middle on civil rights, but able to stick together to vote for the economic interests of family farmers and unionized factory workers. As the country changed, the Democratic coalition frayed. The Southern governors, big city bosses and industrial union leaders who dominated mid-twentieth century Democratic conventions saw their constituencies fall away a generation later. The Southern charm and adept triangulation of Bill Clinton, plus cultural issues like abortion, brought affluent college grads into the Democratic tent, and Barack Obama’s election produced a top-and-bottom coalition that seemed enduring, momentarily. But the Clinton-Obama Democrats may have stage-managed things too cleverly. Bill Clinton cleared the field for Al Gore in 2000, and after the one close and extended fight for the nomination in 2008, Barack Obama cleared the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the meantime, the pro-defund-the-police left, which has shown its clout in big city mayor and prosecutor elections, threatened to grab the 2020 nomination for self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie Sanders. Blacks, one-fifth of the party’s primary voters, determined the Democratic nominations in 1992, 2008 and 2017, and, steered by South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, did so again for Joe Biden in 2020. Now that Biden has been driven off the ticket by party leaders, including former president Barack Obama, the substitute nominee must almost certainly be Kamala Harris, chosen as vice president by Biden after he promised to select a black and a woman. A party that is a coalition of disparate constituencies can scarcely afford to disrespect a constituency so large and assertive as black Americans, given their history, have been and are. And yet, before Biden dropped out, a larger percentage of blacks appeared set to vote Republican for president than in the sixty years since the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater 60 years ago–and all for a rookie politician who is far from a consensus-builder., , , https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/kamala-harris-donald-trump-july-2024.webp, Washington Examiner, Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-favicon-32×32.png, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feed/, Michael Barone,

For those of a certain age, or with more than a woke education, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump brings back echoes of history.

Not exactly the history of the abysmal political year of 1968, which saw the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., 39, and Robert Kennedy, 42, riots in major cities across the nation — especially violent in Washington, D.C. — and violent demonstrations and a pitched battle during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But just as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York noted as Ronald Reagan was recovering from his gunshot wound, this time, the nation could take heart because the assassin’s target survived.

The year 1968 saw the retirement of an exhausted 59-year-old president, Lyndon Johnson, and the succession of a conventional and (then) not widely disliked 55-year-old Richard Nixon. Neither Joe Biden, 81, nor Donald Trump, 77, fits into this script.

The more illuminating analogy to the two transcendental events of recent weeks — the Biden debate performance on June 27 and the attempted assassination of Trump on July 12 — were things that were happening some 104 years ago, in the presidential campaign cycle of 1920.

That’s not a campaign cycle much remembered because of its politically incorrect result — the repudiation of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, a sentimental hero of liberals who applaud his scorn of constitutional limitations and conveniently forget his record as chief presidential enforcer of racial segregation in government.

Those were tumultuous times. Some 116,000 Americans died in 18 months during World War I, and even after the November 1918 armistice, fighting continued in the former Czarist and Ottoman empires, including a temporarily independent Ukraine. There were Communist coups in Munich, Berlin, and Budapest, and many feared that the totalitarians who turned out to tyrannize Russia for 70 years would do so elsewhere.

Including here. Revolutionaries in Jun 1919 bombed the Washington townhouse of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, threatening his neighbors Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Unknown radicals in September 1920 set off a bomb on Wall Street across from the J. P. Morgan building, killing dozens.

Wilson’s administration had jailed former Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs merely for speaking out against the draft, but other targets of the raids organized by the young Justice Department lawyer J. Edgar Hoover were bent on violent overthrow of a system, much as violent pro-Palestinian demonstrators threaten on campuses and in downtowns today.

Other menacing events resemble those of recent years. There were numerous race riots in 1918 and 1919, mostly with whites attacking blacks, just as there were numerous “mostly peaceful” riots, mostly of blacks destroying billions of dollars of property, in 2020 and 2021. There was a worldwide influenza epidemic, first experienced in U.S. Army camps, which killed millions here and around the world and resulted in varied restrictive measures: echoes of COVID-19, quite possibly likely incubated in a U.S.-financed Chinese laboratory.

The post-World War I economy oscillated between sharp recession and then strong inflation, which Americans had not experienced for decades. Meanwhile, the vast Ellis Island immigration in the quarter-century before world war broke out led to demands for barring most newcomers from historically unfamiliar cultures.

Amid this turbulence, the American president was mostly absent. Wilson collapsed in September 1919 on a cross-country train trip to rally support for the Versailles Treaty he had negotiated, and for months was incapacitated by a stroke. His wife and doctor barred access to Cabinet members, congressional leaders, and the press. The required two-thirds majority of the Senate was willing to ratify the treaty only with reservations preserving Congress’s constitutional power to declare war. Edith Wilson told them the president refused.

Wilson had won a second term by only a narrow margin in 1916, and opposition Republicans regained majorities in both houses of Congress in 1918. Theodore Roosevelt, defeated for a comeback third term in 1912 (in a campaign when he insisted on delivering a speech after he had been shot in the chest) was back in the Republican fold and, at 60 in 1918, wanted to run again.

Astonishingly, so did the incapacitated Wilson, 62. Had there been polling then — Dr. Gallup didn’t conduct his first random sample survey until 1935 — Roosevelt would probably have been running far ahead, but he died suddenly in January 1919. Wilson, in shattered health, was persuaded to retire.

Foreign military involvement, anti-democratic demonstrations, bitter memories of the recent riots and pandemic, dismay with inflation, concern about immigration — even in the jerky film clips of that era, you can see echoes of the issues concerning American voters today.

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How did the 1920 election cycle turn out? The Democrats nominated a formidable ticket: Ohio Gov. James Cox, a Dayton newspaper owner whose media conglomerate would make his heirs billionaires, and the 38-year-old FDR. But disgust with the Wilson administration weighed them down and helped elect the Republicans, Ohio Sen. Warren Harding, chosen in that smoke-filled room in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, and the taciturn Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge, who won by a 60 to 34% margin — the widest such margin in American history.

Such an outcome seems improbable in our current closely divided partisan politics. But voters’ concerns, echoing those in 1920, combined with Biden’s debate performance and Trump’s gallant recovery, make the Republican ticket the favorite this year Which leads to the question, to be explored during the Republican convention, of what lessons the mostly successful Harding and Coolidge administrations of the 1920s have to teach today.

The debate featured “an extraordinarily aggressive, top-to-bottom attack,” Politico wrote. “Over and over,” one candidate’s “tactic of choice was a gut-level punch.” An “alpha-male display,” Britain’s left-wing Guardian headlined. The dominant candidate’s style, CNN agreed, was “put your head down, charge forward, and don’t stop.”

No, those were not comments about last Thursday’s earliest-in-history presidential debate. They were analyses made 12 years ago after the October 2012 vice presidential debate between Paul Ryan and his much more aggressive opponent, Joe Biden.

Biden was then the incumbent vice president, determined to offset Barack Obama’s indolent performance against Mitt Romney in the campaign’s first presidential debate eight days before. His forceful, often mocking approach obscured his frequent misstatements and factual errors, but he reversed the Democratic ticket’s downward plunge in the polls.   

The contrast between Biden’s 2012 and 2024 performances is glaring and a reminder of the ravages of age. But the two debates may also turn out to represent a turning point in the politics of, and the balance between, the two parties.

Going into the 2012 debate, Ryan at age 42 looked to me like the future of Republican politics.

As House Budget chairman, he had gotten his colleagues to back his package of tax cuts and entitlement reforms while looking favorably on free trade and legalization of worthy illegal immigrants.

But the bombast and ridicule Biden inflicted on Ryan in the 2012 debate was a foretaste of the bombast and ridicule former President Donald Trump inflicted on multiple rivals in presidential primary debates in 2016 — and which he inflicted on the (to many voters) surprisingly inert Biden last week.

As speaker of the House for 38 months from October 2015, Ryan helped shape and pass Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. But from the time he came down the Trump Tower escalator, Trump repudiated Ryan’s stands on entitlements, trade, and immigration. By now, almost all Republican officeholders have followed his lead.

Meanwhile, under Biden, Democrats moved sharply left on key issues, with an open borders policy, vast spending increases (on top of Trump’s) sparking first-time-in-four-decades inflation, and ninth-month abortions. Trump hit Biden hard on such leftward lunges last week.

Will the 2024 debate in which Biden got shellshocked have a similar politics-altering effect to the 2012 debate in which he administered the shellshocking?

Of course we don’t yet know the fallout of this year’s debate. Thoughtful liberals like polling analyst Nate Silver, issues advocate Ezra Klein, and the gifted reporter Joe Klein are pleading that Biden withdraw and Democrats nominate someone stronger than his hand-picked vice president, Kamala Harris.

But Democratic politicians have, as the younger Klein writes, a “collective action” problem: Retribution awaits the first dissenters from the public Biden-should-stay consensus. And as shown in Biden’s 36 years of commuting from the Senate home to Delaware and his nearly 300 days there as president (according to CBS’s Mark Knoller), he’s never been close to Washington insiders. He has relied instead largely on family members, all of whom are reportedly strongly against withdrawal.

It’s still possible he could win. Silver gives that a 31% likelihood, just above the 29% he gave Trump of winning going into the 2016 election. Things that likely tend to happen about one-third of the time.

But two-thirds of the time they don’t. Trump was ahead going into the debate, initial polling suggests his lead has grown since, and he seems to have significant leads in states (including Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia, which he lost in 2020) with 268 electoral votes, two short of a majority. Add Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin or Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District and he’s president again. And probably with a Republican House and Republican Senate.

Democrats looking back on the last three decades brag that they’ve won five of the last eight presidential elections and have carried the popular vote in seven. A Trump presidency, if it were as successful with voters as the pre-COVID first Trump term was, could be followed by a second and possibly two-term Republican presidency.

Possible Trump VP nominees Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) or Tom Cotton (R-AR), or Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), whom he shoved aside this year, look to me as at least as gifted at politics and policy as any Democrat I’ve seen mentioned as national nominees.

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So one possible result of the Biden debate debacle could be 12 years of Republican popular vote victories and presidencies, something achieved only once since 1952, in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s. That would represent success for the Republican politics of Trump and would surely, sooner or later, prompt a rethink of the Democratic politics of Biden.

Is that too much to extrapolate from a single debate? Probably. But it would be poetic justice if the devastation Biden inflicted on Ryan’s ideas were inflicted in turn by Trump on Biden’s.