"A Reasonably Competent Democratic Party"-- Ah There's The Rub

Ross Douthat painted a potentially catastrophic picture of what could happen to the House Republicans-- a total wipeout isn't possible because of 135 districts with PVIs between R+10 (there are 16 of them) and R+32 (welcome to the Texas Panhandle) where Señor Trumpanzee won a whopping 79.9%. That's Mac Thornberry's district. But it's not the only one in rural Texas bogged down in the kind of backward mentality that produced results like that. There were 7 congressional districts in Texas that gave Trump over 70% of its votes. And there were 2 in Georgia with over 70% Trump voters. But that ain't nothin'-- AL-04 went for Trump with 80.4%. And KY-05-- the opioid crisis district-- almost hit 80% (79.6%).

But even if every district with R+10 or more is safe-- and I don't know anyone who considers Pete Sessions safe or Devin Nunes very safe anymore-- that leaves over 100 districts held by Republicans that are potentially vulnerable. Douthat, one of the Times' in-house right-wingers, noted that "over the last seven years, the Republican Party has engaged in increasingly elaborate political suicide attempts. The G.O.P. has nominated cranks and erstwhile witches and Todd Akin in winnable Senate races. It has engaged in Somme-esque trench warfare within its own congressional caucus, shut down the government without a strategy for winning anything out of it, and campaigned on a sub-Ayn Randian narrative about the heroic businessman and the mooching 47 percent. And then, after all its prior efforts at seppuku failed, the party nominated Donald Trump for the presidency."

The Republicans were given a gift by Trump’s campaign, a grace they did not merit: the gift of freedom from the trap of dogma, from the pre-existing condition of zombie Reaganism, from an agenda out of touch with the concerns of their actual constituents. Nominating Trump wasn’t as suicidal as it seemed only because he had the political cunning to run against the party’s ideological enforcers, while promising working-class voters not just cultural acknowledgment but material support.

As written, the A.H.C.A. basically takes Trump’s gift to the party and hurls it off the highest possible cliff. It is not just the scale of the likely insurance losses, or how much the rich benefit from repeal relative to everybody else. It’s also the gulf between that reality and what Trump and various Republican leaders explicitly promised-- insisting that their plan would deliver better coverage, lower premiums, and a lot of other things that have since taken a back seat to making room in the budget for more tax cuts.

When President Obama said-- lyingly-- that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” his party ultimately paid for it. A reasonably competent Democratic Party, with something like the A.H.C.A. to run against, should be able to make Republicans pay dearly in their turn.

But, alas, there is no "reasonably competent Democratic Party. Douthat laughs about how the Democrats are fighting internally over "over identity politics versus class politics versus making it all about Trump (and Russia?)" instead of offering a clear vision forward for America's working families. "[T]he central Democratic argument in 2018 and 2020," he suggested, "should be entirely clear: Trump is not a populist but just another pro-plutocracy Republican, and everything his party promised you on health care was a sham." Most Democrats I know are on that page already. But, like I mentioned the other day, I've talked to Democrats-- primarily the DCCC-favored Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party (Blue Dogs and New Dems) who tell me they don't know anything about healthcare and they want to talk about the kind of Republican issues that pervade Hate Talk Radio in their districts-- like how strongly they pledge allegiance to the Second Amendment.

And Douthat ended on a downer: "When a party repeatedly attempts suicide and somehow staggers bleeding into political victories instead, it is reasonable to doubt the rival party’s ability to capitalize even on the worst of blunders. So two questions loom for the Republicans who voted for this terrible bill. Can the Senate save them from themselves? And if the Senate doesn’t-- can the Democrats?" I doubt the Senate will save them, but I bet the DCCC will innoculate at least 50 winnable seats for the GOP with their Rahm Emanuel version of candidate recruitment: self-funders, Republican-lite candidates, Wall Street suck-ups and repulsive and ignorant identity politics sops. Too bad! Wouldn't you love to see a House with 135 Republican crackpots, primarily from the Old Confederacy, and 300 Democrats. Oh well, let's try to get what we can.