Kansas Anymore?

You know what would be amazing? That Trump winds up being so toxic that he even manages to lose the Kansas Senate seat for the Republicans! I know, I know... it's impossible. Actually it is-- literally-- impossible since even if the Schumer candidate, Barbara Bollier, wins, it's still a Republican in the seat. (A few months ago, she switched parties, although certainly not her ideology, but... good enough for Schumer.) Pat Roberts is retiring and the seat is open and-- that aside-- Kansas has elected Democrats in the past-- although only one after senators started being elected by popular vote rather than by state legislatures. That one time Kansas elected a Democratic freshman was in 1930 when George McGill won after Charles Curtis resigned to become Herbert Hoover's vice president.

But a newly released poll of registered voters in Kansas by Civiqs, shows the Kansas Senate contest all tied up-- quasi-Democrat Barbara Bollier beating neo-fascist Kris Kobach 42-41%, losing to establishment Republican Roger Marshall 41-42% and beating establishment Republican Bob Hamilton 41-40%. The same poll, but of Republicans only, indicates that Bollier will probably get her wish to take on Kobach:

• Kobach- 35%
• Marshall- 26%
• Hamilton- 15%

In 1960 Kansas voted for Nixon over JFK, 561,474 (60.5%) to 363,213 (39.1%). In 1968, Kansas would have given Nixon an even bigger percentage but George Wallace was running so it was Nixon 54.8% to Humphrey 34.7% and Wallace 10.2%. Four years later, you can probably imagine the Kansas landslide to reelect Nixon, right? 67.7% to 29,5% for George McGovern. "Trump," wrote David Frum yesterday, "is no Richard Nixon." That's true, even Kansans know the difference. They only gave Trump 56.2% against Hillary. But's that's not exactly what Frum had mind. "As riots and looting have disordered cities across the United States, many have speculated," he wrote, "that the troubles could help reelect President Donald Trump. The speculation is based on analogy. American cities were swept by riots in the mid-1960s, and then, in 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on a pledge of “law and order” and won the presidency. As it was then, so it will be now-- or so the punditry goes. The riots of 2020 may or may not help Donald Trump. The analogy to 1968, however, misunderstands both the politics of that traumatic year, and the success of Richard Nixon. One thing to remember about the presidential election of 1968 is that it was a three-way race. Nixon ran not only against the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, a liberal stalwart with a long civil-rights record, but also against the outright segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama. Wallace would ultimately collect 8.6 percent of the popular vote and win five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Facing those two rivals allowed Nixon to run as the candidate of the middle way, committed both to civil rights and to public order." But, yeah, Wallace did better in Kansas... of course.

Today, we know the Nixon of the secret tapes: crude, amoral, often bigoted. The public Nixon of 1968, however, behaved with the dignity and decorum Americans then expected in a president. Trump in 2020 occupies the place not of Nixon, but of Daley and George Wallace: Trump is the force of disorder that is frightening American voters into seeking a healing candidate-- not the candidate of healing who can restore a fair and just public order.





The irony, of course, is that at the same time that Trump tweets bloodthirsty threats, he has turned off the White House lights and cowered in the bunker below. He joins noisy bluster to visible weakness-- exactly the opposite of the Nixon formula in 1968. Trump will not repeat Nixon’s success in 1968, because he does not understand that success. Nixon joined his vow of order to a promise of peace at home and abroad. Trump offers only conflict, and he offers no way out of conflict, because-- unlike Nixon in 1968-- Trump is himself the cause of so much conflict.”

If Trump seeks historical parallels for his reelection campaign, here’s one that is much more apt. There was a campaign in which the party of the president presided over a deadly pandemic at the same time as a savage depression and a nationwide spasm of bloody urban racial violence. The year was 1920. The party in power through these troubles went on to suffer the worst defeat in U.S. presidential history, a loss by a margin of 26 points in the popular vote. The triumphant challenger, Warren Harding, was not some charismatic superhero of a candidate. He didn’t need to be. In 2020 as in 1920, the party of the president is running on the slogan Let us fix the mess we made. It didn’t work then. It’s unlikely to work now.

The L.A. Times published an editorial at 3AM yesterday about Trump poring oil on the flames. He's overtly calling himself "your president of law and order" and threatening to send the military into American cities. The Times labeled that another demonstration "that he has little understanding of why Americans have taken to the streets [and] reinforced the impression that he sees the current crisis as an opportunity for him to score political points in an election year with a new iteration of his 2016 claim that 'I alone can fix it.'... A different president would have been able to credibly lament that lawlessness, and call for measures to deal with it, with no one suspecting ulterior motives. Trump has forfeited any such benefit of the doubt. In his remarks on Monday, as in previous comments, he expressed sympathy for George Floyd, whose death led to a murder charge against the former Minneapolis police officer shown kneeling on Floyd’s neck in a video that went viral. But Trump consistently has failed to recognize that Floyd’s death was the latest example of a pattern of police violence against African American men that in turn is a manifestation of entrenched and pervasive racism."