In a year we’ll be saying goodbye to 2016, and with it, goodbye to an era of comity, bipartisanship and political goodwill.
We’ll recall it as the last year when red states and blue happily held hands and skipped down the sidewalk together drinking frappuccinos and singing nursery rhymes. We’ll remember it fondly as an era of cottony-soft rhetoric and polite disagreement, when people could express their differences without name-calling and the president enjoyed broad respect.
Relatively speaking, that is. Sure, the Obama period has been what writer Ed Driscoll dubbed “the hateful eight years,” and President Obama has been the single most polarizing president in US history.
Until the next one.
On both sides, the electorate is saying the opposition has been treated far too kindly, that it’s time to put down the switchblades and pick up the howitzers. Get ready for an election year like no other. It’s going to be a hair-raising path to November. From here on in, it’s Mad Masses: Fury Road.
“The candidates leading the polls in either party — Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, Donald Trump for the Republicans — are not just viewed unfavorably by voters overall; they are the most unfavorably viewed by Americans out of all of the candidates running,” noted Kristen Soltis Anderson in The Washington Examiner. Over a 40-year career in and around public life, Hillary Clinton has accumulated so much baggage that the mere mention of her name (like that of Richard Nixon) has come to seem disparaging.
Her unfavorable rating stands at 51.5% in a Huffington Post average of recent polls. Yet her name recognition is also her best asset and the main reason why she is miles ahead of every other Democrat in the race to be the party’s nominee in November.
If Clinton should face Donald Trump on the ballot in November, Americans will be forced to choose between two candidates they hate.
Believe it or not, that’s unusual.
In previous elections, even losing candidates like John McCain and John Kerry enjoyed approval ratings of over 50% during the heat of the presidential campaign. At no point in 2012 did Mitt Romney ever register an unfavorable rating of 50% or more in three consecutive polls, according to the RealClearPolitics survey of polling data. Hillary has hit that mark in nine of the last 10 polls, before a single vote has even been cast. Her undisguised, indeed proudly trumpeted, message is to be even more extreme and contemptuous of constitutional checks and balances than Barack Obama.
It’s going to be a hair-raising path to November. From here on in, it’s Mad Masses: Fury Road.
And yet Trump makes her look like Abe Lincoln by comparison. Every poll in the RCP average going back to May has Trump’s unfavorable rating at 50% or more. His average is 34% favorable, 57% unfavorable.
Ted Cruz, who with some success has been trying to position himself to voters as Trump with a Senate seat and a Harvard Law degree, isn’t likely to endear himself either.
He instantly became the most hated man in the Senate. Knowledgeable sources tell me Cruz was widely disliked by his classmates at Princeton and by fellow conservative Supreme Court clerks when he worked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Even though many voters don’t have an opinion about him yet, his disapproval rating has already edged above 40%, with his approval rating at 32%, in the RCP average.
I agree with Cruz’s positions on almost everything, but even I can’t help noticing he comes across as worse than a used-car salesman. Cruz is more like a used car salesman’s lawyer.
But in this environment, Jeb Bush and (so far) Marco Rubio have been unable to get traction. They’re too nice. If you’re not making people mad, you’re putting them to sleep. David Brinkley is dead. Howard Beale is alive.
The Democratic Party used to be so concerned with moderate voters that as recently as 2004 John Kerry felt the need to pretend to be a hunter and as recently as 2008 Barack Obama felt the need to pretend he was against gay marriage. Today the party is convinced that turning out liberals is the key to victory. At the same time, some Republicans (notably Cruz) are murmuring that their party, too, should play to the base rather than the middle. Mitt Romney would have lost the 2012 election even if he had nabbed 70% of the Latino vote, 43 points more than he actually got. But he would have prevailed if he had increased his share of the white vote by just four points.
If both presidential candidates chase the votes, and the fundraising dollars, of the most extreme, stubborn and confrontational members of their party, it’ll be a campaign season nastier than anything you’ve ever seen. There won’t even be a pretense of playing to our better instincts. Forget hope and change. It’s time for nope and rage.