Franke: Reflections on the Election
by Mark Franke
Now that the election is a month in the past, it is time to take stock of what we learned from it. Not much. Or perhaps, too much.
If the political pundits are to be believed, the Republicans won a clear mandate. True, Donald Trump won the presidency and the Republicans turned four Senate seats, but their slim majority in the House of Representatives is now a razor thin one. That doesn’t add up to a mandate to my thinking.
The other theme being pronounced as if from on high is that the Democrat party is in such disarray that it is no longer competitive. I seem to recall that several election cycles back, the same thing was said about the Republican party . . . that it would never win another presidential election. Yet a Republican will reoccupy the White House on Jan. 20. Apparently the Republican party’s death, like that of Mark Twain, has been greatly exaggerated.
I’m not Nostradamus but I think I can safely predict that the Democrat party will be back in 2026, although repackaged if only superficially.
Why am I not ready to bury the Democrat party? Being an avocational student of history, I can look back nearly 200 years when the modern Democrat party was assembled by Martin Van Buren for the sole purpose of winning elections. This is what the Democrats understand much better than the Republicans: Parties in a representative democracy exist to win elections and do so by forging a majority coalition that unites for this purpose. Republicans, the conservative in me is sorry to say, give top priority to ideological purity even if it means losing in the short term. I submit Rand Paul and the Freedom Caucus as exhibits one and two.
I may be too harsh in my judgment. The “dead” Republican party did manage to rise Phoenix like and find a winning formula around Donald Trump and his version of national conservatism philosophy. He managed a clear Electoral College majority and a victory on election night. He also achieved a Republican popular vote majority, something the pundits mentioned above predicted would never happen again.
So the salient question is how did Trump win this time after losing in 2020?
The Indiana Policy Review held its annual winter seminar last weekend and this was the question. What I found most interesting is that two different and opposite answers came out of our discussion.
Several of our members argued that it all resulted from Donald Trump, his personality and his focus on several key issues. This opinion assumes, per force, that no other Republican could have won. This view aligns nicely with the “Republican party is dead” mantra we have been hearing for a decade or so.
This was hardly a unanimous decision. The seminar speaker, a man with significant experience as both a candidate and a campaign manager, pointed to data that illustrated the net negative opinions held by voters for both candidates. More voters disliked each candidate than liked either one. That portends poorly for both parties, which was his point: Is this the best they can do?
Early polling during the primary season showed that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden (at the time) would lose to a generic candidate from the other party. In other words voters were telling pollsters that they would rather vote for an unnamed Republican than Biden and for an unnamed Democrat than Trump.
This theme, of voting against a candidate or party rather than for one, has been obvious to serious observers for some time. How have we come to this?
The many electoral reform movements active these days see the solution as eliminating the power of extremists in the primaries. With low voter turnout and fields of multiple candidates, do primaries truly represent the parties’ best thinking on favorite candidates? Clearly not, if the generic candidate polling tells us anything.
We must keep in mind that primary elections are functions of the two parties. They happen because the parties want them to, not because the Constitution requires them. The putative election reformers tend to give inadequate thought to this barrier to their proposals for open primaries and independent candidacies.
The greater problem in my mind is the negativity that informs our voting patterns. Regardless of how the two parties conduct their nomination processes, we Americans seem driven to choose based on our dislikes or worse. We have become a nation at war with ourselves.
I can’t exempt myself from this indictment. I haven’t been excited about a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. And, truth be told, I voted for a third-party candidate this year for the first time in my life.
As the Indiana Policy Review speaker suggested, we can do better than this.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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