Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Ross Douthat: It’s good to be back with you, Frank, in the crisp air of fall — the season when anxious Democrats fret about whether their blue wave might sink back into a gentle ripple. I thought we might start with an unexpected source of Democratic anxiety: Hispanic voters, who despite all of President Donald Trump’s border cruelties, don’t appear to be turning against Republicans to the degree that liberals expected. Instead, Slate’s León Krauze pointed out recently, “while Trump was enacting his anti-immigrant agenda, Latino voters seemed to have slowly warmed up to the president” — not embracing him outright, but giving him at least normal-Republican numbers, if not slightly better. What do you think is happening here?
Frank Bruni: Fall’s crisp air seemed to take forever to arrive. Thank you, global warming. But that’s another plaint for another day — or, rather, for many, many other days, and sweltering ones at that. As for Hispanic voters, I haven’t seen great research regarding why, in one poll that Krauze cites, 41 percent approve of Trump’s job performance.
I do know this, though: We talk of Hispanic voters as a unified bloc. That’s lazy and wrong. Some have been in the United States long enough that when Trump vilifies a recent tide of Hispanic immigrants, they’re not closely identifying with the objects of his scorn. Some are responsive to the same law-and-order declamations that move many white voters. Some are religious, even evangelical: They like Trump’s position on abortion. Don’t you think?
Douthat: Yes, I’ve always thought the assumption that Hispanics are all single-issue voters to be won or lost on immigration politics was a mistake. But it’s still striking that after all the post-2012 talk about how the GOP was doomed if it didn’t pivot on immigration, Trump seems at least as popular with minorities — including, at a much-lower level, with African-Americans — as the Republican leaders who preceded him. At the very least it suggests that the solid economy is helping him with some groups — and that, as I’ve suggested before, the biggest culture war of the Trump era is about sex and gender, not race and ethnicity. Do you buy that thesis?
Bruni: I think the culture wars, plural, of the Trump era are all intense, all corrosive and all reflective of a president with little thought or care about the fractiousness he sows. I also think you’re right to bring up the economy: Whether Trump deserves credit or not, many new jobs have been created, and they have gone to people of all colors and ethnicities. And if there’s one thing voters like, it’s jobs. That said, Democrats running for the House and Senate will likely get a majority of the votes from Hispanic voters. Their greater concern, arguably, is the turnout of those voters, no?
Douthat: It’s both: I think the concern for Democrats is that there’s differential turnout, where older, better-off Hispanics are more likely to vote like their white suburban neighbors and more likely to vote overall than lower-income Latino voters and more recent arrivals. That’s what’s been happening for a long time in Texas, where the well-established Mexican-American population is relatively friendly to Republicans — which is why Ted Cruz has hit 45 percent in one poll against Beto O’Rourke with Hispanic voters. So it’s a both/and for Democrats: They need higher Hispanic turnout, but an extra five to 10 points among Hispanics who normally vote would help them a lot, and they don’t seem to be on their way to getting it.
Bruni: I’m glad you mentioned Texas. The Hispanic question is so crucial because many high-profile races that could decide control of the House and Senate are happening in states with large Hispanic populations: Texas, which has a bevy of tight House contests in addition to the Cruz-O’Rourke Senate battle; Arizona, where the Democratic Senate candidate, Kyrsten Sinema, has a good chance of nabbing the seat that Jeff Flake, a Republican, is vacating; Nevada, California, Florida. So how Hispanic voters act is huge. Will the fact that they’re not revolting against Trump mean a blue ripple or blue washout instead of a blue wave?
Douthat: A big breaker fit for surfing, but not a tsunami. The Democrats’ lead on the generic ballot has been consistently in a zone where they should have a good chance of taking the House, but their chances in a Senate map that was never ideal for them have slipped a bit — maybe because of the Brett Kavanaugh controversy nationalizing reddish-state races in a bad way for the Dems, or maybe because a lot of Tennessee and Missouri and Texas voters were always likely to come home to the GOP once they started paying closer attention to the race. So to get a wave big enough to sweep Beto or even Phil Bredesen into the Senate, you need something pretty dramatic to happen in the next few weeks.
Bruni: If I were a betting man — and I am, but only at the blackjack table — I’d put a decent sum of money on Democrats taking the House. They have fielded better candidates than they usually do; I know because I’ve had the privilege of meeting and talking with many of them. Those candidates have raised much, much more money than their Republican counterparts.
Scott Clement and Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote a terrific story based on the most recent Post-ABC News poll; it showed that among voters who prefer Democratic candidates for the House, 81 percent say they are certain to vote. Among those who support Republican candidates for the House, 76 percent say they are. Registered independent voters, powered by independent women, favor Democrats over Republicans. The poll also gave Democrats a double-digit lead in the generic ballot. Those numbers aren’t reliably prophetic, but they can’t be ignored.
Douthat: Which suggests that we’re headed toward an outcome — a split decision, with the Republicans possibly even gaining a seat or two in the Senate — that will escalate the present liberal fury against the design and very existence of the Senate. Our friend and colleague David Leonhardt has the measured version of that take, arguing that it’s time for Democrats to push for D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood to address the ways the current Senate map underrepresents Democratic and especially minority constituencies. Are you on board for that push?
Bruni: Yes, I think David is right about that, and I think when you combine the Senate parity between small states and big states and the reliance on the Electoral College over a popular vote, you have unfairly diminished influence for populous areas of the country and their urban (and suburban) residents.
But I want to go back to turnout, and why it has me on pins and needles. Looking at the 2016 results and at other evidence, I’m convinced that most Americans are not fans of Trump or of the direction he’s taking the country. But will our system and the participation in it reflect that? Or is it too broken? And if it doesn’t, how much wider do the fault lines open? And then what happens?
Douthat: I guess I worry that Democrats are setting themselves up to tell a story where the system is broken, when an equally important problem is that they just don’t want to make certain ideological compromises to win — compromises that might get some disillusioned voters off the sidelines and help them pull back Trump-curious Hispanics or win back Obama-Trump voters in the Midwest.
I look at Beto as an example of this problem: Like Wendy Davis before him, he’s a coastal journalist’s fantasy of the kind of candidate who wins in Texas, running a campaign that’s not wild-eyed but is clearly to the left of his state. Meanwhile, for a Democrat to actually win a Senate seat in Texas, they probably need to be more like, well, Joe Manchin — a little more conservative on abortion, guns and immigration. And if you want to do any of the structural things Democrats fantasize about — like statehood for D.C. or packing the Supreme Court or whatever — you first need to actually win the Senate, and ideally by a handsome margin. Which might require a party that seems a little less socially liberal than the Democrats do right now.
Bruni: I’m on record with my belief that the Democratic Party strays too far from the center at its electoral peril. You’ll get no quibble from me on that. I think Beto is more complicated, though, than any quick left-right analysis.
But we can’t speak honestly of turnout and Democrats’ fate and the divergence of results from reality without at least nodding toward how ridiculously difficult this country makes it to vote. Even leaving aside any conversation about voter suppression, why not more states with mail-in ballots? Why not voting on weekends, when not as many people work? Why not mobile-phone voting? I question how much some people, Republicans in particular, want full participation. Don’t you?
Douthat: I think Republican paranoia about illegal noncitizen voting is mostly sincere, but I also think it’s mostly paranoia (or nostalgia for a time when big-city Democrats really knew how to stuff the ballot box). Voter-ID laws only affect turnout at the margins, but it’s clearly an effect that helps the GOP, and I think the country would be better off if Republicans looked at the polls I started out citing and said: “We can compete for minority votes. We don’t need to live in constant fear of minority turnout.” I also like the idea of a grand bargain: Less early voting (which I don’t love because it means everyone is voting with different information at different stages of the campaign) in exchange for making Election Day a national holiday so that everyone has time to vote that day.
Bruni: I’m going to be a glutton (which is, admittedly, my default setting) and say that I want early voting and the national holiday, but I’m not meaning to be gluttonous. I’m recognizing that not everyone is in town, etc., to vote on one given day. But I’d compress the early-voting period, for the exact reason you cite. You can vote for a candidate and then, I don’t know, an “Access Hollywood” tape that you never expected comes along.
Douthat: Which raises a question with which to see us out: If you were indeed placing bets, what October or early-November surprise still lurks? What are you watching and waiting for as we head down the stretch?
Bruni:In the interests of caution, I do not watch and wait but wonder. I wonder about Trump v. Jim Mattis, per Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview: Could something happen there, in terms of a fallout and resignation, that underscores the instability of this administration? Could there be some other personnel hullabaloo? I wonder about even more than that, but your turn.
Douthat: I agree: Democrats should be hoping for some last burst of instability or scandal to lift their wave. As for Team Trump, I’ve wondered if he has some act of showmanship up his sleeve. His North Korean summit, for all the expert tut-tutting, was one of the most popular acts of his presidency. If I were running his reality show — er, working for his White House — I’d be trying to think of something similarly dramatic for the last few weeks.
Bruni: I’ll tell you, in closing, what I don’t wonder about: some personal — as opposed to personnel — scandal that derails him and thus Republicans. The glory of being Trump is that everybody already assumes the worst about you, sex-wise and taxwise and temperwise, so there are no shockers. No being pulled down. You’re already frolicking at the nadir.
Douthat: Don’t tempt fate, Frank; there are nadirs as yet unplumbed, and it’s always possible that we’ll plumb them before we meet again.
Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni are columnists for The New York Times.
