Republican problems with voters are clear. Solutions are not

Losing candidates — and losing presidents — usually don’t stick around in the spotlight. Trump has been the opposite, and for whatever reasons the party has chosen to indulge him, despite the fact that he’s never been popular throughout his political career, losing the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020 and never hitting 50 percent approval throughout his presidency. And that’s before he was indicted four times, had one court find him to have committed sexual assault and another about to find that his business empire was fraudulent.

None of that means he has no chance to win a second presidential term; indeed, as the much-discussed New York Times polling this week and other polls have found, current horse race polling shows him doing quite well against Biden. But it may mean that when people vote, instead of just thinking about a president they don’t approve of they also think about his opponent, who they also dislike. They may even think mainly about the attention-seeking former president.

The other thing worth mentioning is that the whole constellation of “anti-woke” measures and themes Republicans have been running on over the last couple of years, including attacks on trans people, have been total flops as far as winning elections is concerned. Again, it’s hard to be certain of exactly what does and doesn’t drive votes, but Republican failures do make it clear that those issues are certainly not overwhelmingly successful for them. Given the popularity of this stuff in the conservative marketplace, however, it’s not clear that Republican opinion leaders will back off at all.

It’s possible that if Biden rallies and becomes more popular, it will mainly be among the people who currently say they don’t like him but vote for Democrats anyway. If that’s the case, then a significant Biden rally may only make his popularity align better with election results, rather than expanding the Democratic advantage. And if Biden doesn’t rally, it’s possible that he’ll drag down the ticket from the top — that the effect of Democrats outperforming Biden’s popularity won’t work when Biden is the one on the ballot. We just don’t know how that will play out.

But in the meantime, elections matter regardless of what they do or don’t signal about future elections. And after Tuesday night, abortion rights are going to be more secure for Ohioans and Virginians — and more accessible for nearby residents of states that have imposed bans. And while Kentucky’s Governor Andy Bashear will still find his vetoes regularly overriden by a very Republican legislature (that wasn’t on the ballot this year), Virginia’s Governor Youngkin will find his legislative agenda blocked by a unified Democratic legislature in that state.

Overall, then, the biggest takeaway from these elections is that policy is going to shift very modestly in the Democrats’ direction, especially compared with what might have happened had there been a normal reaction to an unpopular president. And regardless of what happens next November, that’s a big deal for now.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg