Writing in the Financial Times on September 1, Robin Wrigglesworth reported that markets are signaling unease about what may lie ahead in the first week of November. It is not so much the election that’s causing agita as the fear that Election Night might not resolve the result. Investors do not appreciate uncertainty, and if everything is still unresolved by, say, late the next day, the only certainty will be uncertainty.
Read MoreThe fact that I am writing this from home, in a New York City that has been more or less shut down, with the National Guard checked into neighboring hotels and, just a few blocks away, Gotham’s principal conference center hosting an emergency hospital, is a reminder that to dismiss almost anything these days as an impossibility is unwise. And so, yes, it is possible that Andrew Cuomo could be chosen as the Democratic nominee at whatever sort of convention the party is able to hold in Milwaukee in August. But it is also extremely unlikely.
Read MoreThe economic numbers are beginning to come in, and, predictably enough, just about wherever you check, they are appalling. In Pennsylvania alone last week there were more than 350,000 first-time claims for unemployment assistance. That compares with (seasonally adjusted) initial national claims over the last year averaging in the low 200,000s, and the news is only going to get worse in Pennsylvania and, probably, every other state. Brokerage research, usually a reliable source of good cheer until well past the last moment, now makes for bleak reading. On Friday, Goldman Sachs estimated that U.S. GDP would tumble by an annualized 24 percent in the second quarter (against earlier expectations of a 5 percent hit). A pandemic has consequences and so do the measures taken to contain it. This week Morgan Stanley ratcheted up the gloom, forecasting an annualized 30 percent GDP decline in a second quarter when unemployment could hit nearly 14 percent. Tracking the course of these projections shows how rapidly the mood is darkening, and expectations play no small role in driving the economy.
Read MoreIf Amazon or the pharmacies of Manhattan are any guide, buying a thermometer in America has become tricky, expensive or both — the Braun thermometer for which I paid some $60 shortly after the birth of our one-year-old was available online over the weekend for a modest $359.97. In confronting an epidemic data is, if not necessarily the first line of defence, very close behind it. Yet when it comes to testing for Covid-19, the US has been a laggard. On some estimates, fewer than 20,000 Americans had been tested by March 11. That’s around 23 per million, compared with a rate of 347 people per million in the UK.
Read MoreNovember 2020 is still a long way away, but it already looks as if the next presidential election will be lost not won.
It is not a given that America’s economy will hold up, but if it does, Donald Trump, as the incumbent, would normally have a good chance of hanging onto his job. However, “normally” is not a word that applies to a president forever a tweet, a fiasco or a past, present or future scandal away from disaster. Then there are the polls. Trump has had the lowest average approval ratings of any president since Gallup started measuring them in the 1930s, and he has yet to hit 50 per cent even once. He prevailed in 2016 with the smallest share of the popular vote (46.1 per cent) since a complicated four-way tussle in 1824.
New York City, July 2018 © Andrew Stuttaford
“Treason,” it has been famously said, “is a matter of dates”. The same, rather more obviously, is true of political surprises. At the beginning of the year, there was excited talk of “a blue wave” that would sweep the Democrats into power in the House of Representatives and, despite unfavourable political geography (Democrats were defending many more Senate seats than Republicans, including a good number in states won by Trump in 2016), quite possibly the Senate too. A new president’s party typically struggles in the first Midterm elections held after his victory. And when that president was polling so poorly as Donald Trump, well…
By October, those hopes had largely evaporated. The prevailing conventional wisdom was that the Republicans would hold the Senate and lose the House, but not dramatically so. As it was, the GOP has actually managed to add to its current 51-49 majority, an impressive achievement under the circumstances. To be sure, Republicans have lost the House by a little more than the most recent expectations, but by quite a bit less than the carnage of Democrats’ January dreams or, say, the humiliation inflicted on the Democrats in 2010, two years after Obama first took up residence in the White House.
Even a blue trickle will prove sufficient to bring down that non-existent wall. However, the President will, come 2020, be able to blame the failure to fortify the border on Democratic obstruction rather than Republican hesitation, one element in a wider perk of defeat that Trump, better at running against than for, will exploit to the full. A Democratic House will make for a tremendous target, especially if, as seems likely, the Democrats continue to swing to the left. Making Trump’s task easier still will be the fact that this iteration of the left is driven more by the politics of identity—terrain where Trump has considerable skills of his own— than by those of economic grievance.
Today, of course, marks both of the start of the 2020 election season and a surge in complaints that it is too early to start discussing 2020. All I will say for now is that the GOP will, absent “events”, be fighting the 2020 election as unambiguously the party of Trump. The President’s appeal to a changing base both saved yesterday (more or less) for the Republicans, but his spiel –and the baggage that comes with it—drove yet more moderate voters on the coasts and in the more affluent suburbs into the Democratic camp. This is a self-reinforcing process. As ‘purple’ parts of the country turn blue, they throw out the GOP lawmakers most likely to push back against the President, leaving the remainder even more closely bound to the man from Trump Tower. There is a great deal of division in this nation, and it is not going to narrow.
Nevertheless, part of Trump’s persona is as a deal-maker. As he contemplates a newly hostile House of Representatives, he may well try to see if he can win its agreement to the increased infrastructure spending he has always wanted, but without the tax increases that would infuriate the Congressional GOP. He might get that—even if, with government debt coming into ever more uncomfortable focus, another splurge would not delight the bond market—but it won’t buy him enough Democratic goodwill to head off the flurry of investigations that will be coming his way from congressional committees now under Democratic control. Trump’s reactions to siege by subpoena will not be edifying, and they won’t help either him or his party. And if those investigations come up with anything, well…
Meanwhile Special Counsel Mueller plods on, gathering evidence, securing pleas, and, doubtless, fully aware that the decision to impeach is ultimately political, not legal. With the Democrats in charge of the House (the institution that would initiate impeachment) the politics have just changed, and not to Trump’s advantage.
No one ever said his presidency would be dull.