Barack Obama: Midterms Are Not a Joke

Obama: If we had kept the senate in 2014, we’d have a very different supreme court making decisions about our most basic rights. So midterms are no joke… pic.twitter.com/Z0jt4rCmYR

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 5, 2022

Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party’s coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a *filibuster-proof trifecta* with a minority of the vote.

If you want to help stop that, come check out our job board! https://t.co/2xKqs6nT3e pic.twitter.com/cK1ojkyYII

— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) April 4, 2022

Listen to Barack Obama.

Obama is absolutely right about Senate races.

In the 2014 midterms, the GOP won nine Senate races. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I didn’t bother to vote. I was so alienated and dialed out of politics that I didn’t even cover the midterms. Ben Sasse and Cory Gardner were elected to the Senate. Whoop-de-doo.

At the time, I couldn’t see the long term consequences of the 2014 midterms. The GOP won the Senate in the nick of time before Anthony Scalia died in February 2016. Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell blocked Garland’s nomination until after the 2016 election. Donald Trump ran for president and won and packed the court with Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Even then, I wasn’t that interested in changing the federal courts. It didn’t seem like much had changed on the Supreme Court when Trump was president.

Today, we are living in a time when the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v. Wade and seems poised to end affirmative action. The Supreme Court could gut the Voting Rights Act in this term. The Supreme Court could endorse the “independent state legislature” theory in Moore v. Harper. This is all happening because Donald Trump and Senate Republicans succeeded in changing the ideological balance on the Supreme Court. The 2014 midterms are why we have this new Supreme Court. Cory Gardner is gone and Ben Sasse is leaving Congress. Future historians won’t remember them.

From the perspective of 2014, I was unable to see how much our politics was about to change when Trump ran for president. While Dump was largely a failure as president for a host of reasons, he pushed the True Cons out of power and normalized a huge swath of our politics. Then in the depths of the Trump presidency when everyone was overdosing on blackpills after Charlottesville, I was unable to see how radically our politics would change again under the Joe Biden presidency. We have taken another giant step toward the mainstream. It has gotten to the point where even the Jewish Question is part of the national conversation. It is now mainstream to oppose the Great Replacement.

The moral of the story: shit happens that we don’t expect which can be decisive. Ruth Bader Ginsburg croaked on the eve of the 2020 election months before Joe Biden could be sworn in as the next president. If she had held out for just a few more months, Roe v. Wade would still be intact. Those of you who watch football know how turnovers can make the difference in a close game.

So, you have to wonder: what will our politics look like two years from now or four years from now? In light of how radically our politics have changed over the past eight years, which seems like an eternity ago, where will be in 2025? How much power could the next president have in 2025?

60 Votes in the Senate

Donald Trump is president

6-3 Majority on the Supreme Court

This scenario is very plausible.

It is not going to be a repeat of 2016 for a number of reasons.

For starters, MAGA has radicalized under Joe Biden and the next two years are going to be insane, which is going to drive the polarization to unimaginable levels. The 2022 midterms and the 2024 election will produce a MAGA Congress that has been purged of Liz Cheney types. When the public radicalizes to this level, the trend rapidly accelerates and gains momentum.

Instead of narrow Senate majority filled with people like John McCain, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, Trump could return as president with a filibuster-proof Senate majority with all sorts of people who owe their careers to him like Vance, Masters, Oz, Herschel Walker, etc. “Trumpism” will also be completely normalized as the reigning conservative ideology. A second Trump term will be staffed with “Trumpists” and will work with a Trumpified Congress and Trumpified federal courts.

Whereas Trump was like a besieged island inside the executive branch in his first term in office, the political landscape will be completely changed. Having survived two impeachments and been restored to power and with a radicalized MAGA behind him, it will be career suicide to oppose him. He will have demonstrated this by destroying all the haters and losers in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Two years from now, the public is going to be far more polarized and radicalized than it is now on both sides. The real question is where things will stand in the Senate and governorships. How much power will the next president have in the Senate when he assumes office? Enough to break the filibuster on major legislation or just short enough to continue the gridlock?

In the near future (two to four years), I think we will reach a point where our politics have been completely normalized and the system has been completely destabilized. Despairing libtards might try their hand at a National Divorce. Neither side will be able to live under the rule of the other. Decisions which are made tomorrow like who is your governor will impact how that shakes out when all hell breaks loose. Don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t matter if you have someone like Josh Shapiro as your governor.

If the shit hits the fan in 2024 when Trump is reelected, which very well might happen given the snowballing hysteria and panic we are seeing on the Left, you don’t want Gretchen Whitmer, Stacey Abrams or Josh Shapiro as your governor. I shouldn’t have to tell you this.