Democratic Wave Unlikely This Year. Then the Party Splits in 2020.

Last week there were a number of stories on the upcoming wave election for the Democrats in November, the most emphatic of which might have been Sean McElwee's "The Midterms and the Turn Leftward": "Democrats will take the House, probably winning around forty seats."

Dems need to pick up 24 seats. I'm not saying that it can't happen, but I'm just skeptical that it will. A lot of the "Democratic wave" prognostications appear to be based on the generic ballot, a wholly unreliable lens to look at the myriad individual congressional races. Lambert Strether's Water Cooler from last Wednesday had these two items:

• “Dems surge in generic ballot as economy fades from spotlight” [The Hill]. “[P]ollsters warn that the generic ballot is better as a gauge of the entire electorate’s mood than as a predictor of outcomes in individual races. In the Senate, Democrats are defending 25 seats, while Republicans are only tasked with defending eight seats. Many of the GOP incumbents are running in states that Trump won handily in 2016, while several Democrats are running in states Trump won by double-digit margins. Pollsters say not to read too deeply into generic ballot polling at this early stage, pointing to the extreme volatility in the polls in recent weeks. Over the past month, polls have put the Democratic advantage everywhere from 2 points to 16 points.”

• “Democratic National Committee war plan: Target 50 million voters” [NBC News]. “The DNC, which has struggled financially and faced doubts about its relevance, will focus its 2018 organizing plans for the midterms around partnerships with a wide range of groups aimed at boosting turnout among Democratic-leaning voters, who have been less likely to get to the polls in recent nonpresidential elections.” Wake me when the Democrat party makes voter registration and expanding the base a core party function, 24/7/365, instead of a random, election by election effort. (Oh, and a political version of Conway’s Law seems to be at work: Liberals think of themselves as an aggregation of silos (mostly identity-based silos), hence the “partnerships with a wide range of groups,” i.e. not a core party function.

Last week Trump announced his tariffs on aluminum and steel. If this is sincere, and not some hocus pocus to screen his failure to overhaul NAFTA, then Trump has secured the continued allegiance of his base MAGA voter.

A president's first midterm is supposed to be a plebiscite on his performance. If true, and assuming the U.S. is not drawn deeper into Syria and/or attacks North Korea and/or falls into recession, then I think the GOP will perform better than expected.

Granted, Trump's tariffs cut against the grain, creating a situation where Paul Ryan is criticizing Trump while Sherrod Brown is praising him. But I doubt there will be many blue-collar districts where the Republican on the ballot distances himself from Trump.

The biggest wake-up for Democrats has to be the ongoing collapse of the center-left in Europe. Yes, the SPD membership in Germany strongly backed GroKo. But it will be the last GroKo. What has to give U.S. Democrats pause is the failure of Italy's Democratic Party (PD). Today Matteo Renzi announced his resignation. PD managed 23% less than 20% of the vote.

The Democratic Party in the U.S. is splitting. Machine pols are battling the new liberal power, the #MeToos. And this is just a tune-up for the main event come 2020 --  Bernie redux.

Bernie redux will be Armageddon for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party will block Bernie again. And once again it will lose a close general election to Trump.

But let's imagine a successful wave, a children's crusade that topples the DNC leadership and nominates Bernie. What happens then? Mike Bloomberg or some other billionaire bankrolls a centrist third party a la En Marche!, dooming the party of Jackson and Van Buren.

We can only hope.