by Zeus O’Dea
The following words are the opinion of myself (Zeus O’Dea) only, and not of Steve, or the Ace Previews site in general. This series is about politics, betting, and how they intersect. In some pieces of writing, I’ll give political betting recommendations. In others, I’ll talk only about how certain things have shaped my betting philosophy when it comes to politics. Hopefully you get something out of both.
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“You know, someone once told me that time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”
– Rustin Cohle
This quote comes from the critically acclaimed first season of True Detective, in whichformer criminal investigator Rustin Cohle (played phenomenally by Matthew McConaughey) is sitting in an interview room and talking to two current detectives about the similarities between a case in the present day (2012) and a case that Cohle ‘solved’ in 1995.
“This is a world where nothing is solved”, Cohle opines. I would argue that, unlike many of his other nihilistic monologues, Cohle is referring to the here-and-now; the true world, in which child abuse and murder and rape happen every day. Whilst this is a fictional show, the point you can draw is that Things, both bad and good, in all fields, always tend to repeat. People never learn their lessons because there are always inefficiencies and systematic issues that pop up and prevent progress over and over and over again.
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It was the morning of Tuesday, November 8th, 2022.
Election day polls for the 2022 midterm elections had finally opened. 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats, 39 gubernatorial races, 46 state legislative chambers and numerous other statewide and local positions were up for grabs. Most of these races weren’t forecasted to be competitive, but the stakes were sky-high in the ones that were.
The GOP had reason to be excited. It’s conventional wisdom that the president’s party (in this case, the Democrats) loses ground in the midterms, and it’s conventional wisdom for a reason. The last time a party that held the presidency picked up a net gain of governorships was 1986. Going even further back, the last time the president’s party didn’t lose a single incumbent senator was 1934. Reagan’s Republicans lost the Senate in 1986. The ever-charming Clinton presided over the Republican Revolution of 1994. Not even Barack Obama could stop the bleeding – the Democrats suffered enormous losses in both 2010 and 2014.
Biden’s popularity had been waning ever since he withdrew American forces from Afghanistan. There were question marks about his age and the usual intra-party weak approvals and low enthusiasm applied. The GOP primary elections (‘primaries’ are elections held within parties to determine that party’s candidate for the ‘general’, or main election) had thrown up a slate of confident, Trump endorsed candidates.
The vultures were circling, and the Republicans thought that the Democrats were the carcasses.
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In the above paragraphs, I talked about inefficiencies within systems that prevent progress. The Republican Party’s biggest inefficiency in the past decade has been their primary electorate and their systematic tendency to nominate awful candidates that don’t and/or can’t appeal to most of the country in a general election. This is both a circular issue, and one that’s not likely to go away soon.
The GOP primary electorate elects a candidate of their choosing. The candidate espouses views that are further towards the right of their party. These views alienate centrist, more reasonable voters. Eventually, some of these centrist voters then either decline to participate in primaries because they don’t feel these candidates represent them, or switch to another party. Either way, the effect is that the ‘centre’ of this party now moves further to the right, and thus forces their nominated candidate to move towards the right. If they refuse, they’re voted out. It’s not hard to see how you can quickly achieve a runaway freight train of unsuitable candidates and unpopular rhetoric.
This rarely happens overnight; but shows how you can go from McCain to Trump in eight years. When the ever-wise Detective Cohle was questioned by a colleague about his unusual personal beliefs, he responded with, “I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.” The old guard of the GOP can no longer say the same.
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It was the evening of Tuesday, November 8th, 2022.
Election day polls for the 2022 midterm elections had finally closed. Democrats gained a net of one Senate seat and two governorships. They flipped three state legislatures, and restricted the GOP to 222 of 435 seats in the House – a majority of just five. The predicted ‘red wave’ was nothing more than a ripple, and the conventional wisdom had just been broken in the most emphatic way possible.
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American political shifts have happened many times over the preceding centuries, but many political scientists credit Republican Newt Gingrich’s speakership from 1994-1998 as the de jure end of political civility. Gingrich believed that, to unseat popular Democrats in the conservative south, the Republicans had to tie them to the more liberal national leadership. He introduced contentious societal wedge issues in the House to create a ‘culture war’, and beat his opponents over the head with them. He had no issue with labelling Democrats as ‘traitors’, ‘fascists’ and ‘radicals’, and frequently encouraged his party to do so.
The result: Democrats in conservative areas became less and less common, and vice versa with Republicans in more liberal areas. It was guerilla warfare, and an effective strategy if your goal is to maximise the amount of seats you want to win as a party. The issue is, once the lightning is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in. Once voters had become used to seeing their political opponents as ‘enemies’, it was near impossible to rebridge that divide.
Fast-forward to 2008. You had an promising young senator named Barack Obama vying for the presidency, and the rifts in the collection of ‘small d’ democratic norms that America was used to were beginning to become obvious. A series of conspiracy theories, all revolving around the central idea that Obama was ineligible to be president due to being born outside of the United States, were floated and encouraged by many prominent Republicans, including one Donald Trump.
John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent, to his credit, shut down those obviously ridiculous rumours whenever he was asked. The famous clip of him shaking his head and explaining that Obama was ‘a decent citizen and family man…who I just happened to have disagreements with’, after a voter called him an ‘Arab’, exemplified the type of man he was, and he, along with Mitt Romney, papered over the cracks for a few more years.
An electoral coalition with these types of views, however, had to lead somewhere. The bubble had to burst, and with the election of Donald Trump, burst it did. A decade of resentment, exacerbated by endless partisan drivel pushed by Fox News and other right-wing conspiracy theorists such as Roger Stone and Alex Jones, reared its ugly head. Trump supporters were famously unshakeable, and stuck with him despite various sexual assault allegations, violent outbursts on immigration and continual outright lies. He joked that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn’t lose support”.
People tend to forget that, prior to his candidacy, far-right opinions weren’t often incorporated into presidential campaigns. Trump, already a lightning rod for hyperbole and conspiracy, put a lot of them front and centre, and his passive reluctance to call out groups such as white nationalists created an environment where those very groups felt like he was ‘their man’. Trump signalled to Republican voters that it was okay to oppose multi-culturalism, civil rights and refugees; and the voters listened.
This style of politics, however, isn’t particularly palatable to vast swathes of the public. In terms of vote share, Trump has a reasonably high floor due to his locked in minority of supporters. His ceiling, however, is conversely very low. It means he has a very narrow lane. Trump threaded the needle in 2016 – probably because Clinton was a weak candidate. Even so, he lost the national popular vote by just under 3 million. Four years later, he couldn’t repeat the feat against Biden, despite being an incumbent; and two years after that, his slate of handpicked candidates got slapped in the midterms.
This all leads to a few questions – one of which is why? Not why in terms of why the Republican primary electorate votes for the candidates that they do, but why do voters sit through ass-kicking after ass-kicking and refuse to change their ways?
A cynical answer might be that they just don’t want to.
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Sometimes you forget, amongst the non-stop horse-race coverage, that the actual point of elections is to win power. This might be quite a naïve viewpoint, but I believe that most parties do actually want to enact change and make society better. Most parties, for better or worse, have an agenda and a clear set of ideas about how to go about achieving it. Most parties are aware of how much political currency they have, and don’t try to waste it on trying to reverse popular programs or to spend time on inane legislation.
The reason I italicise most is that I don’t think it applies to the modern Republican party. The Grand Old Party is broken. It stands for nothing and now only appeals to people afraid of change and supply-side fetishists. American conservative voters constantly think they’re winning because their whole platform is devoted to ‘owning the libs’. When you’re happy with disorder, it’s not hard to ‘win’.
It might sound harsh, but, since Trump was elected, what have Republicans achieved? A tax cut in 2017, and repealing Roe vs. Wade. One of them extended the federal budget deficit by billions – hold on, I thought they were all about fiscal conservatism? – and the other rowed back a broadly popular right that millions of Americans supported under the guise of ‘letting states decide’. Tell me again how this is a party that takes competition seriously?
It’s circular, but I would argue that part of why this is happening is because of the enormous brain drain from the Republican party. Many centrist, college-educated voters no longer feel represented, and are shifting in droves towards the Democrats. These people have money to donate and are smart and driven, but cannot or do not want to be associated with the modern GOP. This also then leaves an enormous hole in terms of party cohesion and strategy. These people would normally be the ones running for office, working on campaigns or within congress to shape legislation and discourse. Without them, the party is lost, and the cranks take over.
There are many examples of this. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, this week announced that he, alongside former President Trump, was looking at pursuing legislation that would make it illegal for non-citizens to vote. The issue is, of course, that this is already illegal in state and federal elections, and both Trump and Johnson know it. It’s possible that their base is that dumb, but to the people you actually need to win over, you look like enormous morons.
Another classic case of Republicans shooting themselves in the face involves illegal immigration at the Mexican border. “The Democrats don’t care” was one of the GOP’s most successful lines of attack, particularly in those southern states most affected by the problem. In a mature attempt to resolve it, a select few senators from each party worked together to construct a bill that would pass both chambers. James Lankford, an extremely conservative senator from Oklahoma, took the lead. The final bill was endorsed by the largest border patrol union – the same union that endorsed Trump in 2020. It was considered the most consequential immigration reform in decades. The Democrats, finally, had cared.
Except, that was the problem. They had called the GOP’s bluff. They presented a solution, but in doing so, defanged the attack ads, and that wasn’t acceptable. Donald Trump came out against it and convinced Senate republicans to kill the bill, PURELY because he didn’t want Joe Biden to secure a ‘political win’. The ironic thing was that it did give Democrats a political win. It allowed them to hit back on GOP attack ads, and counter with ads of their own. “The Republicans don’t care”. Putting aside the blatant lack of respect for what was good for the country, it was just dumb politics, and a symptom of their half-baked strategic vision.
The list continues with the general hesitancy amongst Republicans to use masks during COVID. Studies have shown that up to 15% more Republicans died than Democrats. That gap widened after vaccines were made available. Why would you want your voters dying off? Trump, to his credit, did encourage supporters to get vaccinated, but many other elected Republicans were very hesitant to do so.
The same point could be argued for mail-in voting. Trump has decried it multiple times – suggesting it’s ripe for abuse and riddled with fraud – all things that have been proven many times to be untrue. Naturally, his supporters listen to him, and mail-in voting rates amongst Republicans are still extremely low relative to Democrats. The issue with this strategy, of course, is that you’re relying on all of your voters to show up on election day. What happens if there’s a snowstorm, like in the recent NY-03 congressional special election on Long Island? The Democrats are sitting pretty with votes banked, and torrid conditions suppressed GOP turnout. As it turns out, a sunny day wouldn’t have made a difference in that particular race, but imagine a closer election where it did?
The overarching point here is that, absent the people that know better, and in the name of ideological purity, the GOP needlessly handicap themselves, and erect structural barriers that make it so hard to win. Alongside, I often give the opposite example to provide contrast: that of the Democrats. The Democrats listen to the people further left on the political spectrum, but do not allow themselves to be defined by them. They realise that ideological purity doesn’t help you win elections. It’s fine to have ideas, but they mean nothing if you can’t govern. Slow progress is better than no progress at all, and their primary voters realise that and tend to prioritise electability over ideology.
A perfect example of this? The 2022 midterms.
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There were a lot of bad Republican candidates in 2022, but none worse than Doug Mastriano. A former army colonel and state senator, he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor. Mastriano shot to ‘fame’ after convening a state Senate enquiry into illegally overturning the 2020 election results and participating in the January 6th riots. He spoke at various Christian nationalism events, promoted numerous conspiracy theories, and stated that he believed women who get an abortion should be charged with murder. All of this was known when he was nominated, but nevertheless, he still won the primary! He ended up losing so badly to his Democratic opponent that it likely cost Republicans several other seats that were lower down the ballot.
This is hardly unique. In New Hampshire, Republicans nominated Don Bolduc; a man who endorsed Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, and was widely known as someone who was on the far right of the political spectrum. In Arizona, there was Blake Masters (for Senate), a venture capitalist who had zero personality and released a deeply weird campaign video that consisted of just him shooting a pistol into the desert for three minutes; and Kari Lake (for governor), a firebrand television host who insulted John McCain (an Arizonan icon), endorsed antisemitic politicians, and led rallies against the COVID vaccine.
It doesn’t stop there. In Georgia, Herschel Walker won the Republican primary handily despite having more baggage than an A380. Nevada Republicans chose Adam Laxalt, the former state Attorney General who had a history of underperformance and frequently disputed that Joe Biden was the president. Last, but not least, Mehmet Oz was the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat despite facing mounting criticism that he didn’t even live in the state.
What do all of these candidates have in common? One, they have at least one view that’s way out of touch with the general populace; two, they’re all proponents of The Big Lie (Trump’s assertion that he won in 2020); and three, they’re all endorsed by Trump.
Much has been written about January 6th, by many more informed and better writers than me. What is not up for debate, however, is that Trump explored nearly every possible avenue to stay in power. To this day, he still wrongly claims he was defrauded by the electoral system. Studies have shown that nearly a third of written statements by Trump in the year and a half after leaving the White House included lies about the election. It was incessant, and extremely unpopular. The public has no appetite for election denialism.
It’s no wonder, then, that MAGA-aligned candidates paid a demonstratable electoral penalty. Already-flawed candidates wrapped themselves around one of the least popular figures in American politics and then acted shocked when they lost. What does it say about the Republican party that you have to endorse non-existent electoral fraud to win a primary? What does it say about the leader, Donald Trump, that only 5 of his 17 endorsed candidates (2022 gubernatorial or Senate races) in swing states won?
This is why I’m so bearish on Republicans, and this is why I’m so bearish on Donald Trump. People like to say that Trump is smart and has good political instincts. If that’s the case, why does he endorse so many stone-cold losers? It’s not like there aren’t more reasonable, centrist candidates in the primaries that he could attach his name to instead (and if there aren’t, that ties back in with the brain-drain point I made earlier!). Joe Lombardo, Glenn Youngkin and Mike DeWine are all examples of candidates who were perceived as significantly more moderate by the general electorate (but are still very conservative), and coincidentally, won their races.
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So far, I’ve ignored the elephant in the room: abortion. It was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. It forced the electorate to do something that it almost never does: take notice. As I mentioned in my previous article, voters were confronted with genuine changes to their lives, and safe to say that they didn’t like it.
What has been mentioned in this piece is what happened in the midterms. What hasn’t been mentioned is how what happened, happened. Similarly to previous midterm elections, the president’s party suffered a turnout deficit. To put it into plain terms, more Republican-leaning voters voted than Democrat-leaning voters. This makes sense – alongside the historical factor, inflation was at 8% and Biden’s approval ratings were around 43%. This raises a question, then: if more Republicans than Democrats voted, why did the Democrats have one of their best ever nights (relative to expectations)?
It’s all down to something called persuasion. There are two ways to win an election: you either turn out more of your voters, or you persuade voters to vote for you who might not be predisposed to voting for you. Considering Democratic turnout is widely considered to have been quite poor, the simplest conclusion is that many Republican voters were turned off by the rhetoric and personal history of the Republican party and its candidates. As the below graphic by Split Ticket shows, every single swing-state Republican Senate candidate underperformed the state’s partisan lean – that is, how the state should vote if there was a generic Democrat running against a generic Republican. The issue, of course, is that there aren’t that many generic Republicans.
Figure 1 – 2022 Senate margins in swing states vs. how they should have voted. From Split Ticket
In 2023, it happened again. Running into what should be the headwinds of a Democratic Presidency, Andy Beshear beat his Trump-endorsed Republican counterpart to win re-election as governor of Kentucky (a state 27 percentage points more conservative than the nation) in the highest profile race of the cycle. Democrat Brandon Presley (yes, Elvis’s cousin) kept incumbent Republican governor (also Trump endorsed) Tate Reeves to a 3.24 percentage point victory in Mississippi – a state that has only voted for Democrats once since 1960 at the presidential level.
In fairness, it must be said that there is precedence of governors being able to buck partisan trends that other candidates can’t and win in states that should theoretically be unfavourable to them. Even factoring this in, both were stunning over-performances and demonstrate the penalty that Republicans are beginning to pay.
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Finally, we’ve arrived in 2024. Have Republicans learned their lessons?
Primaries are still ongoing, but early signs aren’t great. Kari Lake, the 2022 Republican candidate for governor, is running for the Senate seat in Arizona while still not having conceded her last race. Bernie Moreno, the furthest right of the three candidates in Ohio, has won the nomination to face three term Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown. In Wisconsin, the favourite to win the Republican Senate nomination is a hedge-fund manager, while the presumptive Senate nominee in Montana recently posted an antisemitic meme on twitter and may have received a Purple Heart (a military award for being wounded in combat) for shooting himself in the arm (it would be funny if it wasn’t sad).
The Senate map is so unfavourable to Democrats that it’s possible that, even if the Republicans do pay a significant electoral penalty, it might not be enough for them to lose this time. Even so, this Republican problem of a lack quality candidates is one that isn’t going away soon. The MAGA breed of politics has doomed the GOP to failure, and there’s no easy way out.
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