Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
Unless Trump backs down on tariffs, his party will have political hell to pay.
There might not have been anyone marching in pink hats, and congressional Democrats might have been “playing dead,” but the Democratic special election strength looks just as large as it did in 2017 and 2018, before the so-called blue wave flipped control of the House.
Perhaps this shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise: It’s what happened the last time Mr. Trump won. But it’s not what triumphant Republicans or despondent Democrats had in mind in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, when there was seemingly no “resistance” to Mr. Trump and the “vibes” seemed to augur a broad rightward cultural shift.
The tariffs announced Wednesday, however, introduce a political problem of an entirely different magnitude for Mr. Trump and his party. No party or politician is recession proof. Historically, even truly dominant political parties have suffered enormous political defeats during major economic downturns.
In none of those cases — not even with the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff — could the president be held responsible for the downturn as self-evidently as today. And whatever it may have felt like after the election, the Republican Party is not even close to politically dominant.
If anything, Mr. Trump and the Republicans today could be especially vulnerable, as so much of his political strength is built on the economy. Throughout his time as a politician, he usually earned his best ratings on his handling of economic issues. He’s benefited from his reputation as a successful businessman and from effective economic stewardship in his first term. He won the last election, despite enormous personal liabilities, in no small part because voters were frustrated by high prices and economic upheaval that followed the end of the pandemic.
In New York Times/Siena College national surveys last fall, more than 40 percent of voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2024 but not 2020 said that the economy or inflation was the most important issue to their vote.
