Between Two Majorities | The Cordray Administration

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"A Coolidgeian figure" careful what you wish for, Pence!

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Yeah, this is easily the best TL in rotation at the moment. Do you intend on going into the presidency of the individual who succeeds Pence or are you going to stop after election night 2024?

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8 Democrat Senate gains (Blunt survives though)-nice! What's the Senate seat count?

54-46 Dems. Dems had 46 seats after the 2020 elections.

Those maps though... they're beautiful!!!

If the prologue is any indication, that also means Dems will pick up 4 seats in 20204

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Ooh, I wonder who wins! (maybe having another of the 2018 Dem gov pickups take the plunge would have been better for creating suspense, but from the Big Three it's pretty clear you don't want anyone who's been paying attention to be in doubt over the nominee)

edit: Nevermind, it's not any of the big three. Cordray is a red herring; the prologue specifically states that the 47th President was a state legislator when Trump was elected in 2016. The named individuals who best match the prologue are Iowa's Tyler Olson and Wisconsin's Kathleen Vinehout. But since that post describes potus47 with he/him pronouns, the closest match is Olson.

edit2: my mistake, the prologue states that he was a lowly state officer when Trump was elected, which probably means it isn't Olson. But that also roles out Cordray. Alexi Giannoulias was Illinois treasurer... but was long gone by Trump's election, probably ruling him out too. Brian Fosh is not young but he was MD AG when Trump was elected. Since you never told us who won the governorships of NM, NV, or VA, they're probably not important. Which means that either state officer could mean state legislator or FORMER officer, implying Olson and Giannoulias respectively, or you fibbed/changed your mind, meaning it really is Cordray.

BTW, what happens on the Supreme Court? Does Pence get any justices aside from the one Trump replaced Scalia with?

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Actually, the prologue is mistaken in two areas because when I first wrote it. Minor tweaks, actually. But at this point, I don't want to give away the 47th President's name. So don't assume it's not one of these big Three.  

Yeah, I sometimes need to plan better. And sometimes, I'm just evil in trying to leave my mistakes to keep you guessing.

(Sorry, for real. I have had 95% of the timeline planned out since November, but I've had to tweak it).

Well I'm happy to be kept guessing, this is kind of fun And point taken, but I'm not going to eliminate the possibility that it isn't in the Big Three either

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The Democratic nominee-in-waiting now turns to taking on the Republicans and tapping a Vice President. At the top of his list? Secretary Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a former HUD Secretary.

That would be Julian Castro. Joaquin is the congressman

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Interesting. I have a couple questions.

Since when did Ihado get 3 more EVs? Nevada and MA losing 1 instead of WV and RI? Interesting EV allocation

On a more serious note, it's interesting that this race is apparently a tossup in most of the South, (including West Virginia!) as well as Kansas and Montana, but not in the Dakotas, NE-2, or NE-1.

Also, what's going on at the Senatorial level?

This is the Class 1 Senate your 2024 is working with; 11 Republicans, 22 Democrats. R+4 from the current Class 1 after the GOP gained in 2018. Of course, this is counting Sanders and King as Democrats because that's who they caucus with. (though isn't Sanders dead or about to die? Whatever, I'm not going to take the prologue as gospel anymore )

Considering the polling map from before, there are some obvious D pickup opportunities, in NV, AZ, TX, WV, MS, MO, and TN, depending on what the tossups do. There's also the chance some funny business could happen in IN, a state that loves its ticket splitting. On the other hand, given the dire state the GOP is in at this point, the only pickup opportunity I see for them is MT.

It'll be interesting to watch, that's for sure

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Interesting that Georgia, Virginia, NC, and Ohio were all called the instant polls closed. That's a really bad omen for Pence. Not to mention that Pence now basically has no room for error; if everything else votes like it did in your 2020 save for Ohio, Georgia, and NC, Pence wins 279-259.

We'll soon be approaching what I'll call the "critical call." The critical call is the point at which enough electoral votes have switched sides from the previous election that having every state vote the way it did in the previous election would result in a win for the party that lost the previous election. In 2008 that would be the call of Ohio to Obama, and in 2016 it would be the call of Wisconsin for Trump.

Looking at the states that are called at 8 PM, I'm going to guess that the Critical Call will be not one single state, but all of PA/FL/ME/NH/MO(?). Either PA or FL would be enough, as would MO+NH, MO+ME Statewide, or MO+ME-1.

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You called Florida for Cordray but didn't colour it in red

Anyway, we have now reached the Critical Call! If every state that has not yet been called goes the same way it did in 2020, Cordray wins. This is going to be a big night for Dems.

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so VA and GA went for Cordray the instant polls close, but NY took 15 minutes to call? Interesting

Still hype though! Go Cordray!

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The map's looking interesting. Appears to be some combination of Clinton 1992 + Clinton 1996 + Obama 2008. Not sure what happened in West Virginia to make it go Democratic, or why Georgia seems to have been won with less than 30% of the vote, or why NE-2 didn't go Dem while the rest of the Obama '08 Crew seems to be coming along for the ride. (Indiana has an excuse, with Pence atop the ticket and all)

Hopefully in the post-election write-up you'll have some kind of explanation for why Cordray basically erased all post-Bill Clinton Republican gains in Appalachia and the South.

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A few interesting observations from this map:

1. Between this election and 2020, MIMAL has voted in unison twice in a row now.
2. Cordray had some strong appeal in the South that we haven't seen since Bill Clinton. He actually won Appalachia! Tennessee seems to be the odd one out, though. (And Alabama, though it's not in Appalachia.) This is the region that swung to Bush and stayed in the GOP column after him.
3. He hasn't improved as much in the HRC-swinging suburbia as you would think. His Georgia win is more narrow than any other win, including Texas, Missouri, West Virginia, South Carolina, etc. It's significantly less Democratic here than NC is. With that in mind, that also means his Texas win probably came from different places than we would expect.
4. Pence's best region was the interior/mountain west, where he won Oklahoma, Nebraska (save NE-2), Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and the Dakotas.

There's also no indication just from this election that the Reagan era is over. Obama won big in 2008, and I'm sure we all thought the Reagan era ended then, but 2010 happened. The 2026 Midterms are going to be the real test; if Dems gain like in 1934, (or at least, hold their losses to a minimum) then it'll be clear we've hit a sea change. But we'll just take your word for it that 2026 isn't like 1994 or 2010

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Thanks for the Meta post! I'm going to be annoying though and add a final point of analysis

For a while when reading this, I had wondered why you chose to focus mainly on Pence rather than Trump, while having Trump be written off through the 25th amendment. At first, I thought it was simply a reskin of your original version with Walker. But clearly I wasn't seeing the big picture. Trump's specter still hung over the 2024 election.

When Trump left office, Pence and the Republicans abandoned what he brought to the party: populism. The 2020 electorate, in the moment, seemed willing to celebrate a return to normalcy in the GOP and the nation. But the populist fervor that brought Trump to power in 2016 was not the same forces that brought Reagan and the Bushes to power. The GOP didn't realise this, didn't govern with any eye to the emerging populism, and Democrats seized the opportunity and took the mantle of populism that Trump left behind.

The contrast between the two populists of 2016, Trump and Bernie, is immense by this point. Trump took over the party, won a single victory, collapsed, and was tossed aside. Bernie lost the primary but continued to force the party to take a good look at progressive populism. The Dems went halfway with Brown in 2020, but all the way with Cordray. Trump won the moment, but Bernie won the future.

The original plan you had, a Democratic coalition built on wine-track liberals and minorities, (instead of the WCW/minorities one we're seeing here) might have played out had Trump stayed in power and redefined the Republican Party. It also may have been shorter-lasting or otherwise not been a true realignment. Cordray's win happened because Pence threw Trumpism out of the GOP, and Dems became the only populist game in town.

(You know a TL is really good when so much interesting meta talk comes from it )

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So what you're saying is Right-wing populism (at least, Trumpist populism) simply isn't compatible with Reaganism long-term, and that this wouldn't change even if Trump had a full term in office.

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Okay, makes sense.

But considering the direction 2024 ended up going, looking back on 2020 suddenly becomes a bit strange. I get the national mood favouring Pence over a populist Dem, and Brown picking Mallow shows him only going halfway toward Cordray populism, but considering what you said about Appalachia and what Cordray's coalition would be in 2024, it's surprising that there wasn't any D trending in West Virginia or Missouri or Arkansas then. Not enough to flip those states, but something to note nonetheless, maybe even a tight Senate race or a later-than-usual Presidential call, a small rumble that doesn't mean much for the moment but would be a key indication of what was to come. In the same vein as Pennsylvania almost being the tipping-point state in 2012, as well as the midwest trending GOP that year.

Bush won the South in 2000 and 2004 because he, while not a populist outside of tone, rooted himself politically in Southern Republicanism. Pence was Midwestern, and not a populist. Or was the economic condition at the time solid enough for that region to give Pence a pass? I know you said you put less thought into 2020 than 2024, so no worries if you don't have a solid answer there

(my only other gripe with your 2020 was that Pence was soooooo close to being the first Republican to win without Ohio But then again, considering where you think the parties will go from here, it's possible the 2036 GOP path back to power would have to exclude Ohio anyway)

edit: didn't see your question until after I made the rest of the post. You may be right about Trump. There is something binding Trump together with the GOP, though, and that's cultural conservatism. Anti-immigration, varying degrees of racism, those elements of right-wing populism. Whether that's enough to hold a winning party coalition together, well, I don't think it is. The GOP still needs an economic platform, and Trump's level of populist rhetoric coupled with a traditionally GOP tax plan, for instance, wouldn't be a good combination.

There's also the fact that Trumpism came alone. Congressional Republicans aren't of the populist mould, even the ones from the South. The difference between the two parties when it comes to populism is that Trump won with it on the national stage, but there's more within the Democratic Party that could foster it; even wine-track liberals could stomach progressive populism in the short and medium-term.

However, I don't think populism will truly leave the GOP under Trump if he serves a full term. We might see a scenario where the Dems have wine-track liberals and minorities, the GOP has the remains of the Reaganite coalition, (the remaining neoliberals, war hawks, evangelicals) and populists are split; Appalachia would become a swing region in this scenario. These swing populist voters would basically end up deciding whether economic or cultural populism is preferable, and that might not be an easy answer. It would only be later that the populists consolidate into a single party and everyone else reacts. This wouldn't be unheard of, after all, in the Roosevelt era liberals and conservatives existed in both parties, and yet the New Deal coalition was, for a time, a coherent and functioning coalition.

Sorry for the rambling, hope I'm making sense

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Regarding 2020: Looking back, it could honestly go either way. Looking at 1928 there doesn't seem to be much foreshadowing to suggest what would happen a scant 4 years later. 1976 is a different story. There's both immediate term and long term stuff going on there. In the immediate term, there was the strong Republican trend of the west, where Reagan would build his base of support and indeed where Reagan's ghost seems to survive post-Cordray. However, it's tough to separate the noise from the forehadowing there. Long-term there was the Southern Strategy of 1968 and 1972, which continued in 1980 and onward. I feel like this is what makes the swings in 2024 more surprising than 1980. The gains Nixon made carried over to Reagan. The gains Obama made in 2008 are not at all part of Cordray's coalition.

Having said that, I must have forgotten about the crisis because that does change things. It's an economic crisis on a different level than the Great Recession, and more importantly, it happens before the parties choose their nominees. Which means that the Dems could have seen the opportunities open up in the South where none existed before and jumped at it with Cordray. Has the crisis been of a different sort, an extension of the Obama coalition might have taken root instead.

However, it's at this point that I should also mention 2022. This is in the midst of the crisis, a crisis that would deliver the South to the Democratic Party, and yet the GOP sweeps southern senate races and governorships. However, there's probably a handful of in-universe reasons why this is the case. The campaign infrastructure might not have existed yet in the South after years of GOP domination, causing Democrats to field bad candidates. Plus, Cordray's wins in much of the South were still narrow.

Basically I waayyy overestimated the actual evidence of foreshadowing major sea changes in the presidential election prior to the big realignment. And you didn't exactly give detailed results for every state in 2020 as far as I know, so who knows, maybe there were some Dem trends in the South that year after all

As for the topic of populism in the GOP, while it is the party of big corporate interests and neoliberals, cultural conservative was arguably an equal partner in the coalition under Bush. A minority party GOP could still have a quasi-populist wing using that cultural conservatism, while either being fiscally moderate or just staying hush on economic issues. It would be similar to a lot of the socially moderate Dems from the South and West, like McCaskill or Tester. Press the right buttons on the right issues and you don't really need to be the complete package as a candidate.

Having said that, I think the coalitions you created for the Cordray era make perfect sense. I think it's perfectly plausible that the populists move en mass to Dems after the situations you've created, rather than being fractured. Note how I said that the GOP could retain some populist/cultural conservative elements if Trump serves a full term. That's for a few reasons that would diverge from your timeline. One, the GOP wouldn't be able to rid itself of Trumpism without a speedy exit for Trump himself. With Pence taking over, the party could go full neoliberal and shed its right-wing populist components, but otherwise, the GOP would be wedded to Trumpism probably around the time of the crisis. Trump staying around also opens up the possibility that the crisis could heavily involve him, or more to the point, be him. If the crisis is Trump's incompetence and corruption, the Democratic coalition would necessarily have to leave out some of his core, some of the cultural conservative right-wing populists. With an economic crisis and Pence as its face, all that changes.

Since Trump was 25th in 2019, all the possible crises centered around Trump were taken off the table. Given the crisis Pence had to deal with, the resulting realignment makes perfect sense. What's interesting to me is that there are multiple ways this realignment could happen, depending on the future of Trump, the nature of the crisis, and the Democrat who crafts the new coalition.

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That means a lot to me TBH for whatever reason I didn't actually get around to reading this until you had already completed 2020. I really wish I had, (though binging through it was fun, I'll admit ) and honestly if I had started reading this earlier I would have been doing this shtick of mine for most if its run

edit: all this is also giving me pause for how I should handle my own TL. Right now it's focused mainly on the Democratic primary process, but since so much interesting stuff here came from you looking at the big picture, I'm inspired to incorporate some of that into my own work going forward

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This was by far the best timeline I have ever read and one of the most realistic futures for this country.

Hear hear

I concur. This has been incredible to read!

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Beautiful, really loved every word of it and was almost in tears at various points. Actually gave me some real hope for the future. Hope something like it comes true.

As a final thought, the cycle of history that you project going into the 2030s and 2040s almost does seem to continue the parallels between the post WWII era with the US becoming increasingly prosperous and education being more affordable to a broader slice of the population. Also ties into the Strauss and Howe generational theory with Millennials as a hero generation and Boomers as a Prophet generation. Maybe in the 2040s you'll see something mirroring the 60s counter-culture emerge.

Interestingly the FDR and Reagan eras line up well. Almost too well. The 1990s were a mirror opposite image of the 1950s, down to the presidents losing Congress in their first term. Bush and JFK/LBJ line up fairly well with Vietnam/Iraq. If you believe Nixon was a foreshadowing president, Obama would be a good stand in. Now we're in the Ford / Carter phase apparently.

Seems like the difference here is how each coalition adds to the standard 40 year model. FDR's coalition got 2 terms added onto the beginning, spending more time in the realignment phase, while Reagan's coalition spent 4 more years in the disjunction/carter phase, almost turning it into a second Bush 43 era before everything came crashing down.

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I'll come up with an answer tomorrow.

Anyone want me to flesh out the lead up to the debt crisis in a brief post alongside the foreign policy? That's probably the one thing I wish I covered more.

Yes please

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I could see a map like this being the norm in the 2036-2048 time period

http://www.270towin.com/maps/K2yPZ

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It also sounds to me like the Republican elected in 2036 will be the one to open up immigration; the cosmopolitan, business types who would peel off from Cordray are very pro-immigration, as are of course minority Democrats. It would be similar to Eisenhower being the one behind the interstate highways, or Clinton being the one behind welfare reform: just as only Nixon could go to China, only the 49th President could open up immigration and come out politically unscathed. Assuming (s)he gets two terms, it could happen in the second term and still qualify as waiting until the 2040s

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Walker x2 then Portman x1 would have been an eerie parallel to Harding/Coolidge/Hoover, had it happened in real life. Keeping this in mind, it puts your comments about Pence wanting to be a Coolidgian figure and the 1928/1932 parallels in 2020 and 2024 into a somewhat new light, as those seem to be the remnants of the original version's obvious parallels.

It also changes Obama from a Nixonian figure (a president pushing the boundaries of the majority's rules and a foreshadow of things to come) to a Wilsonian one. (a brief blip in a majority stranglehold that turns out to not really be a foreshadowing figure at all, which makes sense considering Cordray's majority is not an extension of Obama's coalition the way Reagan's majority was a realisation of Nixon's southern strategy)

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Feingold absolutely would have fit if he won his senate race in 2016. One loss against Ron Johnson qualifies as the loss in your checklist, but two either puts him out of the national spotlight entirely or forces him to wait until 2018 to make a comeback, at which point it doesn't look in good form to immediately run for President right after getting a new office. (it might not have been in 1860 when freshly victorious Senator Stephen Douglas ran for President, but it sure is now)

Sherrod Brown also works, (his loss was for Ohio SoS in 1990) as do a handful of other politicians. For a 2020 realignment, Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken are potential targets. Franken doesn't have the loss but he does have a near-loss against Coleman that animated him to be a fantastic US Senator. Warren doesn't have an electoral loss but she still has a political one: getting blocked as head of the CFPB. Though her case is a little... eh.... also neither of them have the decades in politics component that Brown does. (also Biden has a personal loss instead of a political one, and otherwise qualifies)

For a 2024 realignment, yeah Cordray works because of his 2010 loss to Mandel, but I'm not sure who else has the loss component. Jason Kander could do it if he wins the Governor's race in 2020, though he might be too young. O'Malley could maybe also work, but that's a massive stretch. Franken might accrue the experience to qualify by then.

Ironically, Obama has the loss, (lost a congressional election before he became a Senator) and given his charisma and political talents, there is probably a universe where he becomes President in 2020 or 2024 instead of 2008, becoming a Reaganite figure instead of a Nixonian or Wilsonian one. It's probably in one of the "HRC wins in 2008" universes and it's only a matter of time before that TL gets written

I'll draw up a House map of the 2024 Democratic coalition based on current lines (roughly) so you get an idea where the new Democratic majority is located. This TL is finished; but I like writing supplemental articles and things time to time to fill out our understanding of this world.

Sweet. Supplemental articles are the best! Also while the plot of this TL is completed, because the story focuses so much on historical trends and big ideas and major coalition and realignments and the like, I feel like the TL won't truly be over until all discussion of it has been exhausted. The plot may be done, but it lives on nonetheless

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Spenstar, actually, most realigning Presidents had two losses. Feingold qualified under his second loss.  Jefferson had one; Cordray would have three, including primaries. It's a statistical quirk and commonality.

Interestimg. Even so, the fact that Feingold just had a loss would preclude him having a realignment in 2020; if he was the realigning figure he'd have to make a major comeback like win the Gubernatorial race in 2018, and even then, bevause starting your job by running for president looks pretty bad, hed have to do it in 2024. (What was Reagan's second loss, btw?)

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It could be Kander or Buttgieg if either wins their state's Gubernatorial election in 2020