How the Tariffs Could Break Trump's Coalition

April Q&As, also going over the post-Trump GOP, the future of liberalism, and whether the left should start a third party.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Hello everyone! Welcome back to our ongoing newsletter mailbag series. Since you probably don’t need me to summarize what’s going on in our very chaotic political present, I figure it’s best to begin with some of the most-asked questions I’ve received over the past few weeks.

Simon Moon asks: Why is the brand “Dem = bad at economy, Republican = good” so solidified when it really hasn't been close to true for a long time? Especially thinking about financial institutions who should nominally need to know better. Tariff stuff seems to be catching a lot of people who should know better off guard.

For financial institutions, the answer is simple: they were stupid, hoped for the best, and were far too willing to write off obviously bad ideas as just campaign rhetoric. For the public at large, it’s because the GOP has been far more willing to reinvent itself than Democrats have been after bad times. Far from a permanently strong issue for the party, the GOP has lost to Democrats on the economy many times in the past. This was at its most pronounced in recent years during the Bush Jr. era, when their numbers on domestic issues were poor for almost his entire administration. What allowed them to come back on the issue so quickly wasn’t just the slow recovery under Obama, but an immediate willingness to leave failed leaders in the past and move on to distinctly new figures and approaches. Well before Donald Trump, both the Tea Party and even the nomination of Mitt Romney heralded a shift away from their Bush-era brand. The party started snubbing Bush himself at their conventions as early as 2008; to this day, he has not attended any RNCs since 2004.

Although markedly unsentimental, this decision paid immediate dividends for the GOP. In 2012, Romney was able to slightly win among voters who prioritized the economy even though a majority of voters still blamed Bush for its poor state, a clear consequence of his efforts to establish himself as someone new. Four years later, Trump kicked this process of separation into overdrive with a campaign that both his supporters and opponents advertised as distinctly different from the GOP of the past. After he got elected and had the fortune to preside over a healthy economy, it logically followed that his approval on the issue would be consistently strong. Democrats, by contrast, have refused to let go of the same D.C. politicians and philosophies that have presided over all of the hard times over the past few decades. When things went bad once again under Biden, it was always going to create an issue for them on a topic far too large to be solved by a few out-of-context statistics about lockdown-era job losses, as 2024 showed quite clearly.

So, how can Democrats fix this? The first step is obvious: imitating what the GOP did after Bush and decisively breaking from their unpopular past leaders. This is something they have complete control over, and they should do it as soon as possible. The second part is waiting for bad times under a Republican president. Unfortunately for them, whether or not this happens is not something they have direct control over. Fortunately for them, however, it might not be that far off on the horizon, which leads us to our next question.

JB asks: How blue, realistically, could 2026 get if these tariffs continue to be a shitshow? Could it reach “Dems actually have a chance to flip the senate” blue?