Beating Donald Trump might not be Democrats' biggest task in 2020: A second blue wave could reshape history

And there’s at least one stark counter-example: Democrats won back-to-back wave elections in 1910 and 1912 (totaling 22.9 percent), while electing Woodrow Wilson president. But their House majority vanished by 1916, and Republicans dominated government in the 1920s. One could argue that 1912 was an outlier election — the only time a “third party” came in second, as Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Party relegated the GOP to third place. But oddball elections come with the territory, and 2020 could be one of them.

“If the public is of a mind to wipe out Trump in 2020 in the fashion of wiping out Goldwater in 1964, that would of course be big,” Mayhew noted. “The Goldwater nomination seems to have thrown the congressional elections out of kilter in 1964, with very big policy consequences, some of them long-term,” he said.

“It's not so much whether there are one or two waves but whether the results of a wave election stick -- and what kind of new member is brought into Congress,” said Gary Jacobson of the University of California, San Diego. Democrats gained 12 Senate seats and 49 House seats in 1958, for example, and all of those were outside the South. That was immensely important for the passage of the Civil Rights Act five years later. Jacobson called it “a single wave that brought significant change."

Mayhew drew particular attention to the Senate side, noting that Republicans elected in 1946 (known as the "meat-shortage election") and solidified by Dwight Eisenhower's election in 1952 "were pretty much wiped out in 1958, which had no such GOP-favoring stimuli and featured a sagging economy as well as the usual in-party midterm drag. These Democratic Senate gains in 1958 (a single election) supplied a platform for party policy drives for most of a decade, at the least.”

The racial and gender diversity of 2018 could have similar long-term impacts. But followup matters. Democrats added another 37 House seats in 1964, even as Republicans made inroads in the South.

Size matters, too. The 2006 and 2008 waves were modest by historical standards, though not compared to the stability of elections from 1996 to 2004. More often, waves of roughly similar size cancel each other out. The GOP wave of 1946, which recaptured the House after seven terms of Democratic control, was quickly reversed by an even larger Democratic wave in 1948. The more modest Democratic wave of 1964 was reversed by a larger GOP wave in 1966, while those roles were reversed 16 years later: A modest Republican wave when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 was followed by a larger Democratic wave in 1982. Back-to-back waves are significantly less common, and significantly harder to reverse.

As Mayhew and Jacobson both make clear, there’s significant variation between wave elections and many do have lasting impacts, at least for a time. Jacobson cited the "Watergate wave" of 1974 as one that “brought significant internal changes to Congress," although those were eroded in 1980, and the 1994 wave as establishing “Republicans as a fully equal competitor for the Congress” after decades of Democratic dominance.

More recently, he called 2010 a “major wave" whose effects have largely been "done in" by President Trump. "With such a strong economy," he noted, "an even moderately popular president would have allowed Republicans to hold the House” in 2018. Obviously it didn't go that way.

Jacobson regards 2018 as a “major wave” as well, but says he's not sure whether it can be sustained in 2020. “It probably will be if Trump is on the ticket,” he said, because that may allow Democrats to hold "the upscale suburban districts that gave them their majority. Trump helps here because he is so unpopular in these precincts.”

State legislative races often get ignored but are critically important, largely because of the congressional redistricting process that will follow the 2020 census. For insight into that, I turned to Steve Rogers of St. Louis University, author of the forthcoming book, "Accountability in American Legislatures.”

“I think the easiest parallel to draw for 2020 is 2010,” Rogers said. “In 2010, Republican state legislative candidates benefited greatly from voters being upset with Democrats at the national level,” and that wasn’t a one-off accident. “My research generally shows that national political conditions are one of the strongest determinants of state legislative election outcomes,” he said. Republicans' big legislative victories in 2010 “allowed them to build somewhat of a redistricting firewall that benefited them throughout the decade,” and even limited Democratic gains in 2018. Now he anticipates something of a reversal.

“Overall, voters are largely unaware of who their state legislators are, let alone what they do from day to day," Rogers said. "So voters often end up relying on views of national politics or their partisanship when making their decisions in state legislative elections.” He's wary of how much difference organizations can make, but says it's critical that “voters have candidates to vote for," meaning that Democratic candidates actually run for office. Democrats did well in this regard in 2018, he noted. “This is something Republican-leaning organizations have a better track record doing, so this is one strategy that progressive groups should likely take up again,” he said.

In addition to its traditional state legislative arm, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the Democratic Party also has its own redistricting committee, working together with Organizing for America, which has targeted 12 states for its efforts. Redistricting is also a high priority for Swing Left, which targeted swing House districts in 2018 (Salon stories here, here, and here) and now hopes to help win key legislative races through an integrated strategy it calls “Super States”:

If you overlay the target maps, the most important battles to win the White House, the Senate, and the once-in-a-decade fight to control redistricting are concentrated in the same few states. By focusing on them, we can maximize the impact of our efforts, working on many or all of these important contests at the same time.

Although Swing Left’s initial strategy doesn't mention House races, those will also clearly be important. Fourteen of the 25 most vulnerable GOP-held seats are located in Swing Left “Super States,” with six in Texas alone, three in Pennsylvania and two in Ohio, along with one each in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina. (The other “Super States” are Maine, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado and Arizona.)

“In 2020 we can defeat Trump and set up decades of progressive victories,” a Swing Left spokesperson told Salon. “That requires winning the White House, the Senate, key state races that will determine redistricting, and protecting our majority in the House. Put simply, the blue wave can't be a temporary movement, and it can't be confined to the House. We need to build a comprehensive and sustained approach to activating grassroots energy to win elections up and down the ballot.”

Swing Left intends to continue and expand its formula of  “providing simple, strategic and meaningful actions for people to take” within a framework that’s both geographically and temporally targeted. For 2018, they focused on turnout, “because only around 65 percent of registered voters typically vote in midterm election years,” as the group's strategy memo notes. But in 2020, the focus shifts to registration since we can expect that a large majority of registered voters will turn out in a presidential election -- especially this one.

There is, however, a core need that Swing Left's strategy does not address: Engaging with rural voters who live in outside the targeted Super States. I reached out to Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska and chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party.

“Democrats and Independents exist in the middle of the country and the Democratic Party can no longer treat us as flyover voters,” Kleeb told Salon. “There's no question that Democrats need rural voters in order to win back the White House, as well as to win statewide races like U.S. Senate,” she said. “Unfortunately, Democrats have lost an entire generation of rural voters because there's been this cycle of mutual neglect. Democrats don't invest in the state parties, and then they don't have the money to talk to rural voters. We don't talk to rural voters, so they don't vote for Democrats.”

One old-timer put it bluntly to her husband at a town hall, Kleeb recalled: “Let's just be honest, if there's only one church in your community, guess what religion you become.” Kleeb added that Democrats “have to start including the solutions that rural people are already putting on the table to the big issues facing our country and our party.”

Rural residents and activists are already involved in climate struggles — fighting pipelines and fracking, advocating for wind and solar power, Kleeb noted, “Yet when Democrats talk about rural communities, they usually talk about us with a sneer or negative language, that we're the problem -- that agriculture is the problem for climate change, rather than looking to rural people for solutions. So we've got to start there. Because if we are really going to solve the big problems our country faces, we have to have all ideas on the table, not just the coastal ideas.