Smart Move

Why the Smart Move for Never-Trumpers Is to Become Democrats

If Steve Schmidt and friends want a centrist candidate in 2020, they need to join the party that wants a new president.

By BILL SCHER

There’s a new debate inside the #NeverTrump movement about how to respond to a president they loathe and the Republican Party that loves him. Some #NeverTrump conservatives, like New York Times columnist David Brooks and former Bush White House aide Reed Galen, are talking about creating a new third party. Others, like George Will and Max Boot, have become registered independents and are urging voters to put Democrats in charge of Congress this November, as a kind of temporary stopgap measure until the Republicans return to their senses. But according to speculation reported by POLITICO, former McCain 2008 chief strategist Steve Schmidt may go one step further: He’s reportedly thinking about signing up with a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, possibly former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

No doubt Schmidt would get attacked for being an opportunist. But if you are a conservative, #NeverTrump, pro-immigrant, free-trading, anti-Putin defender of the post-World War II international order, the only principled and practical move left is to join the Democratic Party.

The moment for temporarily endorsing the Democrats to block President Donald Trump was the presidential election of 2016, not the midterms of 2018. Had more Republicans endorsed Hillary Clinton two years ago, movement conservatives would likely be giddily anticipating the return of one of their own to the Oval Office in two years, as an obstructionist GOP Congress blocked the Democratic president’s every move. Instead, they’re facing a potential 2020 campaign that will be even more unpalatable to them than the choice they were presented with in 2016. Instead of Trump vs. Clinton, they could get Trump vs. Elizabeth Warren, or even Bernie Sanders.

Backing a no-chance candidate like Bill Kristol against Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries just to make a point is a fool’s errand. And even a serious candidate like Jeff Flake or Ben Sasse doesn’t stand a chance, given Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans. Once #NeverTrump conservatives accept that they have completely lost the core debates about the direction and purpose of the Republican Party, they can open their eyes to the possibility of winning some debates inside the Democratic Party. By playing a direct role in electing delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention, #NeverTrump conservatives might even prevent what horrifies them most: a democratic socialist president.

Becoming a Democrat is a step too far for Brooks, who this week wistfully sketched out an improbable vision of a third party that could compete if Democrats swung too far left and Republicans stuck with Donald Trump. Brooks’ dream party would be based not on centrism or pragmatism, but “constitutional localism”—shifting power away from decrepit, discredited Washington. The slightly less fantastical Galen, in an article for NBC News’ opinion site Think, urged #NeverTrumpers to consider his new pragmatist third party, Serve America Now, or other attempts to break the “hyper-polarized, two-party monopoly.”

Join the Democratic Party? That’s the “slightly less bad” option, wrote Galen, where conservatives would be “disliked and distrusted, pushed to the margins.” But wait, how is that different from the space #NeverTrump conservatives occupy in today’s Republican Party?

Playing with third parties risks another presidential election that divides the anti-Trump majority, and in the end, leaves the president in power for a second term. Likewise, simply becoming registered independents, and temporarily lending votes to Democrats to teach Republicans a lesson, is a doomed strategy for conservatives as well. We’ve already tried that one.

Boot explains his go-independent strategy this way: “Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.” But today’s pro-immigrant, free trade, anti-Putin defenders of the liberal international order have plain lost the fight for the soul of the GOP. If movement conservatives want to build something new, and to have a home where they can wield at least a modicum of political influence, they don’t need just to vote Democratic for this year. They need to make the Democratic Party their permanent home.

The hesitation to switch parties is understandable, because the Democratic Party is not a conservative party. But for some anti-Trump conservatives, their reluctance is rooted in a distorted caricature of their rivals. They wrongly view the Democratic Party as a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, abortion on demand and government run amok.

Back in 2016, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg described the 2016 election as not only “a choice between two crap sandwiches on different kinds of bread,” but he also suggested Hillary Clinton presented the “greater danger” to the Constitution because she may have tried to—gasp—emulate Barack Obama and try to implement some policies by executive order. Today, Goldberg is shaking his head that Trump is “openly questioning our commitment to Article 5 of NATO.” I’ve yet to hear him comment on the Treasury Department’s consideration of a capital gains tax cut by executive order, but I assume he can hear James Madison turning in his grave.

But Goldberg still can’t stomach the Democrats and won’t be donning a blue shirt anytime soon. Most conservative reaction to the notion of party-switching has been harshly negative, even as much of it is premised on a Democratic Party that doesn’t exist.

For example, in an April article explaining why conservatives won’t embrace Democrats, the conservative Trump critic Ben Shapiro wrote, “the Democratic Party has cleansed itself of all pro-life voices.” Now while it is certainly true that support for abortion rights is a pillar of the Democratic Party, it is also true that Shapiro wrote that sentence one month after a pro-life Democrat, Rep. Dan Lipinski, won his primary against a pro-choice challenger, and three months after three Senate Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in supporting an abortion ban at 20 weeks of pregnancy. One month after Shapiro’s assertion, the Democratic governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards, signed into a law a 15-week abortion ban.

Or take this critique of Boot from National Review’s Jonathan Tobin: “Does he really think the Democrats are less corrupt than Trump and his Cabinet? Would America be better off run by a party that is ruled by identity politics and intent on promoting racial division and class warfare? Does he think, for all of Trump’s faults, that civil political discourse is the specialty of the party of Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?”

Leaving aside whether the names Tobin cites deserve to be tagged as uncivil, why doesn’t Tobin describe the Democrats as the party of Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bob Casey, John Lewis, Seth Moulton and Heidi Heitkamp—not to mention Barack Obama and Joe Biden? If the Democratic Party is “intent on promoting racial division,” why is the political arm of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsing the white Rep. Mike Capuano over his African-American primary challenger Ayanna Pressley? How is it that Doug Jones won a Senate seat in deep red Alabama on the strength of a black-white coalition?

The answer to those questions is that anything that complicates the conservative caricature of Democrats is expunged from the narrative. That’s par for the course for both sides in political commentary. Conservative platforms are hardly the only places where such oversimplification happens. But the warped story that conservatives tell themselves about the left is blinding them from objectively weighing where they can wield the most influence.

Granted, where #NeverTrump conservatives can be most effective is in large part determined by what issues they most care about. If you are a Republican because you oppose abortion in all circumstances and love conservative judges and tax cuts, then becoming a Democrat doesn’t make any sense. But if you are primarily horrified at how Trump is undermining the existing international political and economic order—hugging Russia, lauding strongmen, sparking protectionist trade wars—then becoming a Democrat is your best option.

Conservatives tend to look at the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and its aftermath as proof that the party is an incubator of socialism and radicalism. The pro-Trump conservative Hugh Hewitt, in trying to ward off an exodus of #NeverTrump conservatives, raised the specter of a “radicalized Democratic Party” experiencing a “lurch left” which, if in control of Congress, would immediately push impeachment and the abolition of ICE. Hewitt overlooks that House legislation to abolish ICE has only eight co-sponsors, that the Democratic congressional leadership has shunned impeachment talk and that several red state Senate Democrats are running on how well they work with Trump.

Besides, the best way to move the Democratic Party rightward would be for more conservatives to join it. It’s true that socialist-friendly Berniecrats are increasingly vocal in the Democratic Party, but conservatives should also recognize the ideological breadth of what is the nation’s only remaining big-tent party. Democrats are held together by a belief in active government to solve problems and a commitment to equal rights and opportunities for women and minorities. But questions over foreign policy and trade have long been points of internal debate, and that makes them policy areas where new party members can play a significant role.

When third-party advocates like Galen presume conservatives would be marginalized in the Democratic Party, they overlook how heavily Democrats are predisposed to compromising. A Gallup poll last October showed 62 percent of Democrats, versus 44 percent of Republicans, believed it was more important for leaders in Washington to “compromise in order to get things done” than to “stick to their beliefs.”

So once conservatives free themselves from the Fox News echo chamber, it would be easier to conduct good faith, fact-based negotiations over policy specifics, such as how to tackle climate change through a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which some conservatives already support. Instead of barreling toward single-payer health insurance, conservatives could work with their new Democratic friends on tidying up what was once known as RomneyCare. Pro-life and pro-choice forces could finally team up on sex education and contraception access to reduce unwanted pregnancies. (As historian Joshua Zeitz recently explained in POLITICO Magazine, when Civil War-era Democrats became Republicans, they “freed themselves to imagine a larger space for political collaboration” and discovered that “their former Whig enemies shared their fundamental commitment to the good of the nation.”)

To the average conservative Trump-skeptic, the Democratic Party will not feel terribly cozy. You would often be fighting uphill, and you would lose more than you would win. But so long as conservatives fight honorably, stick to the facts and genuinely seek common ground, they will be more comfortable among Democrats than they might now assume—certainly more comfortable than they are in a Republican Party that has rejected them already.

There is no perfect political home for the #NeverTrumpers. So it’s time for them to choose the place where they can do the most good, for themselves and for the country. Of the many reasons “why Trump won,” anti-Trump conservatives refusing to look beyond a caricature of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party is one of the most crucial. It’s a mistake they shouldn’t make again.