VOTE 2020 - What This Election Isn't

"The Trailer: This election isn't 1968 or 1992 or 2016" by David Weigel, Washington Post 5/31/2020

In this edition: Why the fire's different this time, what the Libertarian Party has to say about the riots and the virus, and a new poll that shows why the President is an underdog.

Don't worry, it can get worse.  This is The Trailer.

If anyone was celebrating “MAGA night”  on Saturday, they did so far from the White House.  The President coined “MAGA night”  in a Saturday morning tweet, hinting that there might be some response to what he called the “professionally managed so-called 'protesters'”  who'd rallied in Lafayette Square on Friday.

There was no response, no red-capped counter-demonstration.  In Washington, as in many cities, people protesting the killing of George Floyd by police gathered, faced off with riot-gear-wearing police and then scattered.  A week that began with the President asking for a criminal probe of an unfriendly TV host ended with him promising to “designate Antifa as a terrorist organization,” though there's no legal way to do so.

That has led to speculation of how the unrest will play for President Trump, with just as many people arguing that it will seal his reelection as arguing that it'll undo him.  Who's right?  It is far too early to say, and none of the easy comparisons hold up in 2020.

It's not 1968.  Most of the quick analysis of the unrest, from politicians and from journalists, has pointed to the election of Richard Nixon to suggest events could help reelect the President.  “He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety,”  Edward Luce, referring to Nixon, wrote in the Financial Times.  “Richard Nixon won the presidency by promising the country he would restore ‘law and order’ on the streets,” historian Julian Zelizer wrote for CNN.

The comparison fails in two important ways.  First and most obviously, Nixon was not President in 1968.  He was returning from political limbo to challenge, at first, an incumbent Lyndon Johnson and then by fall, Johnson's vice President.  Every summer had seen riots break out in major cities, and every year, the crime rate surged.  When Nixon told the Republican National Convention that “we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he had no political power or responsibility over those cities.

“America is in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed,” Nixon continued.  “What America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people.”

President Trump has lashed out at mayors and governors, but arguing that all the country's “leaders”  are failing is something an incumbent can't coherently do.  That gets to the second problem: The law-and-order pitch stopped working for Nixon once he was sworn in.  As Walter Shapiro recalled Sunday, polling ahead of the 1970 midterm elections found most voters disapproving of Nixon's crime record.  In the Democrats' official pre-midterm message, Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine leaned in, accusing the President of flailing because he hadn't solved the crime problem.

“For four years, a conservative Republican has been governor of California,”  Muskie said, referring to Ronald Reagan, the era's other major (non-Southern) law-and-order figure.  “Yet there is no more law and order in California today than when he took office.  President Nixon, like President Johnson before him, has taken a firm stand.  A Democratic Congress has passed sweeping legislation.  Yet America is no more orderly or lawful — nor its streets more safe — than was the case two years ago, or four, or six.”

It's not 1992.  Violent crime rates rose throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with Republicans regaining the advantage when voters were asked to consider “law and order.”  Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign tried to turn that around, with the candidate promising not to “make race an excuse for failing to pass judgment about self-destructive behavior” and endorsing “the simple restoration of order.”

The Los Angeles riots, which followed the “not guilty”  verdict for four police officers who had beaten Rodney King, crystallized Clinton's message.  George H.W. Bush was running for President, but the crime rate kept growing.  At one point, when the White House suggested that Democratic welfare policies were at the root of unrest, Clinton mocked them.

“It's just amazing,” Clinton said.  “Republicans have had the White House for 20 of the last 24 years, and they have to go all the way back to the '60s to find somebody to blame.”

Clinton developed a playbook that other center-left politicians would use for years, combining a promise of more policing and tougher sentencing with a promise of smarter social investment.

“We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back,” Clinton said at a July 1992 rally, flanked by police officers.  “I want to be tough on crime and good for civil rights.  You can't have civil justice without order and safety.”

Once in office, Clinton acted on that, signing popular crime bills and presiding over declining crime rates — and no major social unrest.  At the start, he did so with the support of many black political leaders.  The salience of crime as a Presidential election issue faded, while incarceration rates skyrocketed.  No modern Democrat has responded to this week's unrest with rhetoric like Clinton's.

It's not 2016.  By the time Donald Trump ran for President, violent crime had been on the decline for decades, and influential Republicans had pivoted from tough-on-crime policies to criminal justice and police reform while Democrats began reversing policies like stop-and-frisk and cash bail.  The shift from the attitudes of the 1990s was epitomized by Hillary Clinton, who apologized for a 20-year-old speech in which she called some young black criminals “super-predators.”  What was smart politics for a 1990s campaign was toxic in 2016.  But at the same time, unrest after the killings of black men by police officers and fearmongering about Barack Obama's crime policies fed into a paranoia that danger was increasing and the government was covering it up.

Trump, unencumbered by a political record, pitched himself as both a one-man solution to the crime problem and an alternative to Clinton's record.  “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end,”  Trump said at the 2016 RNC.  “Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.”  While his campaign bought ads that portrayed Hillary Clinton as a threat to black voters, Trump himself promised to side with law enforcement over anyone disturbing the peace, and, once in office, he rolled back the Obama administration's reforms.

“The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Bob Kroll, the president of Minneapolis's police union, said at a 2019 rally.  “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the [Eric] Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

In 2020, the Trump campaign balanced tough-on-crime rhetoric with the same argument it had made against Clinton: that Trump's Democratic opponent locked up black Americans unfairly.  That was before Minneapolis.

By this weekend, the Trump campaign was accusing Joe Biden's campaign of “financially support[ing] the mayhem that is hurting innocent people,” because some of its staffers had donated to a bail fund for protesters, while the President was urging police to be “tougher.”  At the very same time, Washington's mayor was mocking an “afraid” and “alone” President, pointing out that he claimed local police were not trying to protect the White House, when they very much were.  Richard Nixon won by portraying himself as a unifier against an out-of-control left; Bill Clinton won reelection by carefully navigating the politics of crime and unrest.  There is nothing very careful, yet, about what we've seen from this President.