It’s an even-numbered year and Labor Day is upon us, which means a major national election is about two months away. This November’s contests, coming as they are halfway through President Joe Biden’s four-year term, are midterm elections. That means the president isn’t on the ballot, but every seat in the House, one-third of the Senate, a whole of lots of governors, and a bunch of state legislative seats are up for grabs.
This election will have significant consequences for American politics going forward. If Democrats retain control of Congress, they have the potential to enact more of their agenda. If they lose just one house, expect gridlock and high-stakes showdowns over budgetary matters. If Democrats lose the Senate, they’ll struggle to fill judicial vacancies. A Republican-led chamber of Congress would also likely launch investigations into the Biden administration. A GOP-led House could even impeach Biden for…his son’s laptop? Liking Amtrak? Benghazi? A Republican victory would also empower Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, particularly in the states, where elected officials there could move to change voting laws in response to their false claims of election fraud in the 2020 elections.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll provide an analysis of what we can expect in the 2022 election, focusing on Congress. (I may try to put together a state overview in a few weeks as well.) In all honesty, I’m not sure how useful this sort of exercise ultimately is; I mean, if you really want to know how the election will turn out, just wait a couple months and find out. I provide this, then, to help you take a step back from the daily back-and-forth and general craziness of the election’s stretch run to help you see the big political picture for what it is. The truth is, most voters have made up their minds already, and barring something major that flips the script, the results are for the most part determined. Any shifts in voter sentiment that happen between now and Election Day will probably happen on the margins. So use this guide to better understand what is truly significant politically over the next two months so you can stay alert to that, tune out all the rest of the political noise, and maybe preserve a bit of your sanity going forward.
I’ll get into more 2022-specific factors next week in part two of my forecast. This week, though, I’ll focus on five “macro” factors that shape the political playing field in every election, particularly midterms.
1. The Midterm Hex: Midterm elections are notoriously rough on the president’s party. Consider:
As this chart shows, in all but two midterm elections since 1962, the president’s party has lost seats in the House. Sometimes they lose a lot (</=40 seats in 2010, 1994, 1974, 1966, and 2018) and sometimes they stave off loses. That overall pattern of loss kind of holds true in the Senate, but because only 1/3 of Senate seats are contested every two years, you won’t see as big of swings as in the Senate as you do in the House. Furthermore, the scope of losses in the Senate is constrained by what particular seats are in-play that given year, a factor I’ll dive into in a little bit. Overall, though, this historical trend suggests Democrats are at a disadvantage going into the midterms.
The other thing to take into account when considering these numbers is how big of a margin the president’s party has in either chamber of Congress. Remember that prior to 1994, Democrats had robust majorities in the House of Representatives, so big in fact many politicos couldn’t imagine a House without a Democratic Speaker. Democrats could lose 47 seats in the House in 1966 and still have a pretty solid grip on the gavel (although what they could actually accomplish was constrained by how much sway conservative southern Democrats held within the caucus.) Since 1994, however, the margins either party has had to work with in Congress have been small by comparison. Consider this chart, which measures the size of House majorities all the way back to 1856:
As this chart shows, Democrats only lost control of the House twice between 1932 and 1994 (in 1946, which was the midterm immediately after World War II during Democrat Harry Truman’s first term and when inflation was pretty high, and 1952, when Republican Dwight Eisenhower was first elected president.) Democratic House majorities in that time rarely dropped below +25 seats. Since that time, however, House majorities for both parties have been fairly small, with cushions of +25 seats occuring only twice (+39 for Democrats in 2008 and Republicans in 2014).
Democrats currently have a 1 seat majority in the House, but they’ll get that number back up to 3 after a couple Democrats who recently won special elections are sworn-in in a few days. What all this means is if the historical pattern holds true and Democrats lose seats in the House—and even if they match the lowest number of seats a president’s party has ever lost in a midterm—it’s likely they’ll lose control of the House. As for the Senate, well, it’s currently split 50-50, so if Democrats lose a single seat without winning a seat currently held by Republicans, they’ll lose control of that chamber, too.
2. Presidential Approval: So why does the president’s party tend to lose seats in midterm elections? Part of it’s the ebb and flow of politics: When a president wins their election, they tend to have coattails that benefit other candidates from their party down ballot. Presidents aren’t on the ballot in midterms, though, meaning the coattail effect goes away. For example, when Democrat Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he drew a lot of people to the polls who weren’t regular voters. When they showed up to vote for him, they filled out the rest of their ballot, too, and more often than not supported candidates from Obama’s party. As a result, Democrats were able to win some seats in districts typically won by Republicans. Without Obama on the ballot in 2010, however, the coattail effect went away and many of those surprise victors in 2008 lost.
Furthermore, during midterms, the opposition party tends to get riled up when they see a president of the opposite party in charge. Because they want to put the brakes on the president’s agenda and are generally displeased with the president’s leadership, they tend to be more motivated to vote in midterms. At the same time, members of the president’s party tend to grow complacent, either because they’re generally satisfied with the president’s leadership or disappointed the president hasn’t lived up to their expectations yet. That depresses turnout among the president’s supporters. (Governing is hard; it’s always easy for a candidate to say what they would hypothetically do in office, but it’s hard to maintain popularity once an office-holder begins making tough decisions that end up frustrating some of their constituents or finds they lack the legislative support to advance their agenda.) Add to that the inclinations of notoriously fickle independent voters, and what we usually see in midterms is a highly-motivated opposition, a complacent presidential-party-in-power, and a populace generally dissatisfied with the grinding gears of governance.
This is where presidential approval comes into play. A president with higher approval ratings would probably be better situated to mitigate losses during a midterm. Here’s a chart looking at midterm presidential approval ratings:
As you’ll recall from the first chart, the presidential party’s biggest midterm losses came in in 2010, 1994, 1974, 1966, and 2018. The respective presidential approval ratings in those years was 45%, 46%, 54%, 44%, and 41%. (The 54% in 1974 belonged to Republican Gerald Ford, who had only been in office for about three months after Richard Nixon had resigned. The losses Republicans sustained that year were attributed to the fallout from Watergate.) The lowest midterm approval rating—38% in 2006 for George W. Bush—translated into a 30 seat loss for Republicans. As you can see, though, even solid approval ratings often turn into losses in Congress, as Republican Ronald Reagan with a 63% approval rating in 1986 experienced in the Senate. The only two presidents who actually picked up seats in the House during a midterm—Bill Clinton in 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (5 seats) and George W. Bush in 2002 following 9/11 but prior to the invasion of Iraq (8 seats)—had approval ratings of 63-66%. That’s a pretty high bar, and it still only netted the incumbent president’s party less than 10 seats.
So where does Joe Biden stand right now? Let’s go to 538.com and their polling aggregator:
Yeah, that 42.7% would be higher than only George W. Bush in 2006 and Donald Trump in 2018. That’s not good news for Democrats. It forebodes a shellacking. On a positive note, Biden’s approval rating has definitely recovered from his July nadir. If that trend continues, Democrats have a chance to limit their losses.
3. Congressional Preference: These are midterm elections, though, which means the president isn’t on the ballot. Rather than ask voters if they approve or disapprove of the president to get a sense for how they’ll vote for Congress, why not just ask them directly which party they would prefer control Congress?
Well, 538.com aggregates those poll numbers as well:
As you can tell, Democrats lost their advantage in the generic ballot somewhere around November 2021 but recently regained it. (Their numbers began tracking up in July, perhaps as a response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs; I’ll discuss that next week.) What these numbers suggest to me is that while a majority of Americans disapprove of Biden, they’re not enthusiastic about the prospect of Republican leadership either. Or maybe they believe that no matter what Biden’s faults are, they don’t necessarily need to be checked by a Republican-led Congress. For Democrats, though, this has to be considered a positive development. Obviously, they would like bigger margins, but to be able to stake a claim to the voter’s preferred congressional party this late in a midterm suggests Democrats can be competitive in these elections.
4. The House Landscape: A big caveat, though: Given the way voters are distributed across the states and congressional districts, Democrats can’t expect a small lead in a congressional preference poll to translate into control of Congress. This is because partisan voters are distributed unevenly across congressional districts. For instance, if Democrats pile up votes in a heavily-Democratic district yet lose modestly in a number of Republican-leaning districts, they’ll end up with fewer representatives in Congress even if it turns out a majority of voters across all those districts supported Democratic candidates.
Part of the reason for this is that Democrats are clustered in cities, and those who draw congressional maps generally aren’t inclined to slice such clearly-defined geographic areas up into districts that stretch into more rural areas. But we also can’t deny the effect gerrymandering—the act of drawing legislative districts for partisan advantage—has on the House electoral landscape. Democrats and Republicans engage in the practice, although Republicans have benefited more from it recently.
Because this is the first election held following a census, House maps have been redrawn this cycle, and 538 estimates the new congressional map is again biased toward Republicans when compared to national partisan preferences (although less so than in the previous cycle.) According to 538, the mean congressional district has a 2.5 point Republican lean. That means Democrats would have to win the generic ballot by roughly 2.5 points just to break even with Republicans in the House. Furthermore, 208 congressional districts have at least a 5 point Republican lean compared to 187 congressional districts with a Democratic lean of at least 5 points. If you divvied up the remaining congressional districts (those with less than a 5 point lean; in other words, the toss-up districts) according to which way they lean, 225 seats lean toward Republicans while 210 seats lean toward Democrats. For Democrats to retain control of the House, they’ll need to win on territory that at least marginally favors Republicans.
That’s not a Herculean task. Democrats have done so as recently as 2020. It is expected to be harder, though, in a midterm with a Democratic president. And if Republicans do better than break even in the generic ballot, they could start accumulating a fair share of seats.
One final thing to note about this new map, however: There are more safe/uncompetitive seats than usual. Consequently, analysts believe it’s unlikely (at least this early in this map’s 10-year lifetime) that we’ll see a big wave election that builds up an enduring congressional majority. A good night for either party wouldn’t produce the tidal wave of 40+ seat gains that we’ve seen in the past. Expect something more modest unless public sentiment really turns against one of the parties.
5. The Senate Landscape: To forecast the Senate, you need to remember only 1/3 of the seats (35 in 2022, actually, due to a special election in Oklahoma) are contested every two years. Consequently, a generic national poll of congressional preference may not graph onto the particular collection of 33-34 states up for grabs in any given year. But because states regularly hold presidential elections, it’s easier to get a sense for the partisan lean of the states. Also worth noting: The number of senators who belong to or caucus with the party opposite the party of the candidate their state supported in the most recent presidential election has dwindled to six: (Brown [D-OH]; Collins [R-ME]; Johnson [R-WI]; Manchin [D-WV]; Tester [D-MT]; Toomey [R-PA]). More and more, senators come from the same party as the most-recent presidential candidate favored by their state’s citizens.
What that means is we can establish some sort of baseline for how we expect the senate elections to turn out based strictly on how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election. Remember, it’s a 50-50 Senate, so Democrats don’t have a seat to spare.
Safe Republican seats (+5% margin of victory for Trump in 2020): Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah
Safe Democratic seats (+5% margin of victory for Biden in 2020): California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington
Toss-Up Republican-leaning seats (-5% margin of victory for Trump in 2020): Florida (3.4%), North Carolina (1.4%)
Toss-Up Democratic-leaning seats (-5% margin of victory for Biden in 2020): Arizona (0.3%), Georgia (0.2%), Nevada (2.4%), Pennsylvania (1.2%), Wisconsin (1.4%)
Those categories aren’t destiny, of course. But if each state votes in 2022 according to how they voted for president in 2020, Democrats would pick up two senate seats: One in Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey is retiring, and the seat currently held by Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. If the midterms are hard on Democrats, though, it’s very conceivable that Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada would slip away from them, as well as New Hampshire (which Biden won by 7.4%) or some other states that unexpectedly get caught in the wave. And with margins of right around 0.3% to spare in Arizona and Georgia, even the faintest midterm headwind could cost Democrats control of the Senate.
So that’s the view from 30,000 feet. It’s pretty rough terrain for Democrats. They’re expected to lose seats simply because the president is from their party. Furthermore, even though their president’s approval rating has recovered somewhat recently, Biden remains quite unpopular, which will likely increase the magnitude of their losses. On the plus side, Democrats are basically tied with Republicans when it comes to which party voters want in charge of Congress, suggesting voters’ disapproval of Biden has not yet turned into support for Republicans. But to win the House, where the mean district leans +2.5 points Republican, Democrats have to do better than break even on measures of party preference; they’ll need to win a number of seats where one would expect a generic Republican to defeat a generic Democratic in a generic election. That will be tough to accomplish in a midterm. The Senate map slightly favors Democrats, but they have virtually no room for error and even if Republicans receive the slightest of midterm bumps, Democrats could easily see their caucus shrink by 3-4 seats. That’s a problem when an aggregate loss of only 1 seat would cost them control of the chamber.
These are the overarching factors that tend to shape electoral cycles. You can analyze these variables in any election and get a pretty good idea for how the election will turn out. These forces are elemental to American politics and need to be heeded.
But there’s a reason we have elections rather than just plugging these variables into an algorithm to generate an outcome. There are always factors specific to every electoral environment—specifically issues and candidates—that have the potential to defy these odds. I’ll look at those factors in next week’s article.
Signals and Noise
Since it’s Labor Day weekend, let’s start with some labor news. A new poll has found support for labor unions in the United States is at a 57-year high.
Also: California has passed a bill that would give fast-food restaurant workers greater workplace protections. From Don Thompson of AP: “The bill will create a new 10-member Fast Food Council with equal numbers of workers’ delegates and employers’ representatives, along with two state officials, empowered to set minimum standards for wages, hours and working conditions in California. A late amendment would cap any minimum wage increase for fast food workers at chains with more than 100 restaurants at $22 an hour next year, compared to the statewide minimum of $15.50 an hour, with cost of living increases thereafter.”
Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic speculates on what a second Trump term would look like.
Trump went on a “Truth” Social bender this week. See here (in which he demands to be declared president) and here (in which he reposted QAnon’s greatest hits).
By the way, how does one get “declared” president? Do you just, like, ask Madara and BAM you’re the president? Is that in the Constitution?
Trump also told conservative radio host Wendy Bell he would grant “full pardons with an apology to many” of the Capitol rioters. “I am financially supporting people that are incredible and they were in my office actually two days ago, so they’re very much in my mind,” he said. Never reassuring to hear Trump would pardon people who commit crimes on his behalf.
Jared Kushner thinks the reason Trump was hording a bunch of classified documents “may be a paperwork issue.” Leave it up to the lamest guy ever to come up with the lamest excuse ever.
“BUT HER EMAILS!” they scream. Correct, Hillary Clinton should not have used a private email server while serving as Secretary of State. Fair enough. But do you know how many classified emails she had on her server? Do you have the answer, Count?
That’s right, Count! Zero classified emails!
Well this was predictable. From the Washington Post: “In the nearly three weeks since the FBI searched former president Donald Trump’s Florida home to recover classified documents, the National Archives and Records Administration has become the target of a rash of threats and vitriol, according to people familiar with the situation. Civil servants tasked by law with preserving and securing the U.S. government’s records were rattled.”
In what I’m sure is totally unrelated news: “National Treasure 3 Script is Done and Awaiting Nicolas Cage’s Approval, Says Jerry Bruckheimer” (What would that movie be like? Does Benjamin Franklin Gates work for Trump now and break into the evil National Archives to steal back the
incriminating documentsI meannational treasuresI mean boring declassified documents that belong to Trump? Or does Cage break into Mar-a-Lago to recover the documents Trump took? And given how secure those documents were on Trump’s estate, would that latter movie only be like 5 minutes long?)When lawsuits collide: In response to a subpoena issued by the New York State Attorney General’s office investigating the Trump Organization, a Trump lawyer testified she had diligently searched Trump’s residence and office at Mar-a-Lago for documents pertaining to the investigation. Now people are wondering if in doing so, she handled the unsecured classified material Trump had stored at Mar-a-Lago, which would be a big no-no if she didn’t have the clearance to do so.
Don Trump is not only struggling to put together a coherent legal argument as to why he had a bunch of classified documents stashed away at Mar-a-Lago, he’s struggling to put together a legal team. He hired one lawyer after seeing him on TV. Was it this guy?
Former Attorney General and Fred Flintstone cosplayer Bob Barr had a lot to say about Trump this week.
On Fox News: ““I think for [DOJ] to take things to the current point they probably have pretty good evidence…People say this was unprecedented, well it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club.”
Also on Fox News: “I frankly am skeptical of the claim that [Trump] declassified everything. You know, because frankly, I think it’s highly improbable… If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them and said I hereby declassify everything in here, that would be such an abuse and — that shows such recklessness — it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”
In an interview with the New York Times: “As more information comes out, the actions of the department look more understandable. It seems to me they were driven by concern about highly sensitive information being strewn all over a country club, and it was taking them almost two years to get it back. It appears that there’s been a lot of jerking around of the government. I’m not sure the department could have gotten it back without taking action.” He also laughed when asked about Trump’s request for an independent special master to review the recovered material, calling it a “a crock of shit.”
Joe Biden went after Donald Trump in a speech delivered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia Thursday. Said Biden, “History tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.” Jonathan Alter summed up Biden’s speech this way: “Biden was basically saying, You are either with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that were written just behind me…or you are with the political terrorists who use fear and threats of violence to get their way. There’s no middle ground.” Alter added, “It’s like the principle of fighting bad speech with good speech. The only way to defend democracy is to extend democracy.”
From Peter Baker and Blake Hounshell of the New York Times: “The Republicans’ reaction to Mr. Biden’s speech was remarkable. For years, they stood quietly by as Mr. Trump vilified and demonized anyone who disagreed with him — encouraging supporters to beat up protesters; demanding that his rivals be arrested; accusing critics of treason and even murder; calling opponents “fascists”; and retweeting a supporter saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” But they rose up as one on Thursday night and Friday to complain that Mr. Biden was the one being divisive.”
Alaska is now represented by a Democrat in the House of Representatives. To illustrate how dramatic the urban/rural divide is in American politics, David Wasserman points out Mary Peltola’s victory in Alaska’s special election has increased the amount land represented by Democratic members of Congress by 104%.
Dr. Oz is distancing himself…from his own campaign? (In response to a question about attacks on his opponent, Oz replied, “The campaign’s been saying lots of things. My position is — I can only speak to what I’m saying.”)
Pundits increasingly believe the Democrats’ odds in the 2022 midterms are improving. But is that really the case, or is it just Democrats rallying around their candidates? By Paul Kane of the Washington Post: “Has the Political Environment Shifted? Alums of 2010, 2018 Wave Midterms Urge Caution”
But watch White college-degree-holding women. They’re shifting toward Democrats. Abortion is an important issue for them. Might college debt forgiveness matter as well?
So long as we’re talking about college debt relief, a critical question to ask: Is the problem student debt or the high cost of college tuition?
This encapsulates the problem facing the nation: Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is often lauded for resisting Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 Georgia presidential election, but his running mate Burt Jones claims that election was stolen and actually signed-up to serve as a fake Electoral College elector. In other words, voting for Kemp ends up empowering Jones, and that’s not good! There’s a group of pro-Republican/anti-MAGA voters that needs to reckon with the fact that voting for admirable Republicans who choose to caucus with their Republican colleagues doesn’t serve as a check on Trump. It only bolsters Trump and his elected sycophants.
The leading GOP candidate for the Senate in New Hampshire is a retired general who called the state’s GOP governor a “Chinese communist sympathizer,” floated the idea of abolishing (dare we say “defunding”) the FBI, and signed a letter asserting that Don Trump won the 2020 election.
Conservative commentator Allahpundit is leaving conservative website Hot Air. His parting shot: “What is the right’s ‘cause’ at this point? What cause does the Republican Party presently serve? It has no meaningful policy agenda. It literally has no platform. The closest thing it has to a cause is justifying abuses of state power to own the libs and defending whatever Trump’s latest boorish or corrupt thought-fart happens to be. Imagine being a propagandist for a cause as impoverished as that. Many don’t need to imagine. The GOP does have a cause. The cause is consolidating power. Overturn the rigged elections, purge the disloyal bureaucrats, smash the corrupt institutions that stand in the way. Give the leader a free hand. It’s plain as day to those who are willing to see where this is going, what the highest ambitions of this personality cult are. Those who support it without insisting on reform should at least stop pretending that they’re voting for anything else.”
Pay attention to what’s happening in Brazil, where the right-wing autocratic president Jair Bolsonaro is running against the popular left-wing ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has already cast doubt on the validity of the electoral process, touted the military’s support for his campaign, and prepared his supporters for “war” if he loses.
Don’t overlook one of the major issues behind the heightened tension between China and the U.S./E.U./Japan over Taiwan: Semiconductors.
Pakistan is experiencing floods that could leave one-third of the country (roughly the size of Great Britain) underwater.
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022)
When I was in high school, I read Michael H. Hart’s The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. After finishing it, I tried a more modest project and put together a list of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. If I remember right, my top three were Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong. While only one American entry cracked the top ten—Wilbur and Orville Wright—I included three Russians/Soviets: Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the time I composed the list, Gorbachev loomed as an all-time important world figure. (In fact, Hart included Gorbachev in his top 100 when he revisited his rankings in 1992.) More than anyone else, Gorbachev was responsible for ending the Cold War, defusing the nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe (which also resulted in a politically, economically, and militarily unified Europe), the break-up of the U.S.S.R., and the fall of the Soviet regime in Russia. Gorbachev’s actions brought about what some at the end of the second millennium called the “end of history,” when it was said human development reached its final stage, resulting in a peaceful, liberal, democratic, capitalist world order that dominated the world and seemed an inevitable development in the places it had yet to reach.
Now, thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, thirty-one years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, twenty-two years after the turn of the century, Gorbachev’s place in history appears diminished. Russia’s current leader, a former KGB agent who once said “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” is trying to forcibly reassemble the Soviet empire as we speak. The Russian government’s crackdown at home against those who have spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine recalls Soviet-era repression. Meanwhile, relations between the West and Russia are the worst they’ve been since if not the early 1980s then the early 1960s (and if you think it was bad then, imagine Vladimir Putin touring an Iowa farm or scheduling a visit to Disneyland today.) Our world is not one of Gorbachev’s making but instead seems to resemble a pre-Gorbachev era.
But then again, we should note Gorbachev never set out to create the liberal world order that emerged in the 1990s. In the 1990s, it was common in the West to hail Gorbachev as the great man who set Russia and the nations of the Eastern Bloc on the path toward western-style democracy. What Gorbachev actually wanted to do was reform communism by granting people more freedom to openly critique the Soviet system (glasnost). Gorbachev assumed the citizens of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe accepted communism’s political and economic paradigm and only longed for it to work better. As it turned out, a critical mass found communism irredeemable. The communist governments in Eastern Europe were toppled less than five years after Gorbachev took office, and the Soviet Union fell about two years later. That meant Gorbachev, as a defender of the old system, had to go with it. The reform agenda he put in motion proved beyond his ability to corral and direct.
The West’s subsequent adoration of Gorbachev was predicated on the democratization and liberalization of the old Soviet bloc and Russia itself. But as the 90s wore on and the abrupt transition to capitalism sent shockwaves through Russian society, the Russian people held Gorbachev responsible for the tumult they experienced. That was mostly unfair: Gorbachev was the socialist whose approach to free market reform would have been more measured than the laissez-faire course charted by his successor, Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev ended up being disliked by both capitalists (as an artifact of a discredited ideology) and communist sympathizers (as a sell-out).
More significantly, however, Gorbachev’s legacy in Russia became one of capitulation and humiliation. Russia lost a lot of international prestige following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Despite retaining a massive nuclear arsenal, it was stripped of its superpower status. Furthermore, westerners regarded Russia as a developing nation that didn’t even belong among the first tier of world powers. Russia’s inclusion in groups like the G7/G8 seemed like a courtesy rather than something it deserved. It was expected to go along with the West to get along. It was easy for Russians to associate their economic struggles with the end of the Cold War and the West’s triumphalism, and the person who symbolized that to them was Mikhail Gorbachev. One could see this dynamic at play during Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004. There was Gorbachev alongside Western leaders like Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, Brian Mulroney of Canada, and Helmut Kohl of Germany. It didn’t seem like he was there as an equal or a partner or someone who had cut a major deal with them in the past. He looked like the guy who had played along with the West, adopted their language, given them everything they wanted and while getting little in return, and then surrendered.
A big part of Putin’s project has been making up for the sense of humiliation Russians felt at the end of the Cold War. The longer Putin stays in power, the more Gorbachev’s legacy seems to fade. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that while we in the West tend to admire Gorbachev, his reception is far more mixed in Russia, where he is associated with both liberalization and the loss of Russia’s status as a global superpower.
So where should Gorbachev stand amongst the towering figures of the twentieth century? It’s impossible to deny his role in the end of the Cold War and the fall of European communism, although it’s difficult to argue that’s what Gorbachev intended to happen. Still, that was a consequence of Gorbachev’s actions. And again, if Putin’s vision of Russia and global politics ends up prevailing in the long run, it would be hard not to regard Gorbachev’s time in office as an aberration. On the other hand, if Putinism fails and Russia successfully embarks on a path toward democratization and integration with the West, perhaps people will look back and acknowledge Gorbachev’s contributions to that effort.
In many ways, however, Gorbachev’s greatest legacy remains the many things he chose not to do. After Reagan initiated a new arms race with the Soviets, Gorbachev chose not to contest. Not only did he know his country couldn’t afford to compete but that an arms race endangered humankind’s continued existence on the planet. As the leader of a global superpower pitched in a geopolitical conflict with their ideological rival, Gorbachev could have decided to match the Americans weapon-for-weapon even if that meant jeopardizing the welfare of his own citizens. But he chose not to.
In 1989, when the people of Eastern Europe rose up against their communist leaders, Gorbachev could have ordered tanks into the streets of their cities to squash the protests just as his predecessors had. But he chose not to. (That same year, China’s communist leader Deng Xiaoping, who had reformed the Chinese economy along free market lines in the 1970s and 1980s, allowed the Chinese military to crackdown on democratic demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, resulting in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of protestors.) While Gorbachev did use the military to tamp down independence demonstrations in the Soviet republics, the break-up of the Soviet Union was a relatively peaceful affair. Finally, Gorbachev was not among the communist hardliners who used military force in an effort to cling to power during the failed August 1991 coup. Instead, Gorbachev effectively dissolved the Soviet Union with a televised speech in December of that year. Gorbachev was the leader of an autocratic state who chose not to resort to the instrumental means of violence to hold on to his position of power and preserve his autocratic regime.
In other words, despite occupying a position of enormous and largely unchecked political power, when presented with multiple opportunities to use that immense power in ways his predecessors had to assert control over the state and its people despite the terrible attendant cost in human suffering, Gorbachev chose not to become a monster. As a child in the 1930s, Gorbachev knew both of his grandfathers had been arrested by Stalin’s secret police and sent to gulags, and that his maternal grandfather had been tortured. Gorbachev knew the sort of evil that could be perpetrated by the state. When he set out to reform the Soviet Union as its leader fifty years later, he wasn’t merely focused on finding ways to improve economic efficiency or restructuring the halls of government. He also sought to make the Soviet Union more humane, knowing the state cannot serve its citizens well if those citizens are so easily sacrificed to the imperatives of the state.
It is easy to imagine a darker alternative history set in motion by the unrest that swept across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. That that history did not come to pass may be Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’s most important legacy.