Democrats and “Traditional” Republicans Must Unite This Year

Until electoral reform occurs, the best way to protect democracy is for a bipartisan coalition to join together in a campaign against a would-be autocrat.

The Democratic party’s convention is the week of August 19-23. If President Biden’s standing in the polls hasn’t improved by then, he and his party will have an excruciating choice to make.

The premise of Biden’s campaign, both in 2020 and this year, is that the country cannot risk a second term of Trump. This is not, or shouldn’t be, a partisan point. After all, Liz Cheney—as conservative a Republican as there is—has said the same thing. So too, just as courageously, has Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia.

But what if by August it becomes evident that Biden can’t beat Trump because, as the polls currently seem to suggest, enough of the country has concluded that he’s not up to the job for a second term? That seems to be the current message of the latest N.Y. Times poll, among others, which shows swing-state Democratic senators leading their races, while Biden is behind. As many commentators have observed, this apparent reemergence of a willingness to ticket-split is the clearest indication that persuadable voters are rejecting Biden specifically and not Democrats generally.

(While pundits routinely warn against reading too much into a single poll, knowledgeable observers of politics—like Chuck Todd and David Axelrod—say there’s reason to believe that this particular poll is accurate in its depiction of key swing voters as willing to back Democrats, just not Biden. In any event, what matters for purposes of this essay is not whether current polling is an accurate prediction of what will happen in November, but whether persistent polling between now and August hardens the impression that Biden can’t win.)

Readers of Common Ground Democracy know that the choice between Biden and Trump is the artificial product of a faulty electoral system. A well-functioning electoral system would enable American voters to choose a third alternative whom a majority would prefer to either Biden or Trump—like Nikki Haley, Joe Manchin, Larry Hogan, or a myriad of other possibilities. It is only because of the distortions caused by partisan primaries followed by plurality winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes in most states that voters are forced to make what many view as a particularly unpalatable binary choice between Biden and Trump.

Obviously, we are stuck with the existing electoral system for this year’s election. So then what is to be done if one views Trump an existential threat to the Constitution, the Republic, and American democracy itself—as Biden repeatedly has said he does—but Biden is incapable of beating Trump because, given this artificial binary choice, a plurality of voters in enough swing states would prefer to risk a second term of Trump than a second term of Biden (or Vice President Harris becoming president if Biden can’t finish a second term)?

It seems to me that the only available option at that point is for Biden to step aside, just as he would if he had a health crisis that prevented him from continuing his campaign, and force the Democratic convention in Chicago to pick someone else in the hope that the new candidate, like the more popular Democratic senators, could convince enough voters that this fresh face is a better option than Trump.

Is doing that risky? Sure. But a risky move is still better than a virtually certain defeat, especially if you think that defeat endangers American democracy itself.

Most knowledgeable people I talk to think there’s no chance that Biden or his party will entertain this possibility. Perhaps so. But then history likely will be very unkind to Biden and the Democrats from marching towards November with the extreme peril that their decision will allow Trump back into the Oval Office without attempting to do what has the best shot of averting that perceived calamity.

So, for sake of discussion, let’s just suppose that Biden would be willing to do what’s best for the country, and step aside in the hope that a younger Democrat could defeat Trump. What then?

Most of the speculation on this topic has assumed that the Democrats in their convention would come up with a new ticket of two Democrats—perhaps Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan as the presidential nominee, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia as the vice-presidential nominee. (The assumption is that both Biden and Harris would need to be replaced in order to give the party’s ticket an entirely fresh start, given the country’s apparent yearning for change in this year’s election.)

I suggest that the situation would call for an even bolder move. At the Chicago convention, the Democratic party should consider nominating a “unity ticket” with a Democrat as their presidential nominee and a traditional (non-MAGA) Republican as their vice-presidential nominee.

A unity ticket of this nature would send a message that this year is not a normal election, and it is necessary for Democrats and Republicans who respect our constitutional Republic to come together in its defense, regardless of intense policy disagreements. Liz Cheney has said the country can survive four years of policy that is badfrom her conservative perspective. Democrats should feel the same way from their liberal or progressive viewpoint.

Recently, three prominent former senators who are Republicans—John Danforth, William Cohen, and Alan Simpson—announced that they are forming “Our Republican Legacy” as an “organization within” the Republican party in an effort to rescue it from Trump and his authoritarian populism. Apart from the impossibility of “traditional Republicanism” surviving without the kind of electoral reform described previously in Common Ground Democracy, it is not enough for traditional Republicans like Danforth, Cohen, and Simpson to distance themselves from Trump. They need to join forces with Democrats in order to defeat him and protect the Constitution, the Republic, and democracy.

Likewise, Democrats need the support of traditional Republicans (like these ex-senators) in order to prevent Trump from returning to the presidency. As David Axelrod and his colleagues noted on their punditry podcast, the Democratic ticket this fall needs a good portion of those Republican primary voters who continue to cast ballots for Nikki Haley long after she’s dropped out of the race to do more than just abstain from the general election. They need to actually take the next step and cast a general election ballot for the Democratic ticket, if that ticket is to reach an Electoral College majority.

The best way to entice these traditional, or Haley, Republicans to vote blue is to give the blue presidential nominee a red running mate. Obviously, Haley herself would be the best “get” in this regard, if she’d be willing to do it. But would she be willing to play “second fiddle” to someone like Gretchen Whitmer? It’s certainly worth exploring.

But even if Haley herself won’t do it, there are other options. One that comes to mind is Brian Sandoval, former governor of Nevada and former federal judge, currently president of the University of Nevada at Reno. (Disclosure: he’s a graduate of the law school where I teach, but I’ve never spoken to him, and this fact is not why I’m suggesting him. Instead, he’s the kind of “traditional Republican” who, believing in democracy and the rule of law, would be a good balance to a Democrat at the top of a unity ticket. The fact that he’s of Hispanic heritage and from a battleground state is obviously a bonus.) I’m sure readers can think of other suitable individuals who would illustrate the same point.

There’s precedent for a unity ticket of this kind. Lincoln reached across the aisle for his running-mate in 1864 because it was essential to have a bipartisan coalition to win continuing support for waging the Civil War against the secessionist Confederacy. The United States doesn’t face the exact same threat today, but the kind of authoritarianism that Trump announces he will pursue if given a second term presents a danger to republican government of arguably comparable magnitude.

Moreover, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have reminded us, the most effective way of countering the rise of fascism in the 1930s occurred in countries where pro-democracy parties from the left to the center-right formed a united anti-fascist front.

So, if in August it’s become abundantly evident that Biden can’t win, it’s incumbent on him to put together a unity ticket he and Harris can present to the convention. It’s essential that both he and Harris visibly give their full-throated support for this new unity ticket as what’s necessary to give the American experiment in self-government a New Beginning.

America will commemorate its sesquicentennial in 2026, in the second year of the next presidential term. Let’s hope that commemoration is a recommitment to the realization of our foundational principles, including the basic proposition that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Renewal of this fundamental American tenet means taking fsteps necessary to make the structural changes in order for our electoral democracy to yield results that truly represent the will of the majority (as I detail in this new paper to be published in the Florida Law Review).

But until we make these necessary structural changes, Democrats and Republicans who believe in collective self-government through the republican architecture established by the Constitution should unite behind a bipartisan ticket to give us the best chance of protecting ourselves from the anti-constitutional, anti-republican, anti-democratic authoritarianism that Trump’s return to the presidency would portend.