If the polls are correct, late tomorrow night Hillary Clinton is going to become president-elect of the United States. Even the conservatives who opposed Donald Trump and for whom this outcome will be something of a relief will still find themselves feeling a fair bit of distress when the call is finally made.
But they should gird themselves for worse, because if Clinton does win, after Tuesday, America is going to become more liberal in a whole variety of ways.
We can start with the presidency, which is of course on everyone’s mind. Clinton’s election will represent not just a missed opportunity for the right, but an entrenchment of everything they’ve fought against for the last eight years. Their hopes of repealing the Affordable Care Act will be dead — and knowing that, some more states may finally accept the expansion of Medicaid, making the law even harder to repeal. They won’t be outlawing abortion, or cutting taxes for the wealthy, or privatizing Medicare, or building any walls on the border. Clinton may not be a clone of Obama in foreign policy, but she won’t be tearing up the Iran nuclear deal either. And she’ll continue Obama’s initiatives to address climate change and promote renewable energy.
Republicans may succeed in stopping Clinton from passing ambitious new legislation, but she’ll still be able to make incremental progress on a wide variety of issues with a combination of the president’s bully pulpit, the regulatory levers of the executive branch, and the courts. For instance, she’ll push for increasing the national minimum wage (and history shows that Republicans eventually give in to that pressure after fighting it for a few years) while her Labor Department promotes workers’ rights and increasingly liberal courts uphold them.
That’s another vital area where things will get progressively more liberal. A third of current federal judges were appointed by Barack Obama. Even more striking, when he came into office, only one of the 13 federal appeals courts had a Democratic-appointed majority, but now nine of them do. After another four or eight years of a Clinton administration, liberal judges will completely dominate the federal courts.
That includes, of course, the Supreme Court. Some Republicans are now pledging that they’ll stonewall any justice nominated by Clinton, on the principle that only Republican presidents should be allowed to make appointments to the Court. But if Democrats take the Senate, they’ll present Mitch McConnell and his colleagues with an ultimatum: let Merrick Garland (or whoever Clinton puts in his place) have his confirmation, or we eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees and fill that seat anyway. If Clinton were to be elected and reelected, you could see a liberal majority on the Court of not just 5-4 but 6-3 or even 7-2. Liberals are about to get their first Supreme Court majority in decades, and it could persist for decades more.
But that’s not all. Look at the initiatives on the ballot this year, and you’ll see that liberal measures dominate. Recreational marijuana measures are up for votes in California, Arizona, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts — and will probably win in all five. Medical marijuana is also on ballots in Florida, Arkansas, Montana, and North Dakota; all those could succeed as well. Minimum wage increases, which almost never lose, are on ballots in five states. California, Nevada, and Maine have gun or ammunition background-check initiatives which could all pass.
Democrats also have a chance to flip some state legislative chambers, where Republicans have enjoyed extraordinary success in recent years. Like Congress, that could flip back in 2018 — the president’s party almost always does poorly in off-year elections — but in the meantime it could have an impact in some states.
Still, we’ll probably also see states where Republicans retain complete control becoming even more conservative as a reaction to developments on the national level. That process will be fed by a heightened feeling among core Republican constituencies that they’re being left behind by a country changing in ways they don’t like. So we could see a particular kind of political bifurcation, where changing demographics make swing states out of places like Georgia, Arizona, and (eventually) Texas, while a diminishing number of conservative states mount a kind of rear-guard action against the dominant national trends defining the country’s politics and policy.
Which is where the effects of the Trump campaign will linger. If Clinton wins, history will record that the American people — whom both Republicans and Democrats agree are possessed of infinite good will, impeccable values, and boundless wisdom — will have emphatically rejected Donald Trump and the things he represents. As Tommy Craggs argues in a compelling piece in Slate, despite all the complaints that we didn’t spend enough time talking about issues in this campaign, in fact we had an intense and substantive discussion of many of the vital questions that define us as a country. We talked about what it means to be an American, we talked about racism, we talked about how men treat women. “The one favor Trump did us was to be monstrous about the things in America that matter the most, to force a confrontation with all the stuff our politics typically is at pains to suppress,” Craggs writes.
Liberals won those arguments, a victory that will be even more clear if Clinton prevails. That doesn’t mean that men like Trump will stop groping women against their will or that the white supremacists so cheered by Trump’s rise will crawl back under the rock from which they came. But we’re more conscious than ever of the issues 2016 shoved in our faces, and the societal changes that will have led to Trump’s defeat will become only more clear.
It’s even possible that in response to 2016 the Republican Party itself will become more moderate, finding a way to appeal to a broader swath of Americans — especially since it looks like Clinton’s victory will be delivered by the rapidly growing minority groups Trump worked so hard to alienate. If that winds up being part of Trump’s legacy, he will have done the country at least one favor.