(Left to Right) Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole

Democrats have lost all four special house elections and they are right to feel disappointed. The losses dealt a major blow to and may have even spelled the end of ambitious hopes for a 50-state, 335-district strategy. There is a crucial caveat in all this though: they over-performed significantly in every race. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report compared the results of each election to each respective district’s partisan voting index and found that the Democrat outperformed by 12% in Kansas, 8% in Montana, 6% in Georgia, and 7% in South Carolina. The comparisons between the 2016 results in the districts and the 2017 results in raw terms are even more impressive. Republican Mick Mulvaney won South Carolina’s 5th district in 2016 by over 20 points, whereas Republican Ralph Norman won it by only 3 and a quarter percentage points in the 2017 special election. Republican Tom Price won Georgia’s sixth district by over 23 percentage points, Karen Handel won it by less than 3. While it’s true that Trump barely beat Clinton by a percentage point in Georgia’s 6th district, it is crucial to note that the presidential election was a race between a third way, national security Democrat and a philandering, Russia-loving protectionist who can’t form sentences. The fact that Ossoff almost won against a standard Republican there is impressive. These are deep red districts; there are purple districts all over the country that Republicans won in 2016 by margins in the low single digits.

In other words, the house is in play.

William Jefferson Clinton. There is a 50/50 chance that your blood began to boil when you read those three words. Bill Clinton, literally born in a town called “Hope”, served as the governor of Arkansas for almost twelve years before running for, and ultimately winning, the presidency in the 1992 election. He was the first Democratic president elected since the 1970s and overcame a formidable party favorite by the name of the Paul Tsongas in the primary and a popular president by the name of George H W Bush in the general election. Despite his documented infidelities, Clinton ran an exciting, fresh campaign with a strong emphasis on the economy and the middle class. The message was that Bill Clinton and his running mate Al Gore were a new type of Democrat who rejected the big government, Keynesian policies of old and embraced ideas like free trade, fiscal responsibility, and welfare reform. They also made certain to cast aside Michael Dukakis’ “soft on crime” policies that probably sunk his 1988 bid. When Clinton won, both houses of congress were Democratic and Clinton governed as a liberal. Republicans viciously attacked him for having the audacity to raise taxes on rich people and pursue a universal healthcare plan, accusing him of betraying his moderate “New Democrat” platform. In the 1994 midterms, Republicans led by Newt Gingrich ran an aggressive campaign against Clinton and offered a “Contract with America” that laid out the right-wing policies they would push for and the strategies they’d use to undermine Clinton’s perceived liberal agenda. The Republican Party swept the House of Representatives and forced Clinton to adopt a strategy of triangulation. Basically, Bill Clinton, now politically vulnerable and forced into working with them in order for government to function, would adopt elements of the Republicans’ platform in exchange for being able to pass more liberal policies. As a result Clinton spent the last six years of his presidency governing as an American centrist giving both parties things they wanted but never quite pleasing either. (There were also a tonne of epic budget wars, if you’re into that). On one hand, he defended his 1993 tax reforms, a crazy amount of public lands, and signed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to the obvious applaud of Democrats. On the other though, the welfare reform bill, that he eventually passed prior to his re-election, was too harsh even for most of his own party.

Democrats can learn from this. They can learn a lot from this.

Clinton’s left pinky toe’s nail may have a higher IQ than Donald Trump, but there are striking parallels between the two. Trump ran as a different kind of Republican on a platform that was a strange blend of far-right and left-wing policies, yet since taking office he has abandoned key parts of it and shown every intention of governing far to the right. Trump’s personal views are incredibly mixed and have fluctuated over the years, but he has shown himself repeatedly to be open to liberal ideas on a number of issues. Trump’s policies as president are without a doubt at least partially influenced by the fact that so much of the government around him is Republican. Trump like Bill Clinton is not a particularly ideological person and his convictions, which don’t even seem to exist on most issues, are far more malleable. In a 90s Republican-style midterm campaign, Democrats should absolutely rail against Trump, the Republicans and their policies as much as possible, but they also need to lay out a specific, clear set of policy goals as well as some kind of strategy to achieve him. They won’t just be there to oppose Trump, like the Tea Party was there to oppose Obama, they will be there to hold his feet as close to the fire as possible until they get what they want out of him. They are going to Washington to not only halt Trump’s agenda, but also to employ every maneuver they can to get as much of one of their own through as possible, and yes, impeach if need be. This not only makes it clear that the Democratic Party is more than merely an opposition party, if emphasized properly and persistently enough it also would make it clear who was responsible for certain positive policies (many Republicans today claim the sustained 90s boom was a result of a Republican congress).

If the Democrats take hold of either or both houses of congress in 2018, Trump’s domestic agenda will be effectively dead in the water, and the thing is, given some of Trump’s views and the platform he ran on, they may have to give little if anything to get some Democratic policies through. Any kind of regulation or tax would require some deal-cutting and arm-twisting, but when it comes to other things they are positioned well from the get-go. Trump isn’t Paul Ryan; will he fight congressional Democrats to cut social security? Give me a break. If Democrats run both or merely one of the legislatures they may have a serious opportunity to get infrastructure spending, a real family leave program, and possibly even financial regulation passed given what Trump ran on and still occasionally voices support for. Democrats would have serious sway in crafting tax reform as well, giving them ample opportunity to close the carried interest loophole and hypothetically maybe even get a badly needed carbon tax in “exchange” for business and/or income tax cuts. There’s always the wall as well, and having the concrete ability to halt or approve of Trump’s signature project would give the Democrats a tonne of political leverage.

As much as the Republican base despised him, Bill Clinton left office with sky high approval ratings. For most people the genie can’t be put back in the bottle when it comes to Trump, but in triangulation there is still a risk that you could give him policies to take credit for. Obstruction may be the best way to get a Democratic president in 2020, but should they lose the election they will be wishing they had spent the last two years productively and could risk losing the congress if congress looks dysfunctional, rendering the party powerless once again. Then of course there is the impeachment question. At face value, Trump should obviously be impeached if you have any regard for the dignity of the office and the horrible precedent Trump is setting. He blatantly lacks the mental faculties to be president, is trailed by serious lawsuits, tries to undermine the judiciary, obstructed justice, blabs classified information, and still has a mind-boggling number of domestic and international conflicts of interest. The case against impeaching Trump is basically that Trump is way more malleable than Pence, probably way more open to triangulation, and a less competent candidate (see their 2016 debate performances). On the flip side the case for impeaching Trump is that he fails to meet the standards presidents are supposed to be held to and that Mike Pence may be a worse candidate given how unpopular his policies are.

The politics of triangulation is incredibly tough, but the moral of all this remains clear, the goal of every Democrat, non-conservative independent, and Trump voter who voted for him genuinely wanting a different kind of Republican, should be a Democratic congress in 2020. Doing so presents the only real opportunity to block the GOP’s horrible agenda and to bring some of the better aspects of Trumpism to fruition.

And by golly, if this thing is going to happen Pelosi needs to be replaced by Tim Ryan ASAP.