So apparently the Democrats are going to wallop Donald Trump and his awful Republican allies in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.  I know because the New York Times tells me so.  And how could it be wrong about voters rallying to the party of failed big government?

OK, one way is to mistake the wish for the thought as pundits too often do.  Including me, who was certain Trump could never be president.  But there's something else that makes me doubt their prediction, as well as something that makes me believe it in part.

The believe-in-part is because parties in power generally lose seats in midterms.  As the Times notes, polling of voters generally showing Trump's popularity rising is likely to be misleading because midterms are low-turnout events where complacent "ins" are less likely to show up than disgruntled "outs".  So yes, look for Republicans to lose seats.

On the other hand, do not look for voters generally to swing massively toward the New York Times editorial board's political and cultural outlook and finally hand control of the nation to the good old Democratic Party, for two reasons.  First, the New York Times editorial board does not have a unified outlook any more than the Democrats do.  Second, voters have handed control of the nation to the Democrats repeatedly over the years (including House and Senate in Obama's initial two years and Senate for four more) and seem unhappy with the results.  Understandably.

The Times is pretty happy about radical left-wing insurgents gaining inside the Democratic Party and sticking a finger in Trump's eye.  But it is also worried about radical left-wing insurgents gaining inside the Democratic Party and putting forward an unpalatable and unworkable program.  Like the Democratic establishment, the Times is torn between a radical heart and a moderate head.  And like the Democrats, it can't actually think of a moderate left-wing program that hasn't already been tried and failed… or a plausible radical one.

Moreover, Trump is famously a symbol of unhappiness with politics as usual.  There's really no appetite for Walter Mondale-style reheated New Deal/Great Society staggering down the path of unsustainable deficits, crumbling social cohesion, unchecked illegal immigration and increasing strategic irrelevance.  (Yes, Walter Mondale. Google him, kids.)

I continue to maintain that there is much to dislike about Trump's character and his policies.  I sympathize with the Times' feeling that sooner or later a lot of people will start sharing my distaste for both, including his trade wars that threaten American and world prosperity.  But unlike the Times I also see much to like about Trump.

His willingness to break silly taboos in foreign policy is a good thing, including reading the riot act to America's NATO allies, even if he overestimates his capacity to charm and close deals with insane North Korean dictators or thuggish Russian ones.  And Trump's and his Congressional allies' willingness to repeal regulations and cut taxes has spurred economic growth of a sort the Times mostly regards either as blind luck or the result of some hidden wise thing Obama and his congressional allies did.

The problem I see is that Trump is only a part-time small-government guy.  (And a boor.)  He has done good things his GOP predecessors were too obtuse or obsessed with being liked by liberals to do.  But his tariffs, like his willingness to run huge budget deficits, are part of a populist tendency to favour big government in all sorts of odd and harmful ways.  And I don't believe they help him in the polls, especially as they produce pain voters resent and punish whether or not they're lucid about its source.

Here the problem for the Democrats, and the Times, is that their program or programs have no small government elements at all except perhaps willingness to discard the key public function of border control.  Whether they advocate plodding grimly down a tried and true path to overregulated overtaxed ruin, or plunging berserkly into new and untested ways of crushing the economy and dividing citizens, they continue to suffer from the problem that put Trump in the White House in 2016.  They are even worse than he is, primarily because big government has failed and they don't even suspect it.