If the U.S. presidential election were held today — one week prior to Election Day — then Donald Trump would retake the White House and Republicans would gain control of the Senate, while the picture in the House of Representatives is harder to predict.
These were some of the perspectives shared by John Boehner, the former Ohio congressman and Speaker of the House, who left office at the end of 2015 less than a year before Trump won the 2016 election.
Current political climate
Boehner was speaking on stage Tuesday at the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA)’s Annual Convention and Expo in Denver. He was joined by MBA president and CEO Bob Broeksmit to talk about his decades of experience in Washington, D.C., and the dynamics in play ahead of the election.
Boehner was critical of the tenor of modern national politics, particularly in his old stomping grounds on the House floor. Having worked in his family’s tavern at a young age, he said that a skill he learned was to “disagree without being disagreeable.” That trait, he said, is not as commonly seen today.
When asked by Broeksmit about the dynamics in play on the Republican side, Boehner said he is “having a hard time recognizing” the Republican Party he served. He criticized Trump for “hijacking” the party, but he also attributed the deep divisions in the political system to one of its key attributes — representation.
“We shouldn’t be surprised that Congress is as divided as it is because their constituents are that divided,” he said. “They reflect their views, and they’re holding their members of Congress hostage to their right-wing or left-wing politics. It’s disgusting — I’ll just say it the way it is.”
Makeup of Congress
When Broeksmit asked Boehner to offer his election predictions, Boehner was quick in his appraisal of the Senate.
“Let’s do the easy one first. Republicans are going to win the Senate,” he said. “Now, the question is, do they have 51 votes or 52? If they really have a good night, they’ll get 53 votes. But if you don’t have 60 votes in the Senate, you have nothing other than the budget and a process called reconciliation, which only requires 50 votes on each side.”
But any proposals beyond revenue and spending will be harder to get passed with such a narrow majority, he said.
While not weighing in on a clear winner either way in the House, Boehner does foresee a similarly slim majority to the one in play today regardless of who actually takes control. This will keep the odds of consensus on many issues low.
The presidential race
As he transitioned to the presidential race, Boehner took a moment to take some swipes at both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We have 330 million Americans and we’re down to these two,” he said. “Really?”
He recalled feeling similarly in both 2016 and 2020, but at the end of the day, he felt like the tailwinds are working in Trump’s favor. He attributed some of his thinking to polls that underestimated Trump’s ultimate electoral tallies in both of his prior races. At this point in 2020, Joe Biden had more of an advantage in the polls than Harris has now, and that race largely resulted in a “dead heat,” Boehner said.
“Unless the pollsters have figured this out, which I don’t think they have, Donald Trump has a bigger lead than what would appear today,” he said. He also cited “nervousness” from his Democratic friends, and what he viewed as Harris’ own issues with answering questions in interviews.
But he also qualified by saying that it was still possible for Trump to lose, since the decisive factor is often about motivating voters to get to the polls. Harris needs younger people and women to turn out , which is a harder hill to climb since older Americans in general are more likely to vote.
Broeksmit added that at a recent function with the founder of a political news and polling aggregator, it was posited that the key issue of the day has carried each presidential election since World War II — and that issue is usually the economy. Boehner concurred.
“It’s always about your pocketbook and the economy,” he said. “People vote in their own self-interest.”
