A Few Minutes with… Tevi Troy

Tevi Troy is a Washington veteran and best-selling historical scholar. An Orthodox Jew who served in several capacities in the Bush White House before being appointed deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services Department in 2007, Troy has since authored three books about presidential politics, the most recent titled Fight House: Rivalries in the White House, from Truman to Trump. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

We spoke with Troy ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, asking for his prognosis on what President Joe Biden should do if the results follow the decades-old pattern of the party controlling the White House losing at least one chamber of Congress. It seems to happen about a year or so after a new president is inaugurated in an atmosphere of goodwill; a disappointment takes hold among the public that snowballs into a landslide midterm loss. It’s a pattern that has not been ameliorated by an American politics that has become more and more polarized, with reasonable voices in the center pleading for bipartisanship falling to the wayside.

Our conversation took place last Motzaei Shabbos, when most polls were predicting the Democrats would lose at least the House and showing their grip on the Senate was weakening.

How have different presidents dealt with their losses in the midterms, and what lessons could Biden learn if it happens to him?

The first thing you look to is a post-election statement by the president in the immediate aftermath of the midterm defeat. We saw this with Clinton and Bush, Obama and Trump. We now have four straight presidents who have lost at least one house of Congress during their term. And that post-midterm statement is an important signal for how the president is going to handle the defeat.

We just saw news, actually, on Friday, right before Shabbat, that Biden’s team is suggesting they may not even make that statement, which I think is in itself a sign of weakness. The speculation in the articles I’ve seen about why [Biden] might not do it is because they think he might make a mistake and might say something wrong. So there are a variety of reasons for their approach. But I think that signal is really important for setting the tone for how the president is going to deal with the new Congress.

Bill Clinton was elected on wave of hope in 1992, but his grand plans ran aground on the GOP sweep in the 1994 midterms. How did he handle it?

Clinton accepted responsibility in his statement right afterward. And we saw in his behavior that he changed how he approached things. He had a very left-wing orientation for two years, and he changed tack in the next two years and moved back a little bit toward the center. And he called it “triangulating.” He brought in Dick Morris, a more conservative advisor who clashed with the liberal advisors [on] policy, and he was successfully reelected in 1996.

George W. Bush was the last GOP president to receive a majority of the popular vote in 2004, and his party improved its position in both houses of Congress, but those gains were reversed in the 2006 midterms. What did Bush do in response?

Bush also had a somewhat gracious approach to this. He called the election defeat “a thumping,” but he also said that he recognized that there’s a time for campaigning and a time for governing. And he reached out a hand to the Democrats. He also made changes. He got rid of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, who some people said he should have gotten rid of before the election, but just waited until after the election. So that is one approach.