If there is one thing that unites the disparate wings of the Republican Party, it is the idea that some other GOP faction is why the party keeps losing elections.
Populists in the mold of former President Donald Trump, social conservatives who oppose legal abortion, whatever is left of the party establishment and its centrist fellow travelers, business-friendly Republicans who turn a blind eye to woke capitalism and cut corporate tax rates while inflation wreaks havoc on family budgets, each has taken their turn as scapegoats for various GOP electoral defeats.
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Tuesday night’s off-year election losses triggered the usual recriminations. By the end of Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, the candidates were at each other’s throats and threatening to fashion their footwear into weaponry like a prison yard brawl.
When not blaming each other for election losses, Republicans compete to treat their favorite of the elections they have actually won as a one-size-fits-all blueprint to serve the party for all time.
Trump won in 2016 after John McCain and Mitt Romney lost! (2020? That was rigged!)
Have you heard of this Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) fellow?
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) won by 20 points!
Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) is the new Jack Kemp!
Each of these was an impressive victory in its own way. But nearly all of these men have since suffered major setbacks, and there are reasons to question how applicable any of their wins are to Republican candidates running in dissimilar jurisdictions under wildly different circumstances.
Just take a look at the Kentucky governor’s race. Trump, abortion, and turnout were certainly factors. But two other Republicans who opposed abortion won statewide by comfortable margins with the same turnout. Trump won Kentucky in 2020 with 62% of the vote, receiving 632,479 more votes than Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) got in his successful reelection bid.
The difference in votes between Trump and Beshear is more than Republican nominee Daniel Cameron’s total tally in his race for governor. In fact, Trump won more votes in Kentucky in 2020 than Beshear and Cameron combined got on Tuesday.
So yes, Republicans had several problems that contributed to a popular incumbent Democratic governor winning a second term with a shade more than 52% of the vote. But it seems like an oversimplification to draw sweeping conclusions about any one of them from this particular race.
Trump attracted some working-class voters to the Republican Party who wouldn’t vote for Romney. But he also repelled college-educated suburban voters who were mostly voting GOP through Romney’s 2012 campaign.
Nominating Nikki Haley might win some of those voters back, especially the women among them. But there are blue-collar voters who don’t want to see the retirement age raised and wonder why their tax dollars are going to Ukraine instead of being spent closer to home who might prefer Trump.
DeSantis was supposed to be able to offer a little of both, as he managed to do in Florida while Republicans were underperforming elsewhere. Perhaps he can. But he is currently having the same trouble winning over Republican primary voters, and unlike Trump or Haley, he is narrowly trailing President Joe Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
An obvious path to a national majority is winning back the voters Republicans lost under Trump while retaining the voters they gained. But that is much easier said than done.
The Republican Party has multiple problems without one clean single solution. This is unsatisfying but difficult to deny.
Republicans probably could benefit from less infighting. But it is hard to unite a party that cannot decide what ails it.
Democrats had to lose three straight presidential elections in the 1980s before they were willing to settle for Bill Clinton. They lost at least 40 states in each of them and came within one vote per precinct in Minnesota of losing all 50 in 1984 (Washington, D.C., was safe.) And that still wasn’t enough to prevent Democrats from nominating Michael Dukakis in 1988, with Jesse Jackson as the runner-up.
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Failing to capture the Virginia state Senate probably doesn’t create the same level of urgency as a dozen years in exile from the White House, even as GOP presidential aspirants decry their party’s culture of losing.
It’s a long way to 2024.
