Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. Above 2011 photo of Mitch McConnell by Gage Skidmore
Every time Democrats lose an election, they go through a round of panicked, self-flagellating examination. Why didn’t people vote for us? Was our message rejected? Are Democrats too left-wing? Too moderate? Too phony? Too white? After an election cycle where Democrats won the White House, held the House of Representatives, and retook the Senate, the party’s various factions have engaged in finger-pointing, accusations, and debates over why Democrats didn’t do better. The center-left coalition is always on the verge of fracture; there’s a reason why “Dems in disarray” has been a meme for years.
So it’s worth reminding ourselves that it’s the Republicans who should be worried about the state of their party. Donald Trump was historically unpopular and spent his entire presidency with underwater approval ratings; his loss in 2020 was the first time since 1992 that an incumbent president failed to be reelected. Despite having a structural advantage in the Senate due to the power of small, disproportionately white states, the GOP couldn’t maintain control of Congress’s upper chamber, even losing two races in Georgia, which had been a safe red state.
Yet Republicans seem to lack the Democratic tendency to doubt themselves. Trumpism remains the guiding light of the GOP, even though Trump just lost in humiliating fashion. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy flew to Florida for a photo op with Trump just after he stopped being president; Marco Rubio, who used to be the future of the party and who once called Trump a “con man,” bragged about being mentioned by the former reality TV star’s blog. The Republican National Committee, in a particularly dear leader-ish mood, recently asked its email list to sign Trump's “birthday card.” Last month, Representative Liz Cheney got drummed out of GOP leadership for denouncing Trump’s claims that the election was stolen. Though some polls show Trump’s support is eroding, many analysts believe that he would be the frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election.
This closing of the ranks masks the weaknesses of the Republican Party. For years the GOP has had little in the way of a positive policy agenda and is trapped between its mostly unpopular messaging and the demands of its constantly fired-up right-wing base. Lacking the tools to govern the country, it has instead dedicated itself to preventing the Democrats from governing. The result has been paralysis. And the federal government will stay paralyzed until the Republican Party abandons the political tactics of a desperate cornered animal.
The fear behind the war on democracy
In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican state legislators have put forth new bills that effectively make it harder to vote in Georgia and other states, restrictions that partisans on both sides think will favor the GOP. The idea is that obstacles to voting reduce turnout among people who might have trouble going through a complicated registration and ballot-casting process, and these people are likely to be poor or people of color, in other words Democratic voters. (Voting restrictions may not actually be a silver bullet for Republicans, but both sides for the moment are treating them as such.) In some states, Republican legislators are also preparing to draw new congressional district lines after the 2020 Census, and these lines will likely result in Democrats losing seats as GOP-dominated legislatures gerrymander their ideological opponents into impossible-to-win districts.
This strategy, though ruthless, is logical. When you combine gerrymandering and new voting restrictions with the baked-in advantages Republicans have thanks to an electoral system that favors small states and rural voters, the GOP has an excellent chance to win back the House in 2022 and could very likely retake the Senate too. But it’s also a strategy rooted in fear.
If you are shrinking the electorate by limiting people’s ability to vote and using procedural moves to increase your power, you are admitting that your party does not have the tools to expand its popularity, that it does not have broad appeal, that there’s no path to getting more votes than your opponent. (The last time a Republican won more votes than a Democrat in a presidential election was 2004.) These tactics from the GOP can help them win, but they are fighting a rear-guard action, using every means at their disposal to keep control of states where their grip is loosening. If Democrats flip Texas, turn Georgia blue for good, and make inroads elsewhere (Mississippi?), it will be a disaster for Republicans. They may be able to avert that disaster, perhaps indefinitely, but where are the states Republicans can flip from Democrats? What is the plan to create more conservative voters?
The GOP could try to bring more voters into the fold by tweaking its policy stances, but it doesn’t seem capable of doing that, because the party barely has policy stances, period.
The abandonment of policy
Republicans are very skilled at acquiring power, but they seem confused about what to do with it. This was exposed in 2016, when they unexpectedly gained control of all three branches of government and tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For years Republicans had denounced Obamacare and pledged to eliminate it, but when it came time to go through with it they panicked, writing a bill in secret and giving nonsensical answers about what the bill was trying to achieve. In the end, internal divisions in the GOP doomed the repeal effort, which might have been a positive outcome for Republicans since repeal was catastrophically unpopular.
They did manage to pass an (also unpopular) tax cut bill and the Trump administration succeeded in quietly cutting a bunch of regulations. But Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said that his greatest achievement in this period of rare total control of the federal government was filling judicial vacancies with conservative judges. That’s a victory, but as is the case with voting restriction bills, the primary goal seems to be simply retaining power. What is the Republican plan to improve Americans’ lives and make the country stronger?
A few years ago Republicans were largely united in their mission to cut “entitlements,” a.k.a. social safety net programs like Medicare and Medicaid. But Trump made a big deal about wanting to protect those programs, and GOP voters seemed to like that message more than the traditional conservative blather about austerity. Then Trump failed to follow through on any of the populist stuff he talked about, leaving Republicans with a befuddling mess of policy priorities. He simply didn’t care about policy, and the party he led followed suit: In 2020, they didn’t bother writing a new platform, instead keeping the outdated 2016 version.
Looking at Republican-run states it’s possible to find a unified conservative agenda on some issues. The GOP clearly wants to make abortion illegal and make life as miserable as possible for trans people. But Republican legislators often seem guided by backlash to liberals, passing anti-protest laws or making it illegal for cities to raise the minimum wage. On the national level, Republicans appear to have no guiding principle other than calling Democrats socialists. They are posters first, policymakers second. Some politicians, like Rubio and Josh Hawley, have denounced large corporations, especially tech companies, for being overly “woke,” but it’s really unclear what an anti-corporate conservatism would look like, given the longstanding Republican alliance with big business. Conservatism, at this point, is less a set of priorities than a feeling of anger toward big-city liberals and a sense of loyalty toward Trump.
This confusion on a policy level is not really a short-term problem for the GOP. Recent history has proven Republicans can win elections on a platform of pure grievance and opposition to Democrats, especially when they use every trick in the book to stop Democrats from voting. But this state of affairs isn’t sustainable over the long haul.
Why liberals should care
The good news, for Democrats, is that as conservatives have catered to the loonier ends of their base, they have lost a generation of voters. Young people largely reject everything the GOP stands for, which has not always been the case—Ronald Reagan was very popular among young Americans. As older voters die out and are replaced in the electorate by more progressive Millennials and Zoomers, conservatism’s popularity seems likely to continue to decline.
The bad news for everyone is that this decline will take a long time, and meanwhile the GOP will control a significant chunk of state governments and Congress even as it slides further into extremism. As this session of Congress has made clear, it’s laughably easy for a Republicans to stop Democrats from running the country even when Democrats technically control the House and Senate. Joe Biden has been trying to talk to Republicans, but there is no clear path for Democrats to negotiate with the GOP to achieve shared goals. How do you compromise with someone whose primary objective is to stop you from getting anything done? Republicans have recused themselves from governing, but they have no intention of letting Democrats run the country.
The most frustrating thing about this is the ingredients of a more rational, compromise-friendly Republican Party are not hard to find. Several blue states have moderate Republican governors, and those governors are very popular. After decades of climate change denialism, some Republicans have quietly admitted global warming is a problem, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signing legislation to protect communities against sea level rise. Also in Florida, voters approved a minimum wage increase even as they cast ballots for Trump, while in other states GOP lawmakers have supported marijuana legalization. In the Senate, some Republicans have signaled their willingness to consider a federal minimum wage hike. As New York’s Eric Levitz recently wrote, the GOP could probably abandon its super unpopular safety net–shredding proposals without losing a whole lot of support. Once recent poll found that most Republicans under 45 wanted more public spending, even if that meant raising taxes.
You can imagine a Republican Party that follows through on these populist instincts while still disagreeing with Democrats on a host of issues. The GOP could back a carbon tax but object to the Green New Deal, support marijuana reform but balk at the racial equity components of those policies favored by progressives, vote to raise the minimum wage to $10 but not a cent higher. I wouldn’t vote for those sorts of Republicans, but that’s the point—the party can still change without becoming a carbon copy of the Democrats. And in any case, they could whinge about wokeness all they want, which seems more than any policy to be the driving force behind conservatism these days.
If the GOP was willing to compromise, they’d find plenty of partners in the Democratic Party, which is still dominated by centrists eager to cut bipartisan deals. Instead of obstructing the Democratic agenda, they could get on board, get some of what they want through negotiation, and take credit alongside Democrats for popular legislation.
I don’t think that Republicans will take this path, at least not anytime soon. But the path they are currently on—slavish, unthinking support to one of the least popular presidents in living memory, combined with an all-out attempt to game the system and ensure a minority of voters can keep them in power—is a dead end. The only question is how long it will take for the GOP to correct course.
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