This morning in his Wall Street Journal column, Karl Rove wrote that crackpot Missouri senator, Josh Hawley— who is up for reelection/defeat— in 2024, offered “a novel explanation for the GOP’s disappointing midterm… The problem, he writes, wasn’t candidate quality but substance: “The old Republican Party is dead.” Because too few candidates backed a Trumpian agenda of protectionism, less legal immigration, a crackdown on Big Tech and an end to tax cuts, ‘the red wave didn’t land.’ Working people who support the Trump agenda “chose to stay home.”
After Rove pointed out the various reasons Hawley’s arguments were off-base, he acknowledged that “Hawley has half a point: The election results do reflect a problem of substance, specifically the damage Republicans did with candidates who went full-on Trumpy. If they echoed the former president’s issues, tone and stolen-election claims, they often lost and in almost every case ran behind the rest of the Republican ticket… The principal reason Republicans came up short was that just when Americans were ready to vote for them to check Democratic excesses, the GOP nominated too many radicals and weirdos. Hawley— who raised a clinched fist in solidarity with those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021— may not see that, but voters did.
Ohio’s Sen.-elect J.D. Vance won with more than 2.1 million votes, or 53%, a margin of almost 7 points. But Gov. Mike DeWine, a quintessential traditional Republican, won re-election with 63%, receiving 380,000 more votes than Vance and sweeping the onetime swing state by more than 25 points.
Mr. Vance trailed the rest of the Buckeye Republican statewide ticket, each member of whom won with bigger margins. He received 286,000 fewer votes than the GOP’s attorney general candidate, 248,000 fewer than the Republican secretary of state, 201,000 fewer than the auditor hopeful and 194,000 fewer than the party’s treasurer nominee. All this despite Sen. Mitch McConnell’s super PAC spending $35 million to help Vance’s struggling campaign.
In the Arizona Senate race, one of Trump’s biggest acolytes, Blake Masters, lost by 126,000 votes, or 4.9%, the worst performance by a Grand Canyon State GOP Senate candidate in 34 years. The GOP’s secretary of state hopeful, Mark Finchem, who claimed the 2020 election was “stolen,” lost by 120,000 votes, or nearly 6%. The more traditional Republican nominee for state treasurer, Kimberly Yee, won 56% to 44%, receiving nearly 200,000 more votes than either Masters or Finchem.
New Hampshire’s Trumpian Senate nominee, Don Bolduc, lost by more than 9 points and nearly 57,000 votes, while the Trump-endorsed candidates for the state’s two congressional seats lost by a combined 61,000 votes, both running about 10 points behind the GOP’s expected performance in their districts. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu cruised to a 57% re-election, beating his Democrat opponent by nearly 95,000 votes and running ahead of Bolduc by 77,000 and the combined vote for the GOP’s two House candidates by almost 75,000.
Washington state’s Third Congressional District provides another example of the Trumpian problem. Propelled by Mr. Trump’s endorsement, veteran Joe Kent pushed aside incumbent GOP Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler in the primary. But he then lost the general election by less than 1% while the GOP’s extraordinary Senate candidate, Tiffany Smiley, ran ahead of him by 3 to 6 points in every county in the district. Similarly, with Trump’s endorsement in Michigan’s Third District, John Gibbs took out incumbent GOP Rep. Peter Meijer in a district rated D+1, then lost in the general election by nearly 13 points.
This morning, Ron Brownstein warned about the ramifications of what the new McCarthyism portends for Republicans who fail the heed the message of the midterms. “McCarthy,” he wrote, “in his bid to secure the votes as speaker, promised far-right members of his caucus that he would authorize investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of the insurrectionists who rioted in support of Trump on January 6 [and]… threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Two months before taking power, the new House Republican majority has signaled that its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters. But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races. That contrast captures why the GOP’s plans for aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden may present as much political risk for the investigators as it does for the targets.”
[T]he new majority’s focus on airing echo-chamber conservative obsessions risks further stamping the GOP as the party of Trump precisely as more Republican leaders and donors insist the recent election results demonstrate the need to move beyond him.
“All these folks are coming out saying, ‘Turn the page; move forward’ … and I think this is really a problem if some of these [House] members are going to continue to look back and embrace Trump at a time when we saw the most Trumpian candidates get their heads handed to them,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent told me.
The choices confronting GOP leaders on what— and how— to investigate encapsulates the much larger challenge they will face in managing the House. This month’s midterm election left the GOP with a House majority much smaller than it expected. The results also created a kind of split-personality caucus operating with very different political incentives.
Most incoming House Republicans represent districts in Trump country: 168 of them hold seats that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more in 2020. Another three dozen represent more marginal Republican-leaning seats that Trump carried by fewer than 10 points two years ago.
But the GOP majority relies on what will likely be 18 members (when all the final votes are counted) who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. Eleven of those 18 are in New York and California alone— two states that will likely become considerably more difficult for Republicans in a presidential-election year than during a midterm contest.
For the Republicans from the hard-core Trump districts, demonstrating a commitment to confronting Biden at every turn is crucial for preempting any possible primary challenges from their right, says the Democratic consultant Meredith Kelly, a former communications director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But, as Dent told me, the Republicans precariously holding the Biden seats have the “polar opposite” incentive: “They need to have bipartisan victories and wins.”
Amid that cross-pressure, many analysts second the prediction of outgoing Democratic Representative David Price of North Carolina, a political scientist who has written several books about Congress, that the new GOP House majority is not likely to pass much legislation. The problem, Price told me, is not only the partisan and ideological fracture in the GOP caucus, but that its members do not have “an agenda that they campaigned on or they are committed to.”
All members of the GOP caucus might agree on legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts, to promote more domestic energy production, or to increase funding for border security. But resistance from the Republicans in blue and purple districts may frustrate many of the right’s most ambitious legislative goals, such as repealing elements of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passing a national ban on abortion, and forcing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
…[T]he GOP inquiries will inexorably identify the party with the same polarizing style of Trump-like politics that voters just repudiated in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. “We saw in this election that voters reject the Trump playbook and MAGA politics, but that is exactly what they will see in these hearings…”
Recognizing the potential political risk, several Republican representatives newly elected in Biden districts have already urged their party to move slowly on the probes and instead to prioritize action on economic issues. Their problem is that McCarthy already has given every indication he’s likely to prioritize the demands for maximum confrontation from his caucus’s pro-Trump majority.
“If past is prologue, Kevin McCarthy will fall much on the side of the ruby-red Republican base and the pro-investigation, pro-culture-war side,” Kelly says. “He’s never proven able to stand up to the fringe.” And that means the new members from Biden-leaning districts who have provided the GOP its narrow majority have reason to sweat almost as much as the Biden administration over the swarm of investigations that House Republicans are poised to unleash.
