The Great Republican Illusion
Republicans have illusioned ourselves into thinking we can only win with Trump. But the reality is that Trump has only won one election.
The 2022 midterm election was a disappointment for Republicans. The highest inflation in 40 years, high gas prices, high crime rates, disorder at the border, and an unpopular President all should have ushered in a red wave to the likes of 2010 and 2014. But it was more like a red trickle.
I’ve spent time thinking and the 2022 midterm election reminds me of two previous elections: the 2020 and the 2012 elections. In the 2020 presidential election, we saw President Biden win a trifecta. Republicans surprisingly gained seats in the House, only giving Democrats a slight majority in the House. The Senate was split 50-50, with Democrats winning the Georgia Senate runoffs in January 2021. The 2022 midterm election looks awfully similar to the 2020 election but only switched with the House. Republicans are posed to have a slim majority in the House and the Senate looks like it’s going to be gridlocked depending on how the rest of the Senate races play out.
The 2012 election comparison is interesting. This was another presidential election, a very disappointing one as well. Republicans had the mojo to beat President Obama who presided under a lackluster economy recovering from a recession, the backlash to Obamacare, and a rising deficit. Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, mainly because of his electability. Romney turned out to only be popular with establishment Republicans with a GOP base that was increasingly middle and working-class. Romney lost a winnable election because of his lack of appeal to this base and other groups such as Hispanics and rural Americans. In short, Romney was deeply out of touch and viewed as too perfect and uptight. Republicans were angry that we nominated Romney, thus ushering in the Trump era. Well, here we are nearly 10 years from that 2012 election, and Republicans are once again disappointed by their performance in a once-in-a-generation GOP environment and losing winnable races in the House and Senate.
The takeaway from the 2012 election was that candidate quality matters and that we needed a new party leader at the helm. In this year’s midterm election, candidates like Doug Ducey, Chris Sununu, Peter Meijer, and Jamie Herrera-Beutler among others were either pushed out by their primary challengers or opted not to run for higher office because they weren’t Trumpy enough or weren’t willing to bend the knee to Trump. For 6 years, the wisdom was that you needed Trump to win. Ironically, the winning candidates in this year’s election had an identity apart from Trump and/or were unwilling to say the 2020 election was stolen. The list goes from New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.
So why did Republicans underperform in this year’s election? The answer is quite clear. In 2016, Trump won Independents by 6 points, won suburban voters by 5 points, and lost moderates by 11 points. Compare that to this year per exit polls and Fox News’ voter analysis: Independents broke for Democrats by 1 point and moderate voters went for Democrats by double digits. More information is being collected about suburban voters but exit polls say they narrowly went for Republicans while Fox News said they narrowly went for Democrats. These are clear signs that since 2016, Republicans are struggling with these key voters, crucial to winning elections.
The explanation doesn’t stop there. Steve Kornacki of NBC News mentioned that a final poll showed matching enthusiasm among Democrats and Republicans. Normally, the party out of power would see more enthusiasm among its voters. The enthusiasm from Democrats could have been due to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the concern over abortion rights. I also believe that voters are dissatisfied with both political parties. They are still figuring out what political party they would like to give control to. In the last two elections, voters haven’t given either party a clear mandate in contrast to other elections.
However, there’s a state where voters weren’t reluctant to say which party they’d want to give control to. That state was Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis won his race by nearly 20 points. He won Miami-Dade county by 11 points, a county that typically votes heavily Democrat. DeSantis won Latino voters by 56%, including Cubans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans. He performed well with women, getting 47% of their vote. He also won suburban voters and Independents. Ron DeSantis has a bipartisan, multiethnic coalition in Florida and it’s hard to look away from that success.
DeSantis could extend this coalition to the rest of the country. I was at a conference this summer in DC when my Tesla-driving Uber driver started to talk politics. He’s an immigrant from Africa and a Biden, and Youngkin voter. I asked him who he’d like to see run for President. He said Ron DeSantis.
The conventional wisdom of the 2022 midterm election would be that Republicans would waltz into a red wave. That we would win the center by default because of Biden and Congressional Democrats. We were woefully wrong. I think often there’s a right-wing bubble as there is a left-wing bubble. This right-wing bubble believes that voters will always stick with Trump because he is the counterculture figure to the left. We gave a lot of deference to Trump this midterm election and his candidates. His candidates didn’t perform well and, with the exception of J.D. Vance, (maybe Kari Lake) were rejected by voters.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this electorate. What we do know is that voters are looking for sanity. They reject election denialism and conspiracy theories. They reject wokeism. Voters also needed a plan from Republicans, especially an economic plan to combat inflation and high gas prices. But there were few policy ideas given to voters, leaving them to speculate as to whether their concerns over the economy would be properly addressed by Republicans. All the data shows that voters don’t want Trump or Biden to be President in 2024.
After the 2016 election, conservatives and Republicans started to shed some of their orthodoxy. Think tanks and new conservative groups were created to fill the gaps. It has continued, what has felt like a centuries-long fight, between populists and traditional conservatives. After the 2016 election, it felt like the populists were right and we needed to follow them. But after losing the 2018 midterm, 2020 presidential, and 2022 midterm elections, it seems like the populist wing and the traditional conservative wing need to unite. The GOP needs a populist flavor that follows common sense instead of the expert expertise so appreciated by Democrats. DeSantis and Kemp bucked the COVID experts and decided to follow the common sense of reopening their states. That was proven as a better method for the Georgia and Florida economies and public health than what some experts originally believed. But Republicans can’t abandon the timeless conservative principles championed by the traditionalists. It seems that the populist wants to abandon these timeless principles and the traditionalist says we need to abandon the populist flair. What the Republican Party needs is the common sense of everyday Americans and the timeless conservative principles of small government, individual freedom, and American leadership in the world.
This moment feels like we can achieve that vision. It requires reconsidering who’s the leader of our party. The current one seems to be too caught up with himself. But there’s a bench of conservative stars ready to fight and win. The one who could unite the GOP and effectively govern is in Tallahassee and not in Mar-A-Lago. It’s time the Republican Party adjusts and shifts before we continue to disillusion ourselves over a one-term President.