GOP plunges into season of ‘self-hate’
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17 Feb 2022, 5:37 pm
Quote:
Republicans are embarking on a primary season that is poised to reshape the GOP for a generation, and that journey begins in Texas.
In less than two weeks, the first primary election of 2022 will take place in the nation’s second-most populous state, and it’s a blockbuster: The state’s Republican governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner all face spirited challenges, as do several GOP House incumbents.
From there, fractious primaries will unfold across the electoral map in the coming months, cementing a more populist orientation for the GOP and Donald Trump’s status as the party’s lodestar, or setting a more traditionally conservative course.
These aren’t simple match-ups between Trump and anti-Trump forces, or isolated intraparty feuds. Safely ensconced Republican officeholders are being bombarded by challengers from coast to coast, in many cases spurred on by Trump directly. Redistricting and retirements have further scrambled the established order in many places, opening up seats and drawing fields filled with combative candidates eager to move the party in a different direction. Combine that with high levels of energy — and anger — in the party base, and it’s a recipe to remake the party from the ground up.
“Primaries are always f****d up to some degree, but it’s different now,” said John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country. “There’s more self-hate than there was before. Ten years ago, we’d argue about who was more pro-gun, who was more pro-life. Now, my clients are going RINO hunting, which is a level of disdain that was not there before in our party.”
Much of the churn is due to forces unleashed by Trump. The defeated president’s iron grip on the party and level of involvement in midterm primaries is unprecedented in modern history, and he continues to advance his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The Republican electorate overwhelmingly agrees with him, furious at Republican politicians who resisted overturning the election. Not only do Republican primary voters nearly uniformly believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction, a common sentiment for the out-of-power party, but they are seething — about the last election, about Joe Biden’s Washington, about two years of a pandemic.
The confluence of the pandemic, the manner in which Trump practiced his politics — just pure, in your face — you throw in a healthy dose around what is being taught in our schools, it’s just a cocktail of people being really just mad, beyond the pale of what I would say is traditional political discourse,” said John Watson, a former chair of the Georgia Republican Party. “There’s not another moment in my life that you just feel viscerally that the country is in many ways at its own throat.”
Evidence of the party’s unrest is everywhere. Nearly a half-dozen GOP governors are facing competitive primary challenges, ranging from Ohio, where Gov. Mike DeWine is facing a primary challenge from former Rep. Jim Renacci, to Idaho, where conservative Gov. Brad Little is being challenged by his lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who is trying to outflank him on the right.
“Twenty twenty-two is a unique point in time,” said Steve Stivers, the former congressman from Ohio and former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s the confluence of a redistricting year, it’s the precursor to a big presidential election. We have a president with pretty unpopular numbers, but a Republican Party that has some infighting.”
As a “prelude” to the party’s presidential nominating contest in 2024, he said, the midterms are where “we’ll sort of see where the party’s heading.”
Congressional incumbents aren’t immune to the convulsions, despite expectations the party will make big gains in November.
“This is a different midterm,” said Kirk Adams, a Republican former Arizona state House speaker. “From a Republican Party perspective, it’s what does a post-Trump presidency Republican Party look like?”
Few Republicans have been spared from the unrest, even in some of the reddest states.
In some parts of the country, the decennial redistricting has made avoiding intra-party conflict all but impossible, pressing Republican lawmakers into one another’s districts in Illinois, Michigan and West Virginia, where Republican Reps. Alex Mooney and David McKinley are brutalizing each other on TV.
In part, this year’s abundance of primary challenges is an exercise in opportunism. Trump’s sudden and rapid rise in politics has encouraged other non-office holders to run for lower office, while a favorable midterm election climate this year for Republicans — with historical trends and Biden’s dismal public approval ratings on their side — has made the chance of winning in a general election better than it has been since before Trump took office.
“If you’re smart, you know winning the nomination in this cycle is 90 percent of winning,” said Dave Carney, the Republican strategist who advises Abbott.
The results of the primaries will be interpreted, most of all, as a measure of Trump’s influence over the party. He has endorsed roughly 100 candidates so far in the current election cycle, ranging from Senate and gubernatorial contests to state legislative and local races.
But the primaries will also test the durability of the Republican coalition that Trump shaped as a candidate and as president — a political legacy marked by significant losses for the GOP in America’s suburbs, but gains among white working-class voters and, to a lesser extent, Latino voters.
More than 253 women and 228 people of color are running as Republicans for Congress, according to the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee — more Republican women and Hispanic people running than in any previous cycle. How those candidates fare in primaries this year, in the first election cycle since 2016 without Trump running or in the White House, may solidify the demographic shifts of the Trump era — or undo them.
In the primary landscape of 2022, he said, “You can’t run one of these traditional campaigns where you’re just, ‘I want to close the border and lower taxes and stuff … You’ve got to focus on the anger — election integrity, borders and Covid mandates … And you’ve got to be very aggressive about it.
In less than two weeks, the first primary election of 2022 will take place in the nation’s second-most populous state, and it’s a blockbuster: The state’s Republican governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner all face spirited challenges, as do several GOP House incumbents.
From there, fractious primaries will unfold across the electoral map in the coming months, cementing a more populist orientation for the GOP and Donald Trump’s status as the party’s lodestar, or setting a more traditionally conservative course.
These aren’t simple match-ups between Trump and anti-Trump forces, or isolated intraparty feuds. Safely ensconced Republican officeholders are being bombarded by challengers from coast to coast, in many cases spurred on by Trump directly. Redistricting and retirements have further scrambled the established order in many places, opening up seats and drawing fields filled with combative candidates eager to move the party in a different direction. Combine that with high levels of energy — and anger — in the party base, and it’s a recipe to remake the party from the ground up.
“Primaries are always f****d up to some degree, but it’s different now,” said John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country. “There’s more self-hate than there was before. Ten years ago, we’d argue about who was more pro-gun, who was more pro-life. Now, my clients are going RINO hunting, which is a level of disdain that was not there before in our party.”
Much of the churn is due to forces unleashed by Trump. The defeated president’s iron grip on the party and level of involvement in midterm primaries is unprecedented in modern history, and he continues to advance his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The Republican electorate overwhelmingly agrees with him, furious at Republican politicians who resisted overturning the election. Not only do Republican primary voters nearly uniformly believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction, a common sentiment for the out-of-power party, but they are seething — about the last election, about Joe Biden’s Washington, about two years of a pandemic.
The confluence of the pandemic, the manner in which Trump practiced his politics — just pure, in your face — you throw in a healthy dose around what is being taught in our schools, it’s just a cocktail of people being really just mad, beyond the pale of what I would say is traditional political discourse,” said John Watson, a former chair of the Georgia Republican Party. “There’s not another moment in my life that you just feel viscerally that the country is in many ways at its own throat.”
Evidence of the party’s unrest is everywhere. Nearly a half-dozen GOP governors are facing competitive primary challenges, ranging from Ohio, where Gov. Mike DeWine is facing a primary challenge from former Rep. Jim Renacci, to Idaho, where conservative Gov. Brad Little is being challenged by his lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who is trying to outflank him on the right.
“Twenty twenty-two is a unique point in time,” said Steve Stivers, the former congressman from Ohio and former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s the confluence of a redistricting year, it’s the precursor to a big presidential election. We have a president with pretty unpopular numbers, but a Republican Party that has some infighting.”
As a “prelude” to the party’s presidential nominating contest in 2024, he said, the midterms are where “we’ll sort of see where the party’s heading.”
Congressional incumbents aren’t immune to the convulsions, despite expectations the party will make big gains in November.
“This is a different midterm,” said Kirk Adams, a Republican former Arizona state House speaker. “From a Republican Party perspective, it’s what does a post-Trump presidency Republican Party look like?”
Few Republicans have been spared from the unrest, even in some of the reddest states.
In some parts of the country, the decennial redistricting has made avoiding intra-party conflict all but impossible, pressing Republican lawmakers into one another’s districts in Illinois, Michigan and West Virginia, where Republican Reps. Alex Mooney and David McKinley are brutalizing each other on TV.
In part, this year’s abundance of primary challenges is an exercise in opportunism. Trump’s sudden and rapid rise in politics has encouraged other non-office holders to run for lower office, while a favorable midterm election climate this year for Republicans — with historical trends and Biden’s dismal public approval ratings on their side — has made the chance of winning in a general election better than it has been since before Trump took office.
“If you’re smart, you know winning the nomination in this cycle is 90 percent of winning,” said Dave Carney, the Republican strategist who advises Abbott.
The results of the primaries will be interpreted, most of all, as a measure of Trump’s influence over the party. He has endorsed roughly 100 candidates so far in the current election cycle, ranging from Senate and gubernatorial contests to state legislative and local races.
But the primaries will also test the durability of the Republican coalition that Trump shaped as a candidate and as president — a political legacy marked by significant losses for the GOP in America’s suburbs, but gains among white working-class voters and, to a lesser extent, Latino voters.
More than 253 women and 228 people of color are running as Republicans for Congress, according to the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee — more Republican women and Hispanic people running than in any previous cycle. How those candidates fare in primaries this year, in the first election cycle since 2016 without Trump running or in the White House, may solidify the demographic shifts of the Trump era — or undo them.
In the primary landscape of 2022, he said, “You can’t run one of these traditional campaigns where you’re just, ‘I want to close the border and lower taxes and stuff … You’ve got to focus on the anger — election integrity, borders and Covid mandates … And you’ve got to be very aggressive about it.
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