No two states better illustrate the merits of discipline on the campaign trail than Arizona and Florida.
At long last, we may be able to do away with the demographics-are-our-destiny, our-destiny-is-an-indefinite-Democratic-majority theory. Of late, many on the left have been unwilling or unable to shake the feeling that sooner or later, the United States would transition into a de facto one-party state. Such speculation saw a significant uptick after Barack Obama’s 2008 election to the presidency but in some cases existed many years before that. Which is why 2016 came as such a shock for so many. The polls showed nothing close to an insurmountable lead for Hillary Clinton, and yet her supporters were measuring the drapes weeks, even months, before Election Day. A changing country simply would not elect a Republican president, much less one with the flaws of Donald Trump.
Despite the surprises of 2016, Democrats entered the home stretch of this year’s race again convinced that they were headed for a landslide up and down the ballot. They were favored to take back the presidency and the Senate, and to expand their majority in the House. This time, the top of the Democratic ticket will indeed have its choice of drapes. But in Congress and state governments across the country, the GOP overperformed. Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell will almost certainly remain majority leader so long as Republicans win at least one of the two January runoff elections in Georgia. House Republicans made significant gains in the House of Representatives despite predictions from reputable elections analysts such as the Washington Post’s Henry Olsen and Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, who both suggested that Democrats might pick up ten or more seats. Instead, Republicans will come away with around 210 seats despite entering the election with fewer than 200. As a result, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will have only a slim majority and a freshly spooked moderate wing of her caucus to work with. Moreover, while some foresaw Democratic gains in state legislatures, Democrats in fact failed to flip control of a single one. Republicans have flipped three, securing two more “trifectas” — control of both legislatures and the governor’s mansion in a state — in the process.
And the number of seats won wasn’t the only encouraging sign for the GOP. Growing support for Republicans among Latinos and (to a lesser extent) African Americans bodes well for the future. In Florida and Texas especially, the GOP should be confident moving forward. Incredibly, Trump lost Miami-Dade County by only seven points; Hillary Clinton won it by 30 in 2016. And despite pre-election prognostication that Texas might finally go blue, Trump took its electoral votes comfortably, thanks in part to a shockingly strong performance in the Rio Grande Valley, where high turnout was not the boon to Democratic chances it was expected to be.
Still, there is a risk that Republicans may not learn the right lessons from the 2020 race. The narrow margin of victory for Joe Biden in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, as well as Trump’s undeniable success in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, may cause some Republicans to conclude that Trump’s loss was the fault not of the president himself, but of the once-in-a-century pandemic and media malfeasance. There’s no question that these factors played a role in Trump’s defeat. But the largest share of blame should be reserved for Trump and his campaign. From day one, the Trump campaign proved to be an undisciplined mess by hiring Brad Parscale, a digital strategist and grifter with perhaps even less self-restraint than the president himself.
Neither Parscale nor Bill Stepien, his eventual replacement, could change the essential defect of Trump’s campaign: The master sloganeer who showed up in the 2016 GOP primaries and general election ran without a unifying message in 2020. Four years ago, the themes were clear: curb immigration, make better trade deals, shell the Islamic State. This year, the Republican Party failed to put together a platform, and the president couldn’t even answer a softball question from Sean Hannity about what his second-term agenda would be. Instead of campaigning on his record and making the case for a conservative policy agenda, the president spent valuable time trying desperately to turn the Hunter Biden controversy into a campaign-changing type scandal on the scale of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Yet this effort was challenged from the get-go. No available evidence convincingly suggested that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s unsavory dealings, and Biden didn’t have the residual stink of corruption on him that Clinton did.
For this reason, it should come as no surprise that down-ballot Republicans tended to, for the most part, run ahead of the president. No matter where they were running or what their message was, disciplined candidates succeeded. Susan Collins, who ran on her experience and bipartisanship in Maine, beat her opponent by nine points while President Trump lost the state by a similar margin. In Orange County, Calif., Michelle Steel ran on pocketbook issues, relentlessly portraying herself as the taxpayer’s best friend. Consequently, she was able to pull off an upset in the 48th congressional district, unseating Democrat Harley Rouda.
No two states better illustrate the merits of discipline on the campaign trail than Arizona and Florida. In the former, Republicans have slowly but surely eroded their once-strong position. Whereas Arizona was once regarded as a conservative stronghold and sent Barry Goldwater to the Senate, it will now have two Democrats representing it in Congress’s upper chamber. This was not inevitable. Charles Krauthammer once observed that decline is a choice. The Arizona GOP has chosen it unreservedly. Making longtime liability Kelli Ward its chairwoman was a striking error in itself. But actively alienating Latino voters, who represent a growing share of the state’s population, compounded the state party’s self-defeating foolishness.
Contrast Arizona with Florida. In Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott, the state party has three incredibly disciplined campaigners who have proven remarkably resilient even to the vicissitudes of the national mood. DeSantis and Scott, for example, both narrowly won races for governor and Senate, respectively, as underdogs in 2018, a bad year for Republicans. That’s a testament not only to their own merits — although they have plenty — but also to the Florida GOP’s long-term commitment to brand-building and outreach efforts to minority voters. The results speak for themselves. There has not been a Democratic governor of Florida in the 21st century. Increasingly, it is being thought of as a reliably red state, not a purple one.
The ideological battle in the Republican Party is undoubtedly of great importance, and finding a synthesis between the Paul Ryan and Donald Trump wings is essential for its future success. To fully realize its potential, though, the GOP must not only resolve its identity crisis, but do away with the recklessness that has sometimes defined its campaigns.