If Republicans are headed to the presidential wilderness, they do so from a potentially powerful position to rebuild.
Their greatest enemy will be divisions among their own.
T here will be more lessons to draw from the 2020 election as the vote-counting proceeds, and after the two Georgia Senate runoffs decide control of the Senate. For now, we know that (1) turnout was extremely high for both parties; (2) Republicans had easily the better night than Democrats below the presidential level, with many Republican candidates running ahead of Donald Trump; (3) Trump and some down-ticket Republicans did surprisingly well with non-white voters, particularly Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas; (4) the presidential race was extremely close in four states Donald Trump carried narrowly in 2016 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina), two that he carried more comfortably in 2016 (Arizona and Georgia) and one he lost in 2016 (Nevada); (5) Trump held more easily onto three traditional swing states he flipped in 2016 (Florida, Ohio, and Iowa); and (6) Trump has almost certainly lost reelection, mainly on the strength of losing the Midwest trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but possibly losing Georgia and/or Arizona as well.
So, here is the story of the last ten years. Republicans won big in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, but fell short at the presidency in 2012. In 2016, in a mostly low-turnout election, Republicans down-ticket ran ahead of Trump by winning a bunch of voters who were able to distinguish the rest of the party from Trump, while a smaller but also significant number of voters in geographically important places in the Midwest came out to give Trump the presidency while not voting straight-ticket Republican. In 2018, in a very high-turnout midterm election, Republicans made gains in the Senate while getting their clocks cleaned in House and gubernatorial races, due largely to hemorrhaging college-educated white suburbanites, especially women, who had backed the party in 2012 and voted down-ticket Republican in 2016. In 2020, we saw 2016’s pattern mostly repeat itself in a much higher-turnout race. Yet, throughout this period, there have been few occasions when Republicans commanded a national popular majority, and then only in midterms such as 2010 and 2014.
The lesson is that there are now two Republican parties — the Donald Trump party and what you might call the Paul Ryan party. The Paul Ryan party is the more traditional Republican Party: upscale, suburbanite, professional, dignified. It believes in low taxes, Federalist Society–style legal constitutionalism, and at least in theory, in spending restraint. It may be quite combative, but it is constrained by the respectability politics of the educated classes. It tends to be pro–free-trade, to support an ambitious American role in the world, to be moderate on immigration, and generally shy about open racial conflict. It is also, traditionally, nearly all white. It is, as the 2012 election showed, unable to muster a popular majority.
Then you have the Trump party. The Trump party is noisy and confrontational, and enjoys Donald Trump’s swagger and showmanship. It appeals to the sensibilities of the working class, in ways that actually appeal to non-white working-class men but can also repel them when it picks the wrong fights on racial issues. (Consider why Trump did so poorly with Cuban-American voters in 2016, compared with 2020). It is skeptical of — and perhaps hostile to — trade, immigration, and American aid and involvement in foreign lands. It is less picky about legal and procedural niceties and norms, and mostly uninterested in spending restraint. This party is also unable to muster a popular majority, and it was unable to reelect Trump.
But here’s the thing: The two parties still have much in common, and they could potentially form a true majority coalition (at least, at times) if they could be unified. Both are pro-life, pro-military, pro-law enforcement, pro-gun, and pro-faith. Over the past four years, the Donald Trump party was more than willing to accept much of the Paul Ryan party’s agenda on judges and taxes. The Paul Ryan party was never as pure as it aspired to be on the size of government (go look up Ryan’s own voting record, or the record of the George W. Bush administration), and has been willing to bend more on trade and immigration. Mitch McConnell is entirely comfortable working to please both parties. On issues, there is enough common ground that the common desire to defeat the Left should be sufficient motivation to compromise internally, and on occasion to agree to disagree.
Certainly, the Republican Party as a whole starts with an uncommonly strong base in 2021, for a party out of power. It will have a sizable House minority, at worst a 50–50 Senate, and control of enough statehouses to draw a lot of district lines. At the presidential level, the states and districts won by Trump in 2020 (as of the current counts) will be worth 236 electoral votes in 2024, and the states and districts that Trump lost by a point or two will be worth another 79. All told, that is 45 more winnable electoral votes than are needed to construct a winning coalition. Against an 82-year-old incumbent whose own base is divided into factions held together only by mutual hatred of Trump, that presents a real opportunity.
This requires a spirit of reconciliation. For my part, I will never quite forgive people who foisted Trump on the rest of the party; I continue to believe that several of the other 2016 contenders would have beaten Hillary and been reelected in 2020. But I’m also prepared to move on. As Winston Churchill said in May 1940:
I am not reciting these facts for the purpose of recrimination. That I judge to be utterly futile and even harmful. We cannot afford it. . . . Now I put all this aside. I put it on the shelf, from which the historians, when they have time, will select their documents to tell their stories. We have to think of the future and not of the past. . . . There are too many in it. Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine. Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Trump, for all his many flaws and the people he turned off, did also bring new people into the tent, and we should want them to stay. Fusion between a populist, nationalist party and a more conventional conservative and classically liberal party is not only an opportunity, it is also a replay of how great Republican coalitions have been built in the past, from Abraham Lincoln to William McKinley to Warren G. Harding to Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan.
The biggest threats to unity come from two sources. One is simply personality and personnel. For reasons I’ve discussed exhaustively, Donald Trump was just too much in too many ways for the Paul Ryan party, and that cost him crucial votes at the margins. The Romney-Ryan ticket, likewise, was simply too earnest, polite, and boardroom for the Donald Trump party. John McCain, who in personality terms was a better fit for bridging the two groups, was a bridge too far on issues, especially immigration. The task of forging a consensus requires finding the right leader who has something for everyone. It is cliché to say so by now, but we could use another Reagan, a candidate with the open steel and common touch and Hollywood flair that appeals to the Donald Trump party, but also the depth and rigor to appeal to the Paul Ryan party. Nobody quite like Reagan is on the horizon, but there are some potential reasonably fresh faces that could contend in 2024. In the meantime, there is Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. McConnell, once much-despised by the Tea Party, is now “Cocaine Mitch,” an improbable cult hero to Republicans of all stripes for his work on the courts.
Perhaps the larger threat is the people who have a vested interest in keeping the divisions of the past four years alive. Trump himself, his family, and a few of his loud partisans are already darkly warning that anyone who will not go along with a scorched-earth campaign to delegitimize his election loss will face their sustained wrath. Of course, Republicans of all factions should and do want to see the counting process play out further; the party establishment was not shy, in 2000, about fighting tooth and nail to win a contested presidential election, and will gladly do so again if the law and the evidence are there to mount a legitimate challenge. But the last thing Republicans need, when and if it becomes obvious that this is simply wheel-spinning sour grapes, is a lot of pointless infighting just when there is a runoff in Georgia to decide control of the Senate. If Trumpian populists blame the Georgia Republican Party for Trump losing the state, that could turn poisonous and self-defeating in a hurry.
Then there are the media interests. People who built brands as Never-Trump critics or Resistance figures will be desperately sad to see Trump go and to see the Republican team united. Max Boot and Jim Acosta, for example, were already enthusing on Twitter yesterday about Trump running again in 2024. On the other hand, people in right-wing media who have built their identities around being the loyal defenders of Trump against a Never-Trump fifth column will face a similar threat to their positions if those internal divides fade into memory, as they did in the Reagan years. They, too, will have a stake in keeping an internal enemy alive.
If Republicans are headed to a time in the presidential wilderness, they do so from a potentially powerful position to rebuild. Their greatest enemy will be divisions among their own.