By all rights, the 2022 elections should have been a blowout in favor of the Republican Party. With inflation then running higher than most voters had ever experienced in living memory, with gas prices still quite high (if trending downward), and with the historical pattern of the party in power losing congressional seats in midterm elections, there was little reason to suspect that Republicans would end up losing ground in the Senate, losing control of four statehouses, and barely achieving a fractious House majority.
The reason this happened can (and has) been boiled down, almost ad nauseum, to two words: Donald Trump. The Supreme Court’s evisceration of abortion rights played a role, certainly, particularly with young people who ended up tilting the scales towards Democrats, despite the party sustaining an overall defeat in the popular vote numbers. Democrats also ran unusually strong candidates in many races. But the primary cause for the GOP’s dismal showing in 2022 was the party’s embrace of Trump, and (more importantly) Trumpism, a seemingly irresistible fixation that manifested itself in appalling candidates loudly mouthing equally appalling and repulsive views and attitudes, mostly because they believed that is what a Trump-addled base wanted to hear. David Frum, writing for The Atlantic, isn’t off the mark when he characterizes the party’s overall posture and comportment as “obnoxious,” a fitting description of Republicans’ performative callousness and reflexive cruelty that shows no signs of abating.
As reported by Sahil Kapur, writing for NBC News:
“It was a Trump problem,” a Republican operative involved in the 2022 election told NBC News, speaking candidly about the de facto leader of the GOP on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Independents didn’t vote for candidates they viewed as extreme and too closely linked with Donald J. Trump.”
Independent voters made up 31% of the electorate and they favored Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 49% to 47%, a stark break from the past four midterms in which they voted by double digits for the party out of power, according to exit polls.
We saw this play out in the Republicans’ pathetic “success” in electing a House speaker, an achievement that only happened because the most pro-Trump hardliners were able to extract humiliating concessions from California Rep. Kevin McCarthy—concessions that effectively ceded control of that chamber to the whims of its most nihilistic, conspiracy-spewing, election-denying members. And while that may buttress the individual prospects of those folks with those pitiful constituents who will continue to vote for them in their districts, all it does is reinforce the notion that Trump’s presence remains the singular, undiluted dominating force in Republican politics.
Many Republicans get this, but what they are now being forced to grapple with is the fact that it is not only Trump’s presence, but his absence—and more specifically, his potential rejection, criticism, or disavowal of the party or its candidates—which could drastically alter the GOP’s prospects in 2024.
As observed by conservative but decidedly anti-Trump columnist and The Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner, this realization was recently thrown into sharp, unsettling relief for Republicans when it became clear that over one quarter of Republican voters would willingly abandon their party to follow Trump wherever he chose to lead them. And unless Trump once again succeeds in winning the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024—despite polls showing his general unpopularity with most of the GOP faithful in the wake of the 2022 midterms—this, Wehner writes, is exactly the worst-case scenario (for Republicans) that could occur:
That unsettling realization broke through with the release of a Bulwark poll earlier this week. The survey found that a large majority of Republicans are ready to move on from Trump—but at the same time, more than a quarter of likely Republican voters are ready to follow Trump to a third-party bid. Two days after the poll results were released, Trump was asked in an interview whether, if he lost the nomination, he would support the GOP nominee. Trump answered, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.” Translation: no.
It doesn’t take a deep understanding of this country’s historical voting patterns to understand why a third-party candidacy involving Donald Trump would spell certain doom for Republicans in 2024. But an equally harrowing prospect for Republicans presents itself, even if Trump (as is likely) foregoes such a quixotic attempt … but instead loudly and publicly registers his disapproval of whoever the GOP ultimately nominates.
Wehner notes:
[E]ven if Trump doesn’t run as a third-party candidate, he could ensure that Republican presidential and congressional candidates lose simply by criticizing them during the campaign, accusing the Republican Party of disloyalty, and signaling to his supporters that they should sit out the election. That course of action is more straightforward, and perhaps even likelier, than a third-party bid, but it would be just as devastating to Republican prospects.
On Sunday, the sprawling Koch network—the traditional corporate funding spigot for a vast number of Republican elected officials—publicly signaled it would not support a Trump candidacy in 2024, and will back one of his rivals, possibly Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Others will likely follow. It’s not yet possible to convey just how vindictively Trump will react to this type of treatment at the hands of fellow Republicans, but it’s safe to theorize that it won’t be pretty.
As Wehner notes, Trump doesn’t react well when others refuse to genuflect before him. When this happens, he tends to viciously lash out; his favored method is to incite his rabid base against whoever he chooses to target. That’s been his modus operandi since the 2016 primaries, and it has evidenced itself over and over during the past seven years.
Wehner observes:
Trump has no attachment to the Republican Party or, as best as one can tell, to anything or anyone else. His malignant narcissism prevents that. Trump is an institutional arsonist, peddling conspiracy theories, spreading lies, sowing distrust. That’s his skill, and he’s quite good at it. But Trump is now causing growing unease among his past supporters and the GOP establishment by signaling that he may very well turn that skill against their party.
As Wehner points out, when this vindictive tendency was directed against “America’s intelligence agencies, the FBI and the Department of Justice, the military, scientific agencies, the courts, Congress, [the] media, those charged with overseeing our elections—Republicans cheered him on.” When he incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol, literally threatening the life of his own vice president as well as members of Congress, Republicans continued to behave as if nothing untoward was occurring, blithely shutting their eyes and continuing to support or condone his behavior, even to the point of undermining our democratic institutions.
But now he’s effectively holding their entire party’s future hostage, and it won’t be very long before his ransom demands are forthcoming. The penalty for refusing his demands will be the destruction of the Republican Party, even if the GOP—having taken stock of the 2022 midterm debacle—no longer wants to play along.
