Typically, after losing a presidential election, a political party will undertake an intense intra-party debate over why it didn’t win and how the party needs to change to take back the White House. Democrats did so after losing in 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016. In fact, even after winning in 2020 — taking control of the White House and U.S. Senate and maintaining control in the U.S. House — Democrats are having an intra-party debate, trying to figure out why they didn’t win more House seats and struggled with Latino voters. Republicans, too, have had such debates, after losses in 1996, 2008 and 2012.
But not this time.
Despite Republicans losing the White House and Senate in 2020, and thus being totally swept out of power in Washington,1 there’s been no official “autopsy” or widespread consideration of appointing new leaders or anything else. In the period after the 1988 presidential election, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential race (2004). It has lost three of the last four presidential elections and allowed itself to be dominated by former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached for breaking with democratic values. But it is moving forward like none of that really happened.
- Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the state level are returning to their Obama-era strategy of opposing everything the incumbent Democratic president does;
- Republicans at the state level are adopting laws that make it harder for left-leaning people to vote, just like they did before and during the Trump presidency;
- Republicans in Washington and at the state level are sticking with the party’s positions on issues of identity and race, which are a big part of the reason that the GOP is struggling among the growing parts of America’s electorate, namely people of color and white college graduates (this marks a change from the post-election periods in 2008 and 2012, when Republicans talked about how to better appeal to nonwhite voters);
- State-level Republican officials, in particular, are taking other extreme actions, from casting Democratic women as “witches” to trying to bar Democratic-controlled cities from requiring residents to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19;
- And, perhaps most surprisingly, Republican Party officials are largely continuing to align themselves with Trump, even though the former president was both an electoral drag on the party and also a moral stain, with a string of racist comments and undemocratic actions that culminated in him encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election results.
1. The party’s core activists don’t want to shift gears.
This is the simplest and most obvious explanation: The GOP isn’t changing directions because the people driving the car don’t want to.
2. Trump is still a force in the party.
After the 2012 elections, prominent Republicans sharply criticized Mitt Romney and his campaign. Democrats did the same to Hillary Clinton after 2016 — and sometimes included former President Barack Obama in their criticisms, too. For a political party to change direction, it nearly always has to distance itself from past leaders.
Or put another way: For there to be an autopsy, there has to be a dead body.
No comments:
Post a Comment