The terror that mainstream conservative Republican politicians have felt over the threat of being called insufficiently conservative — of being tagged as Republicans in Name Only — has made governing difficult for them since the 1990s. But whenever they were the minority party in Washington, they could correctly assume that there was little electoral cost to mollifying the party’s right wing.
This year, that presumption may no longer hold up. With an incumbent president whose approval rating barely tops 40% and plenty of discontent about the economy, Democrats should be facing heavy losses. Instead, there are signs Republican might only make minor gains in the November midterms. The GOP could even lose seats in the Senate and among governors. And that is all due to Republican fears of being labeled RINO.
From the 2016 presidential campaign through the second impeachment vote in the Senate, Republicans have had plenty of opportunities to rid themselves of Trump. Yet time after time, they chose instead to stick with him, with the party and with party-aligned media, giving Trump, who apparently cares little about public policy or the conservative movement, the ability to decide what counts as orthodoxy.
Given the legal trouble the former president has gotten himself into, being a “true conservative” now includes a requirement to defend Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election as well as his right to classified material, including ultra-sensitive information about human intelligence, and store it willy-nilly at a not-even-close-to-secure location.
Republicans know that the weeks leading up to midterm elections aren’t a good time to pick a fight with the party leader, especially one who they believe won’t hesitate to turn against anyone who opposes him. That means the next opportunity to move away from Trump is probably after the November midterms. Until then, Republicans are probably stuck with whatever he does that disrupts the party’s attempts to run coherent campaigns and focus voters on President Joe Biden’s weaknesses.
Nominating extremist candidates who perform badly in general elections has occasionally been costly for Republicans. It’s getting much worse. To some extent this is a consequence of having Trump around, but the former president’s support doesn’t carry that much clout.
Instead, the problem has been that the party simply doesn’t know how to protect itself from cranks and fraudsters. Republicans lack an effective counterargument against anyone who claims to be a true conservative and denounces everyone else for being RINOs. So inexperienced candidates with unpopular views, such as Arizona Senate nominee Blake Masters, or Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, often get nominated — or they wind up dragging the eventual nominee so far from the mainstream that the nominee risks losing.
Democrats don’t always nominate moderates, and even healthy parties sometimes choose to embrace unpopular positions despite the potential electoral costs. But Republicans too often act as if the only question of any relevance is which candidate is the purest conservative. Relevant experience and appeal to independents is either ignored or actually considered a flaw.
It isn’t clear how much the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortions will cost Republicans this fall. But it sure doesn’t appear to be helping. The court itself has become unpopular. Voters appear to be increasingly attached to abortion rights now that those rights have been threatened or eliminated; meanwhile Republican legislatures are passing all sorts of uncompromising bills.
We could chalk up some of this to a normal willingness to push through new policies even at the cost of future electoral loss. But Republican moves following the court ruling, in addition to the court’s decision itself, seem reckless. Republican presidents and senators haven’t been satisfied with solidly conservative justices such as current Chief Justice John Roberts or former Justice Anthony Kennedy. Trump, in particular, used judicial nominations to secure the support of the hardest-line activists within the Republican coalition, and Republican senators eagerly went along, only to find that if you put extremists on the court you’re likely to get extreme decisions that put targets on the politicians who supported them.
The same goes for state legislators and governors who are unwilling to settle for most of a loaf when they can grab the whole thing. Abortion is one of several policy areas, along with guns and climate, in which Republican judges are taking extreme stands that are wildly popular among the most loyal Republican voters but have little backing beyond them.
It’s still possible that Biden’s unpopularity will swamp everything else once the majority of voters start paying attention. But it’s also possible that for perhaps the first time in modern U.S. history, the party out of power will manage to throw away an election that they stood to win.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
