It was working. All around the country, in supposedly safely red districts where Republicans had gone unchallenged for years, Democratic recruits had put the incumbents back on their heels.
The money and enthusiasm on the left had also scared dozens of other GOP incumbents into retirement, weakening the party’s defenses. Of the forty-four districts vacated by Republicans who retired, resigned, or sought higher office, Democrats aggressively targeted half of them.
The most notable Republican to call it quits was Ryan, who nonetheless insisted on serving through the year’s end to help protect the majority. The decision to stay as a lame-duck Speaker irked some in the party and uncorked a gusher of internal gossip. Kevin McCarthy felt exposed by the decision, believing that his best chance to succeed Ryan in the next Congress was to have a running start; sensing the same thing, allies of Steve Scalise whispered about McCarthy’s vulnerabilities and suggested a stealth campaign to leapfrog him.
The tension among all three leadership officials, and their staffs, filled the water cooler talks on Capitol Hill that summer, especially as McCarthy and Scalise each jockeyed to find ground on the other man’s right flank. (McCarthy aired radio ads in numerous congressional districts promoting his legislation to build a border wall, vexing local Republicans in tough races who were being outspent and didn’t get so much as a shout-out from the majority leader while he was talking to their constituents.)
Ultimately, the concerns about Ryan sticking around were unfounded—he raised a record $200 million for the party in his time as Speaker—though his departure fed the narrative of Republicans surrendering in 2018. “There are a few folks that I tried to [convince] to stay in that didn’t stay in,” Steve Stivers, the Ohio congressman and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Politico in late August. This qualified as the understatement of the cycle.
Stivers was no one’s idea of a political powerhouse. In fact, he had become an expert at removing himself from GOP Christmas card lists. The previous fall, after Steve Bannon had left the White House and begun boasting of creating a shadow party to take down the establishment, the NRCC chairman traveled to Bannon’s Capitol Hill town house—which doubles as Breitbart.com headquarters—and threw himself at Bannon’s mercy, pleading with him not to target already vulnerable House moderates.
It was a bizarre maneuver, strategically and otherwise. The fact was, for all Bannon’s talk, he had zero apparatus for actually recruiting and funding challengers to Republican incumbents. There was no money, no organization—just Bannon in all his rumpled, self-aggrandizing glory. Yet here was the NRCC chairman kissing the ring, and extracting promises from Bannon that his cabal would target only McConnell and his Senate members, not House incumbents.
McConnell nearly had a coronary when he heard of the meeting. Calling Ryan, who had no previous knowledge of Stivers’s plans (and was himself irritated), the majority leader told the Speaker that Stivers was about to be persona non grata to the whole of the Republican Party.
Stivers got the message, but his performance as the campaign committee’s leader was widely viewed as ineffectual bordering on incompetent. A record number of House Republicans had retired, and though much of that was due to expiring committee chairmanships and general Trump fatigue, Stivers was seen as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
It was time for the GOP to triage, cutting off doomed incumbents and steering its resources to those who still had a chance. Stivers wasn’t helping things. It wasn’t just that he was forced to make tough decisions; it was that some of his decisions were plainly idiotic. For instance, Barbara Comstock, a popular Virginia Republican representing the DC suburbs, had been trailing by double digits in every poll of the race throughout the entire summer. Yet the NRCC was continuing to pump money into her race, eventually spending $5 million on a seat that nobody believed could be held. (Comstock wound up losing by 12 points.)
Meanwhile, Kevin Yoder, a Republican representing the Kansas City suburbs, was running the best campaign of his career—and fighting hopelessly uphill in a district that Clinton had won in 2016. Brimming with frustration one Sunday in September, Yoder placed a phone call to Stivers. Word had just gotten out that the NRCC would be cutting $1.2 million in TV spending from his district, essentially conceding defeat. Yoder had learned of the development from press reports, not from the committee.
“When people ask me what I think of you, I can’t decide whether to tell them you’re a fucking idiot or a fucking liar,” Yoder growled at Stivers. “But now I think you’re both.”
“TWO WORDS ARE GOING TO DEFINE THE NIGHT OF THE 2018 ELECTION in the next three weeks. One is ‘Kavanaugh’ and the other is ‘caravan,’” Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity. “I think the American people are going to reject both the way they treated Kavanaugh and the way they are dealing with the border, and I think those will end up being the reasons the Republicans keep the House and dramatically increase the number of senators they have.”
It was the evening of October 17, twenty days before the midterm election, and as usual, the president of the United States was tuned in to Fox News. He loved what he was hearing.
Trump had all but pulled a hamstring taking victory laps since Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court at the beginning of October. Moreover, just one day earlier, the president had tweeted about the “Caravan of people heading to the U.S.” from Honduras. Now the conservative propaganda monster was following his lead on both.
The caravan issue was easily exploitable. Trump had threatened to cut off foreign aid to countries that did not thwart the advance of the estimated several thousand people moving through Guatemala toward the U.S. border. Caravans in Central America were nothing new; large groups of migrants have long banded together, traveling both north and south to escape violence and poverty. Earlier that year, in fact, a large caravan had been broken up by the Mexican government at its northern border. But this was different: With signs of complacency in the GOP base and immigration still its animating concern, Trump saw the latest mass migrant group as a prime political foil.
He had been thrilled when, the day before, Gingrich and Laura Ingraham spent part of her Fox News show discussing the issue. (“The largest caravan in a decade approaches our southern border,” Ingraham warned of the people on foot roughly one thousand miles away.) Now the president was giddy at hearing Gingrich—the only man in politics, he felt, whose marketing talents rivaled his own—define the election in such crisp terms.
“I love it!” Trump told Gingrich by phone that night. “Caravans and Kavanaugh! That’s my closing message!”
It seemed improbable that the president would stick to any single “closing message.”
The previous week, on October 11, Trump had hosted Kanye West in the Oval Office for a meeting on criminal justice reform that turned into a surreal impromptu press conference. With a throng of reporters crowded around the Resolute desk (hewn from the timbers of a British Royal Navy barque and gifted to Rutherford B. Hayes by the famously austere Queen Victoria), the hip-hop artist who had once said that George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” riffed for more than fifteen minutes on everything from the “welfare mentality” of African Americans to the jolt of masculine energy he felt when wearing the Make America Great Again hat, calling himself “a crazy motherfucker,” to the delight of Trump.