Even setting aside the particulars of the Electoral College and Trump’s path to reelection, the warnings of the post-2012 RNC autopsy—that the aggregate demographic tradeoffs hurt Republicans long term—rang true once again. Trump’s party performed splendidly among the fastest-declining groups of voters and the decreasingly populated parts of the country in 2016, but Democrats dominated among the fastest-growing groups of voters and increasingly populated parts of the country.
This was unsustainable over the long term, and possibly unworkable even in the short term. Exhibit A: Texas.
In a state no Democrat had won statewide since 1994, and where the GOP incumbent, Ted Cruz, was better financed and better organized than almost any Republican in the country, the result was a 2.5-point win for Cruz. If ever there was a moral victory for Democrats, this was it. Cruz won 66 percent of whites, who made up 56 percent of the electorate; but O’Rourke won 69 percent of nonwhites, who made up 44 percent of the electorate. It wouldn’t be long before those composition statistics are inverted, with nonwhites comprising the majority of Texas voters; when that happens, the state will cease to be red unless Republicans dramatically improve their performance with minorities.
Harris County, the home of Houston, offered a distillation of the GOP’s dilemma. With roughly equal proportions of Hispanics, blacks, and whites—and the whites increasingly college-educated—the county is viewed by both parties as a harbinger of America’s demographic future. Cruz lost it by more than 200,000 votes.
It’s true that O’Rourke was an exciting candidate who mobilized the Texas Democratic base in unprecedented ways. But it’s also true that trend lines in the state bode ominously for the GOP. Back in 2016, not a single House Republican in Texas lost reelection; the only one who came close was Will Hurd, the former CIA agent representing a 71 percent Hispanic district on the southern border. Two years later, a pair of Texas Republicans lost their seats to Democratic challengers, and Hurd, widely viewed as the best campaigner in the House GOP, came dangerously close, winning by fewer than 1,000 votes despite an approval rating in the 70s.
“It was near-presidential turnout in 2018. The Republican base showed up, but it’s shrinking as a percentage of the voting population,” Hurd said after the election. “In 2016, only one Texas Republican got less than fifty-five percent of the vote; that was me. In 2018, twelve [of us] got less than fifty-five percent of the vote. Two of them lost. The average difference in our margins from 2016 to 2018 was negative fifteen points. This is a trend that has to be stopped, and the only way you stop that trend is by appealing to a broader base of people. If the Republican Party in Texas ceases to look like voters in Texas, there will not be a Republican Party in Texas.”
It goes without saying, but if there’s not a Republican Party in Texas, there won’t be much of a Republican Party in America. The state’s 36 Electoral votes have been the foundation of the GOP’s path to the White House since 1980. Without Texas, the GOP’s presidential math becomes unworkable—period.
It’s a similar, albeit less dire situation, in Arizona. Having won sixteen of the past seventeen presidential elections there, Republicans have come to depend on the state’s 11 Electoral votes as a red bulwark in the dauntingly blue West Coast. Yet Trump won the state by less than four points in 2016, the smallest margin in two decades, thanks to poor performance with the state’s nonwhite population. And unlike in Texas, the Democrats broke through in 2018, winning the Arizona Senate race by a relatively comfortable margin, with the Democratic nominee, Kyrsten Sinema, carrying 68 percent of the state’s nonwhite voters.
Georgia represented a final red flag for the Republican Party. Despite carrying the state in six consecutive presidential elections, Republicans have seen its shifting demographics (increasingly urban, college-educated, and nonwhite) yield shrinking margins over the past decade. In 2018, with Abrams vying to become the nation’s first black female governor, Republicans hung on by less than 2 percentage points. The reason: Kemp, the GOP nominee, won 74 percent of whites, who made up 60 percent of the electorate; but he lost 84 percent of nonwhites, who made up 40 percent of the electorate. As in Texas, it’s only a matter of time until these composition ratios are reversed.
Waking up to these realities on November 7, Republicans found that no amount of spinning their Senate and gubernatorial wins could mask the three-front war awaiting them in 2020. Democrats were converting the suburbs into political garrisons. They were reasserting themselves in the Rust Belt states, demonstrating the limits of a strategy banking on big margins with working-class whites. And they were creeping closer to parity in three states, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia, that would surely be contested by the party’s nominee in all future presidential races.
AS TRUMP PREPARED FOR HIS POSTELECTION PRESS CONFERENCE THAT Wednesday morning, studying the names of his fallen GOP detractors, he envisioned the ways in which he could use the loss to tighten his grip on the party. Many of the defeated Republicans, he told his staff, had been disloyal to him; they deserved to lose. Only by embracing his nationalist, America First policies, he said—and by backing him up in his guerrilla war against the media, the Democrats, and the conventions of Washington—would the Republican Party prosper.
Contemplating the inflection point offered by the midterm results, Trump realized there was good news and bad news.
He had purged the party of perhaps his two most outspoken GOP critics, Arizona senator Jeff Flake and South Carolina congressman Mark Sanford. Despite both those seats being lost to the Democrats, the president took comfort in knowing he was free of those grandstanding, grating, self-righteous traitors who lived to criticize his every utterance.
The bad news: A newly elected Republican was on his way to Washington and intent on filling their shoes. He had little patience for Trump, he told friends, and would not hesitate to police him. He had finally won his first federal campaign after three unsuccessful attempts. He was the incoming junior senator from Utah: Mitt Romney.
Chapter Twenty-Five
November 2018
“Some have adapted. And I haven’t.”
LAST NIGHT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DEFIED HISTORY,” PROCLAIMED the president of the United States.
Standing before an overflow audience inside the White House on the afternoon of November 7, his royal-blue tie shimmering and his spray tan exceptionally robust, Donald Trump delivered a postelection press conference the likes of which Americans had never seen.
For an hour and twenty-seven minutes, the president held forth on topics ranging from his popularity among minorities (“I have the best numbers with African American and Hispanic Americans that I’ve ever had before”) to the annexation of Crimea (he blamed Barack Obama instead of Vladimir Putin) to his refusal to release his tax returns (“They’re extremely complex, people wouldn’t understand them”).
Primarily, the appearance was designed as one-part end zone dance and one-part exoneration tour, as he took credit for the contests Republicans had won and distanced himself from those they had lost. Noting how GOP candidates had prevailed in nine of the eleven places he’d visited recently—races picked by his team specifically because of their high likelihood of victory—Trump concluded, “This vigorous campaigning stopped the Blue Wave that they talked about.”