Arguing that the odds were stacked against the House GOP due to so many members retiring, without mentioning that plenty of those retirements owed to what lawmakers labeled “Trump fatigue” in Capitol Hill vernacular, the president congratulated those Republicans who had won their elections by remaining loyal to him.
As for the others?
“You had some that decided to ‘Let’s stay away. Let’s stay away.’ They did very poorly,” the president said. “I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad. But I feel just fine about it.”
Trump, the titular head of the Republican Party, then proceeded to namecheck and mock those House Republicans who had campaigned on their own independent brands and who had lost in districts where the president’s unpopularity made winning with an R next to one’s name all but impossible.
“Carlos . . . Cue-bella.”
Trump could not pronounce the name of the Miami-area Republican, Carlos Curbelo, one of the GOP’s brightest young stars, whose good standing at home was insufficient in the age of Trump.
“Mike Coffman. Too bad, Mike.”
Now he was mocking the Colorado congressman, an Army and Marine Corps veteran, who was widely regarded as one of Congress’s hardest workers, having taught himself new languages to converse with the constituents in his rapidly diversifying district.
The president continued: “Mia Love.”
Trump stopped himself, noting his estranged relationship with the black Utah Republican. “Mia Love gave me no love. And she lost,” he said. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”
He went on: “Barbara Comstock was another one. I think she could have won that race, but she didn’t want to have any embrace. For that, I don’t blame her. But she—she lost. Substantially lost. Peter Roskam didn’t want the embrace. Erik Paulsen didn’t want the embrace.”
After running through his list, Trump paused to reflect on these intraparty traitors.
“Those are some of the people that, you know, decided for their own reason not to embrace—whether it’s me or what we stand for,” he said. “But what we stand for meant a lot to most people. And we’ve had tremendous support, and tremendous support in the Republican Party. Among the biggest support in the history of the party. I’ve actually heard, at 93 percent, it’s a record. But I won’t say that, because who knows?”
IT WASN’T QUITE A RECORD, BUT TRUMP WAS RIGHT: HE WAS MORE POPULAR with his party’s voters than any president in modern history at the two-year mark, save for George W. Bush’s 97 percent approval rating in the aftermath of 9/11. Gallup showed Trump at 88 percent, ahead of Obama at 85 percent, George H. W. Bush at 84 percent, Richard Nixon at 79 percent, Ronald Reagan at 76 percent, Bill Clinton at 75 percent, and Jimmy Carter at 62 percent.1
But there was one critical difference: Donald Trump’s party lost 40 House seats in 2018, whereas George W. Bush’s party gained 8 House seats in 2002.
How was this possible? The only mathematical explanation: The party itself was contracting.
In polling, party affiliation is a state of mind, something that is elastic from year to year (and, in this age, from day to day). Fewer voters were identifying as Republicans—or, at least, as Trump Republicans—when pollsters contacted them. It was possible for Trump to maintain a high approval rating with self-identified Republicans while his party was being decimated in red congressional districts because a rising number of voters were vacating their GOP affiliation.
The proof? Consider polling from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC charged with keeping the House under Republican control. The organization raised and spent roughly $160 million for the election cycle, with an enormous investment in survey work to understand the voters in the dozens of districts they competed in. Every single one of the House Republicans called out by Trump in his postelection press conference (and many more) had higher favorability ratings in their districts as of late October than did the president. And while Trump polled well with GOP voters, the “Generic Republican” option outpaced him on the survey ballots in these districts. For many members—Comstock in Northern Virginia, Coffman in metropolitan Denver, Paulsen in the Twin Cities—Trump’s mid-30s favorability was the result of his alienating their suburban, right-of-center voters. It proved insurmountable, despite his support among conservatives.
Just as Trump wrote these members off, so, too, did the professional right wing. “The squishy members who lost their races were the ones who didn’t embrace the conservative agenda,” David McIntosh, the Club for Growth president, declared at a press conference. David Bozell, the leader of ForAmerica, another activist group, agreed: “Republicans shed a lot of dead weight last night.”
Setting aside the fact that most of the aforementioned House Republicans voted with Trump north of 90 percent of the time, and that several self-styled conservatives also lost their races, the dismissiveness was surprising. Two years in the majority had allowed Republicans to accomplish at least some of what they had campaigned on; now, heading into the minority, some on the right seemed strangely enthused about embracing the old Jim DeMint mantra of 30 purists being better than 60 pragmatists.
It simply made no sense.
“Politics are about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” as Mississippi governor Haley Barbour used to say. The activist right could be forgiven for ignoring this advice. But of all people, Trump, who stitched together an unlikely coalition en route to winning the White House, would seem to appreciate the imperative of big-tent politics. Instead, all he cared about were displays of loyalty or lack thereof.
One election result pleased the president above all others. “In Jeff Flake’s case, it’s me, pure and simple. I retired him,” Trump boasted on November 7. “I’m very proud of it. I did the country a great service.”
Democrats flipped two GOP Senate seats in 2018. One of them was Flake’s in Arizona.
His onetime best friend, Mike Pence, sat a few feet away as the president spoke. The two congressmen used to call each other “Butch” and “Sundance,” nicknames earned from when they would burst through the swinging doors of the House chamber to register their objection to a Bush-era big-spending proposal. When Flake, on his twentieth wedding anniversary, got stuck in Washington for a busy week of votes, Pence helped fly Flake’s wife to DC and arranged a surprise dinner for them on the rooftop of the W Hotel.
Now, as Trump took occasion to spit on his old partner’s grave, Pence started straight ahead. If he was angry or upset or bewildered at what the president was saying, he certainly wouldn’t, and couldn’t, show it.
“Mike is intensely loyal. That’s a virtue. And he has never uttered to me one syllable of disagreement with the president, and frankly I admire him for that,” Flake says. “We’ve taken different paths, but I’m not trying to suggest that mine is a more virtuous path than his. He’s in a position with considerably more power than I have. And there’s something to be said for that. If he can influence the president in a positive direction, then maybe that was a wise choice.”
Flake acknowledges that he has changed; that he is not the same hard-line, insurgent-styled conservative he once was. “But the bigger change was the party, which used to be the party of limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, free trade,” he says. “It has become a more nationalist, nativist, anti-immigration party. That’s an unfamiliar standard for most of us. Some have adapted. And I haven’t.”