Heads fully submerged in the sand, leading Republicans rejected the notion of a widespread political reorientation in the age of Trump, insisting that the 2018 results foretold no long-term threat to the party. This was voiced most naïvely by Tom Emmer, the new chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who told National Journal after the election, “There’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs. That’s not true. It isn’t there.”
To be clear: It was true. It was there.
Just as the 2010 election saw the purging of Congress’s “Blue Dogs,” coinciding with Democrats losing their foothold in rural America, 2018 saw the annihilation of Congress’s moderate Republicans, coinciding with the GOP’s presence fading in the suburbs from coast to coast. This was the definition of a realignment: Democrats flipped two-thirds of the GOP-held House seats with the highest median incomes, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, while flipping just 6 percent of the GOP-held seats with the lowest median incomes.3 When the final results had been tabulated, Republicans were left representing just two of the thirty congressional districts with the most college degrees.
For anyone doubting the ramifications of this, or the reality of a “Blue Wave” in 2018, consider that Democrats won nearly 9 million more total votes in House elections than Republicans, breaking the record set in the post-Watergate midterm of 1974.
The GOP’s pain was felt far beyond the Beltway. Democrats flipped 7 governor’s mansions, 7 legislative chambers, and nearly 400 state legislative seats. The vast majority of these victories were on the strength of a mass resurgence in America’s metropolitan expanses.
In Wisconsin, for example, Governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a third term by a single percentage point—after winning by 6 points in 2014. The reason: While his performance improved in the rural middle and northern parts of the state, his numbers dropped by double digits in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison.
The implications were straightforward. Republicans already faced an existential threat because of their anemic support from minority voters, and specifically Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of the electorate. In a presidential contest, bleeding the support of college-educated white suburbanites to boot would make the party’s electoral math unworkable.
The GOP’s challenge wouldn’t be just with suburbanites writ large, but with women in particular. And its dismal performance among female voters could not be distinguished from its exclusion of female lawmakers: The new Congress convening in 2019 saw a record-setting 102 women serving in the House—but just 13 were Republicans. That number was nearly cut in half from the previous Congress, when 23 women served in the House GOP.
This was a challenge that Elise Stefanik, one of the party’s young standouts, was desperate to address. Leading the NRCC’s recruitment efforts for the 2018 election, Stefanik, a former Bush administration official representing upstate New York, found it “very, very difficult to recruit women candidates” to run for Congress. “This was a problem pre-Trump, and it’s going to be a problem post-Trump,” she said, “Although, it’s been exacerbated by the president’s rhetoric.”
Stefanik knew, however, that her party’s problems run deeper than its showing with any single demographic group. The congresswoman was witnessing in real time the outgrowth of the “isms” that her former boss, President Bush, once warned of. “There will be a post-Trump era,” she said. “And I think there’s going to be a new generation of voices in the Republican Party that push back on some of the trends we’ve been seeing—the isolationist, anti-trade, anti-intellectualism trends that are not moving us in the right direction.”
The old generation might have its say, too.
On New Year’s Day, forty-eight hours before he was sworn in to serve his freshman term, Senator-elect Mitt Romney penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that sent shockwaves through the capital city. Explaining that while he agreed with many of Trump’s policy decisions, and declaring that he would not “comment on every tweet or fault,” Romney warned, “With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”
Trump was disgusted. He recalls a conversation with Romney, during the interview for secretary of state, when he told him, “if only you spent the same energy” against Obama in 2012 as he had opposing Trump in 2016, he would have won the presidency for himself. “But he only wants to play hardball against me,” Trump says, rolling his eyes. “Romney had too much respect for Obama.”
Trump scolded the incoming senator on Twitter, urging Romney to be a “TEAM player” and help Republicans “WIN!” But for Romney, winning wasn’t merely about legislative conquests and electoral triumphs; it was about the government projecting moral leadership, providing an example of comity and dignity for the rest of the country to follow.
For some, these notions were long since irrelevant. To support Trump meant to ignore or justify all that he said and did—period.
This continued to manifest itself most entertainingly on the religious right. As the government shutdown spilled into January, Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor who had railed against Romney’s Mormonism in 2008 and 2012, told Fox News that the president’s tactics were warranted because “The Bible says even heaven itself is going to have a wall around it.” Around that same time, Jerry Falwell Jr. told the Washington Post Magazine that it was a “distortion” to say America “should be loving and forgiving” because Jesus taught such things. “In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated,” Falwell Jr. said. “In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country.”
Not all churchgoers and committed Christians were so unblushingly apologetic for Trump. But over his first two years in office, no group had debased itself quite like their foremost clerics.
“These evangelical [leaders] are the biggest phonies of all,” says Michael Steele, the former party chairman. “These are the people who spent the last forty years telling everyone how to live, who to love, what to think about morality. And then this motherfucker comes along defiling the White House and disrespecting God’s children at every turn, but it’s cool, because he gave them two Supreme Court justices. They got their thirty pieces of silver.”
There were indicators of progress inside the GOP, however halting and long overdue.
In the middle of January, as the shutdown raged on, McCarthy took a step that should have been taken years earlier: stripping Steve King of his committee assignments.
The Iowa congressman had been making thinly veiled racist comments for at least a decade. And his rhetoric had grown that much bolder since the election of Trump: speaking of “cultural suicide by demographic transformation”; meeting with members of a far-right, Nazi-founded Austrian party; endorsing a self-avowed white nationalist for mayor of Toronto; and warning, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”