The spin is on, and you’re probably already dizzy from it. Don’t listen to a word of it. This race wasn’t about right-to-work legislation, steel tariffs, or cultural conservatism. Candidates matter, but the national environment matters more. Like so many elections of its kind, the special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district–a district Donald Trump won two years ago by 20 points–was a referendum on the GOP under this president. The voters do not approve.
The conditions and the candidates vary, but the story since the president’s inauguration has been remarkably static. The vote in both special elections and the off-year races last November has swung away from Republicans and toward Democrats. What’s more, despite divergent candidate quality, the GOP candidates’ margins have tracked with Donald Trump’s job approval rating by state (with Roy Moore’s race in Alabama representing the exception to the rule).
The GOP’s traditional strongholds in the educated and affluent suburbs are no longer reliable, and that’s not because Democrats have suddenly become popular. Voters are not delivering a negative verdict on the economy; it is growing with room to run. They’re not sour on the state of affairs abroad; the world has its troubles, but there are no major combat operations sending American soldiers home in caskets in numbers sufficient to capture the nation’s attention. The next election will be a values election—specifically, it will be a referendum on Trump’s values—and voters appear eager to register their dissatisfaction with them.
Democratic energy isn’t sufficient to explain the party’s string of impressive victories in the last year. Republicans are depressed, and who can blame them? The GOP has squandered its period of ascendancy, scuttling the ambitious agenda set by Paul Ryan in late 2016 and managing to secure only a scaled-back tax code reform package by the skin of their teeth. On a near-daily basis, Republican voters are told by their trusted entertainers and lawmakers that Donald Trump cannot succeed, not with a seditious deep state “conspiracy” undermining his presidency from within. No wonder the GOP is depressed.
If Trump is depressing GOP voters and energizing Democrats, then the solution to the problem seems easy: “dump Trump.” That’s Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis’s suggestion. But Donald Trump wasn’t imposed on the losing GOP candidate in Pennsylvania’s special election, Rick Saccone. The GOP candidate ran as “Trump before Trump.” On issues like tax cuts as well as steel and aluminum tariffs, Saccone wrapped himself in the #MAGA flag. Perhaps most portentously, the losing candidate needed the president to parachute into the district to campaign on his behalf. He might regret that decision today.
At a typically madcap campaign-style appearance in Pennsylvania this weekend, Donald Trump did what he does best: make it about himself. He attacked Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and called NBC News host Chuck Todd a “son of a bitch.” He said Washington D.C. was full of “evil” people. He mocked dignified presidential comportment, calling it boring and declaring his disdain for impulse control. He riffed on the cable news shows he hates. He attacked his reality show competitors, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart. He called Maxine Waters a “low-IQ individual.” He mistakenly claimed that he won a majority of women in 2016. In sum, the president made a spectacle of himself, and the national press coverage of what should have been a micro-targeted event reflected that.
These rallies yield diminishing returns for Republican candidates, but that doesn’t mean they can afford to disinvest. They energize the pro-Trump electorate in the districts in which they are set, but they also energize Democrats—maybe even more than they do GOP voters—both locally and nationally. Republican candidates cannot afford to discourage their base voters by failing to display sufficient fealty to the president or his movement, and Donald Trump is unlikely to shrink into the shadows and let Republican candidates run against him. So the GOP is stuck with their president, even if he’s a weight around their ankles.
Pretty soon, the bill for this Faustian bargain will come due. Already, you can see reliable Trump boosters like Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham making their peace with Conor Lamb as the kind of Democrat with whom Donald Trump can forge a productive working relationship. For a movement built around “winning” rather than ideas, that is not a difficult intellectual leap to make. If Democrats perform this well in November of 2018, the morning-after narrative will not be that voters handed the GOP a “shellacking” or a “thumping.” No, the results will be hailed as a boon to Trumpism. At last, the establishment shills in the GOP will have been cast off, making room for the kind of protectionism, isolationism, and statism that were the centerpiece policy proposals of Donald Trump’s campaign. #MAGA is endlessly flexible.
As for the GOP, this is the bed they’ve made.
