GOP has officially become the Party of Trump
The Republican Party’s post-mortem after Mitt Romney lost his presidential bid to Barack Obama in 2012 was brutally straightforward: Expand the tent or risk extinction. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too,” party leaders wrote.
Regardless of the results Tuesday, that playbook is gone, burned and buried, and it is not going to be easy to retrieve it from the dump. The Republican Party is now the party of President Donald Trump.
The dark politics of anger, division and fear were on display in campaigns across the country this year, as Republican candidates for Congress and governor — and fringe groups who support them — embraced the racially inflammatory brand of politics that Trump unleashed in 2016. With the presidential campaign of 2020 effectively underway Wednesday, there is little reason to think Trump will back away from a tactic that clearly rallies his base.
And as he showed his party in the closing days of the midterms, there may be no way for Republicans to escape his shadow.
“He’s tapped into something really powerful and really ugly in the American electorate,” said Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, “and it’s going to be hard to put that back into the bottle.”
In some respects, the strategy appeared to have worked. In Indiana, Republican Senate candidate Mike Braun crushed the incumbent Democrat, Sen. Joe Donnelly. Braun, a businessman and former state legislator, branded Donnelly “Mexico Joe” and wrapped his arms around Trump, who rallied voters Monday in Indiana by telling them, “If you want more caravans, if you want more crime, vote Democrat tomorrow.”
In Tennessee, another Trump acolyte, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, jumped to a strong lead in her Senate race against Phil