Ohio Republicans after Trump: What’s next?
COLUMBUS – After four-and-a-half years of red “Make America Great Again” caps, raucous rallies and newsmaking tweets, the Republican party no longer belongs to former President Donald Trump.
As Trump moves out of the White House, Ohio Republicans are left to decide whether their embrace of Trump will persist in a state he dominated twice. What policies will they cling to and which rhetoric will they ditch?
Those decisions will reverberate throughout the Buckeye State in the coming years. Both Gov. Mike Dewine and Sen. Rob Portman face re-election bids in 2022, and Trump already hinted at a primary challenge for the GOP governor.
Republicans say they want to hold onto new voters who were attracted to Trump’s brand of populism. Trump accelerated GOP gains in eastern Ohio and the Mahoning Valley that transformed Democratic strongholds into red counties.
“He struck a chord with a lot of people in this part of the country that had been disaffected, that had seen the loss of jobs,” said Columbiana County Republican Party Chairman Dave Johnson.
But they also say they want to ditch the early-morning tweets, personal attacks and vitriol that embodied Trump’s presidency and forced fellow Republicans to either defend or disavow their leader.
Allegiance to Trump, or lack thereof, became a defining characteristic for Republicans from City Hall to the U.S. Capitol, said former state Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-kettering.
“Somehow, it happened that the identity became surrounded around one person,” Lehner said. “The quicker that we can try to figure out what that identity is, what do we stand for outside of the persona of Donald Trump, the quicker the party will heal. As long as it remains divided over loyalty to him, the party will suffer.”
Going forward, the GOP must become more than one person, several Republicans agreed.
Even Ohio Republican Party leader Jane Timken, who won her job with help from Trump and his allies, has hinted that the party must move beyond Trump.
“It is critical to remember that whether it comes to our country or our party, our shared progress and prosperity is never about one person, one candidate or one government official,” Timken wrote in a Jan. 10 email to fellow Republicans.
What the GOP will keep
Republicans will keep the policies and principles that made Trump like any other GOP president: Trade deals that benefit American workers, conservative U.S. Supreme Court picks, progun policies and fewer regulations on everything from the environment to businesses.
“I strongly believe the Trump administration policies are better for Ohio and better for the country, but now is the time to look forward,” Portman told Republican leaders last week.
Even as Dewine rebuked Trump for his role in firing up a violent crowd at the U.S. Capitol, the Republican governor praised other aspects of Trump’s presidency from trade agreements to conservative court appointees.
“I didn’t always agree with everything he did, but I thought he did a good job,” Dewine said.
Who the GOP wants to keep
Trump’s changes to Ohio’s electorate likely will be enduring, in part because some of them already were in motion before his run for president, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
For example, Kondik pointed out that eastern Ohio already had been growing redder in the 2000s and early 2010s, but Trump accelerated the change and even picked up support in the traditionally blue Mahoning Valley.
“Democrats have to hope that some of them don’t stay in the electorate,” Kondik said. “As it stands right now, the state’s electoral math is definitely tilted to Republicans.”
That electorate includes people from eastern Ohio’s Salem. They watched Deming Pump and the Electric Furnace Company leave their once-thriving city, crippled by what they saw as unfair trade policies, Johnson said. In 2020, voters in that county formed a 25-mile line of trucks, motorcycles and cars waving Trump flags.
“I don’t see that movement, frankly, changing,” Johnson said. “I see it intensifying actually.”
The key question remains: Will they stay if Trump isn’t on the ticket? That’s up to the next slate of Republican candidates.
“Where does the party come down on the issues that are important to the working class?” Lehner asked. “If we could figure out what it is that’s important to them, that they need to be successful, that’s a message that should resonate with that voting bloc.”
What might change
One challenge of moving forward is Republicans haven’t formed a consensus on what Trump meant to the party and to the country. For some, he was a political savior, ushering in a wave of new voters. For others, he was a wrecking ball, demolishing the party’s moral high ground and abandoning long-held principles of civility and statesmanship.
“We cannot afford to be loyal at all costs to a single political figure to the detriment of core principles that have always defined the party and America,” said Clarence Mingo, a former Franklin County auditor who disavowed Trump in 2016.
Mingo called this loyalty a “historical danger” and challenged Republicans to soften their rhetoric, even if Democrats do not.
Even former Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican and Trump ally, acknowledged that the “verbiage of personal destruction and wild allegations has to stop” even while the party projects strength.
While Trump’s policies attracted middle-class voters to the GOP, Mingo said they did not do enough for people in poverty, who are disproportionately people of color.
Mingo said the GOP has to expand its defining issues to speak to race relations, poverty and “an economic agenda that addresses the middle class.”
“I believe that the last four years have set the GOP back at least a decade in terms of acquiring a greater measure of credibility and public commitment to improving race relations,” he said, while also chiding Democrats for using race as a “political tool.”
Ohio Sen. Matt Dolan, R-chagrin Falls, said the Trump Administration was helpful in some ways, such as giving states flexibility on how to operate some programs. But Dolan was critical of Trumps’ rhetoric about the election, linking it to an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and a “vacuum of leadership” on the international stage over the last four years.
“We also have to end our personality-driven politics. We have to end our personality-driven policy,” Dolan said, noting that those were “amplified” under Trump.
What’s next for Trump
It’s not yet clear how large Trump himself will loom over the Republican party in Ohio or in the rest of the country. Will he campaign for – or against – GOP candidates moving forward?
“He’s so unpredictable,” Republican strategist Mark Weaver said. “Donald Trump will try to be relevant but given the social media bans, it’s going to be hard.”
Democrats will continue to focus on Trump as a polarizing figure, but Republicans will likely shift their focus to newly installed President Joe Biden’s overreaching policies and inevitable mistakes, he said.
“Republicans are about to go on offense and Democrats are going to go on defense,” Weaver said.
As for everyone else, Weaver said, “most Americans will turn the page.”