The new grand old party
The announcement from Sen. Roy Blunt (RMo.) that he won’t seek re-election does more than create another open seat. It shows that the GOP’s old guard is fast departing, leaving the party’s future very much up for grabs.
Blunt is the fifth Republican senator to declare that he won’t run again, and he’s probably not the last. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin recently said that not running “is probably my preference now,” and 87-year-old Chuck Grassley of Iowa has said he’ll decide whether to run for his eighth term in the fall.
Two other Republicans up for re-election, Sens. Mike Crapo of Idaho and John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, will be 71 years old in 2022 and have not yet declared their intentions. At the current rate, no one should be surprised if one or more of these men decide it’s time to leave.
These decisions will affect the outcome of the midterm elections, as at least two of the retiring senators, Pennsylvania’s Patrick Toomey and North Carolina’s Richard Burr, represent classic swing states. Johnson’s Wisconsin is another partisan battleground that will be tightly contested no matter what he decides.
The other retirements from safely Republican states, however, also probably will be politically important. Each of the retirees is a classic establishment conservative more likely to back Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) than former president Donald Trump. Their replacements might have the opposite inclination.
Alabama’s Senate seat is a case in point. Sen. Richard Shelby was a conservative Democrat before switching parties after the 1994 Republican landslide. The only declared candidate to replace him to date is Lynda Blanchard, a wealthy GOP donor whom Trump appointed as ambassador to former first lady Melania’s home country of Slovenia. Blanchard is running as a Trump-like conservative outsider, going so far in her opening video as to drive a truck with a “Trump-Pence 2020” sticker on the rear windshield.
Other potential contenders are also strong conservatives, albeit perhaps less clearly tied to Trump. Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, a leader in the drive to challenge President Joe Biden’s election on Jan. 6, has said he’s considering joining the race, as has Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill. Both would campaign as conservatives, with Brooks probably playing up his role in challenging the 2020 election to prove his pro-Trump bona fides.
Perhaps the most obvious potential establishment candidate is Katie Boyd Britt, former Shelby chief of staff and the current chief executive of the Business Council of Alabama.
These departures mean that almost the entire GOP Senate caucus will be composed of people elected after the Tea Party helped create the GOP’s current populist nature. Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report notes that after 2022, only 22 percent of the caucus will have been elected before 2010. That number would decline further if Grassley or Crapo chooses to retire.
Virtually all of these recently elected members are either hard-line conservatives or part of the GOP’s reformist wing, or both.
The GOP’s future depends on channeling the current populist Trumpian elements into a vessel that is also welcoming to educated suburban white people who left the party to support Biden. The races to fill safe Senate seats such as Blunt’s will be the first indicator of whether the party can find that sweet spot.