Has the Republican fever broken?

The midterm election turned out to be a referendum — just not on President Joe Biden and the Democrats. How else to explain the mismatch between two crucial numbers: Biden’s approval rating is the lowest for any president at this point in a term, and the public’s view of the economy is in the dumps. When times seem bad — Bill Clinton in 1994, Barack Obama in 2010, Donald Trump in 2018 — the party in the White House usually gets a shellacking. But this time, the Democrats seem to have had the best showing of any party in that position since 9/11 shored up the Republicans in 2002.

So, what was the vote about (or, rather, against)? It’s difficult to be sure, because exit polls are hopelessly skewed and unreliable. But it does seem likely to have been about two things: abortion and, more broadly, Trump. Voters did turn out in large numbers to vote on five state initiatives, and all favored liberal attitudes on abortion, even in dark-red Montana. Florida Gov. Ron Desantis’ effort to find a compromise by allowing abortions for the first 15 weeks appears to have allowed him to escape any punishment on the issue. And only in places where abortion rights were totally secure, such as New York state, did the election seem to turn to factors such as the economy and crime. And as Nate Cohn explained on The New York Times’ Daily podcast, wherever threats to democracy (in the form of Trumpist “Stop the Steal” candidates) or abortion were up for vote, Democrats excelled.

That brings us to Trump. Most of his favored candidates lost. The most egregious MAGA zealots seem to have turned voters off. In fact, it’s hard not to see the midterm elections as one more verdict by the public against Trump. They turned out in higher-than-usual numbers in 2018, 2020 and 2022. As David Frum writes in The Atlantic, “Trump led his party from loss to loss. He lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost the House in 2018. He lost the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2020. He lost the Senate in 2021.” And yet, the Republican Party has so far remained in thrall to him.

Many of the critiques of the GOP and its leaders get it somewhat wrong. The party is not filled with authoritarians (though many do exist). It’s filled with cowards. Despite the pose of machismo, the swaggering strut and the tough talk, in fact the party is pervaded by fear and weakness, a terror of confronting the big bully in the room. Consider what happened with Jan. 6. Most Republican leaders, including the two senior-most congressional leaders, saw it for what it was, an unprecedented assault on democracy. They privately and even sometimes publicly spoke out against it. And then they worried that Trump still had the base with him, tucked in their tails and either quickly reversed course and became lapdogs (Kevin Mccarthy) or quietly dropped the subject altogether (Mitch Mcconnell).

It’s always hard for politicians to break with an activist and energetic base. It took the Republican Party years to speak out against Joseph Mccarthy. It took a while before Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were willing to distance themselves from the John Birch Society. In both cases it did happen in the end. It was easier in those days when the party was more hierarchical.

But it took the voice of the most influential conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., with his persistent attacks on the Birchers, to provide cover for a politician like Reagan. Today, Fox News does the opposite, persistently trying to stir up the anger, the hate and the conspiracy theories. Unlike Buckley, Fox News is not motivated by the national interest but by profit.

Will the fever break this time? Obama predicted that after his 2012 election, the GOP would free itself of its increasingly extreme elements (such as the tea party). But it never happened. While there have been opportunities to course correct, the party remains utterly enamored of and captive to its most extreme members and the media outlets that sing their praises. Remember that even as Fox News dominates cable news, its biggest show has 3.4 million viewers out of about 170 million registered voters, just under half of whom are or lean Republican. It is an extreme minority that has cowed the majority into silence.

There have been important Republican leaders who have spoken out against Trump, most prominently Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. Now is the time for them and others who want to save the party to come out and purge it of its extremism. The fever has broken, but if the Republican Party’s doctors willingly continue to behave like cowardly quacks, the patient could easily relapse once again.