THE ORANGE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Can DONALD TRUMP save the Republican Party? Or will his controversial presidency lead to a massive GOP DEFEAT in 2018?
The new deal has been halted,”
The New York Times decreed on November 10, 1938, two days after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered a disastrous defeat in a midterm congressional election. “TAXPAYERS REVOLT,” the accompanying headline said.
Roosevelt had campaigned vigorously for candidates who supported his progressive policies, which vastly expanded federal powers to lower unemployment. His message to voters: Obstructionists and “outspoken reactionaries” in Congress—in particular those from his own party— had to be expunged for the good of the Republic.
Voters’ message to Roosevelt was no more ambiguous than his to them. “This is a democracy and it is
healthy to have a strong opposition,” a small-town minister from Indiana lectured the president in a letter. “No man is always right. You need criticism for your own good.” Democrats lost 72 seats in the House of Representatives and seven in the Senate, and though they kept control of both chambers, anti–new Deal legislators were ascendant, invigorated by victory. Roosevelt would remain president for seven more years, but most of that period would be occupied by World War II. As the Times predicted, the era of freewheeling liberalism was over.
Presidents dread midterm elections, which come two years into their term. A sitting president can expect to lose, on average, 32 seats in the House and two in the Senate. Some have lost much more: Frustrated with the corrupt administration of Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, voters in 1874 handed 96 House seats to Democrats. Twenty years later, voters displeased with Grover Cleveland’s handling of the Panic of 1893 rewarded Republicans with 116 House seats. The scope of that differential has not been surpassed since.
Barack Obama’s first midterm, in 2010, was also a dark night for the Democratic soul. Although they managed to keep the Senate, Republicans, powered by the Tea Party movement, won 63 seats in the House of Representatives, in what Obama acknowledged was a “shellacking.”
Some believe that an Obama- or even Grantsized loss awaits President Donald Trump when he faces his own midterm test in November. His average approval rating for the first year in office, 38.4 percent, is the lowest in American history. Whether
“The left is going to show up. They will crawl over BROKEN GLASS in November to vote.”
maligning the FBI for investigating his presidential campaign or threatening North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on Twitter, defending a senior aide accused of hitting his wives or berating immigration from “shithole” countries, Trump has shattered every expectation of how a president should behave. Some people are thrilled, convinced that only a singular figure like Trump could rescue the moribund institutions of the federal government, in large part by breaking them. But judging by his popularity, or lack thereof, many more are mortified.
Democrats are accordingly preparing to make the midterm election such a devastating referendum that Trump’s presidency never recovers. They believe they can not only win the House but even retake the Senate, where conditions are more challenging. Were they to fully seize control of Capitol Hill, Democrats could fulfill a dream liberals have yearned to realize since January 20, 2017: the impeachment of Trump and his subsequent removal from office. “The left is going to show up,” warned Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, in a recent speech. He is facing a resilient challenger in Beto O’rourke, an energetic Democrat who has raised more money than Cruz. “They will crawl over broken glass in November to vote.”
Whether the GOP can win in ’ 18 remains a matter of vigorous debate, as does what message Republicans hope to win on. Trump, however, doesn’t seem especially worried about the glass-crawlers. “I have a feeling that we’re going to do incredibly well in ’18,” Trump said during a recent rally in Cincinnati.
His supporters in the Republican Party’s base don’t seem concerned either. On February 21, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, convened outside Washington to celebrate Trump and his accomplishments. Conservatives know that Trump will fulfill their wishes only if bolstered by a compliant Congress. If even one of the chambers turns blue, the right’s aspirations will be entirely nullified.
Just a few miles north of CPAC’S convention halls, in the political consultancies of Washington, D.C., establishment Republicans fear they’re approaching an autumn of political discontent. Democrats are reportedly planning a coordinated assault on as many as 101 Republican-controlled seats in the House, where they need only 24 to take control. If the Democrats are not yet organized, they are certainly energized, less by specific policies than by their general loathing of Trump.
“The 2018 midterm election is going to be a forest fire of such a magnitude for the Republican Party,” says John Weaver, a veteran Republican consultant who worked on the presidential campaigns of Senator John Mccain of Arizona. “My only hope is that through fire comes the rejuvenation of life.”
‘Great Republican Hair’
trump adores the role of the outcast and underdog, a figure shunned by the elites but embraced by the people. That was the pose he struck as a candidate with few endorsements and legions of detractors. It was also an attitude central to his courtship of the Republican base, an effort that began with his appearance at CPAC in 2011.
The centerpiece of the convention is its straw poll, in which conservatives select their ideal presidential candidate. In 2010, their choice was Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas. The following year, Trump decided it was his duty to inform conservatives what a poor choice that was. The 75-year-old libertarian, Trump said in his first conference address, “just has zero chance of getting elected.” While he didn’t announce a run for the presidency, the erstwhile Democrat made a pitch remarkably similar to the one he’d issue from the lobby of Trump Tower four years later. “If I run, and if I win, this country will be respected again,” he said, concluding his speech with a vow: “Our country will be great again.”
Paul easily won the 2011 CPAC straw poll, while Trump as a write-in candidate, earned infinitesimal support. The Week deemed Trump one of the conference’s “losers.”
But like a persistent suitor determined to make his case, Trump kept returning to CPAC: in 2013 (“We have to take back our jobs from China”), 2014 (“With immigration, you better be smart, and you better be tough”) and 2015 (“Our roads are crumbling; everything’s crumbling”). He didn’t go in 2016, canceling his appearance after reports of a planned walkout. Some cheered the news, which confirmed to them that Trump was, in the words of one attendee, not “a true conservative.”
Last year, CPAC took place just a month after Trump’s inauguration, with the president and his
allies eager to tamp down reports of dysfunction and discord. Everyone was getting along in the White House, and the White House was getting along with Capitol Hill. The right was united, the left in wounded disarray. “President Trump brought together the party and the conservative movement,” said then–chief of staff Reince Priebus. Sitting next to him was chief political strategist Steve Bannon, who agreed: “We understand that you can come together to win.”
Bannon and Priebus were ousted last summer; neither is scheduled to speak at CPAC 2018, which begins on February 21. An estimated 10,000 conservatives will gather in National Harbor, Maryland. Some will come in Make America Great Again hats, others in Brooks Brothers suits. Trump will be there, as will an appropriately eclectic array of luminaries, from British nationalist Nigel Farage to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.
Overseeing the event will be Matt Schlapp, who became the head of the American Conservative Union in 2014. I met Schlapp in the organization’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. A cheerful 50-year-old, he resembles a suburban dad who likes to end his evening with Fox News and a Bud Light. In fact, he is one of the most well-connected men in Washington. His wife, Mercedes, is a high-ranking communications official in the White House. And he prefers martinis.
Schlapp is not worried about Trump, and he is not worried about what Trump might do to Republican prospects in November. He evinces something approaching pity for those who think that “great Republican hair,” as he puts it, is all it takes to sell a candidate to the conservative base. During the Republican presidential primary, some of Trump’s 16 competitors weren’t especially eager to make their way to National Harbor in 2015, Schlapp recalls. “Some of those campaigns were just sweating bullets at the idea of even stepping on that stage,” he says. “If you say you’re a conservative but are uncomfortable talking to conservatives, that’s weird.” Trump displayed no such hesitation. He couldn’t afford to.
Yet neither Schlapp nor anyone else I spoke to could articulate what Trumpism was, let alone how Trump accorded with conservatism, compassionate or otherwise. “There is no such thing as ‘Trumpism,’ ” the conservative editor Roger Kimball wrote last year. Instead, there are things that Trump has done and that conservatives happen to approve of: giving lifetime federal bench appointments to conservative jurists; passing a $1.5 trillion tax cut; the systematic rollback of the federal regulatory infrastructure. All this, Schlapp says, has made the Republican base “ecstatic.” So has what
Trump has SHATTERED every expectation of how a president should BEHAVE.
supporters see as the masterful trolling of liberals and the media.
But the ecstasy of the base is the agony of the mainstream. These Republicans believe they have handed their party to someone who is only a conservative of convenience, one whom party leaders frequently have to scold—on the treatment of women, race, nuclear gamesmanship—as if he were a wayward understudy. Some even welcome a Democratic wave, should it remind the GOP what it stands for. “It’s better for us to lose power for a generation than to continue this fraud,” says Bruce Bartlett, an adviser to Ronald Reagan who has become a member of the Never Trump brigade.
Schlapp dismisses the Never Trumpers as false prophets of political doom who have intellectualized their own irrelevance. “They just have gotten everything wrong,” he says. Trump’s victory is “an indictment of everything they’ve done—and they don’t like that. It’s uncomfortable.” For all the laments about Trump’s lack of genuine conservative convictions, the GOP has become the party of Trump. Nearly 75 percent of Republicans support a border wall with Mexico; only 36 percent of Republicans support free trade.
Trump is an inimitable act, a set of flagrant contradictions that somehow hold together. Schlapp wants to reassure potential candidates that they don’t have to go the full Trump. They probably shouldn’t even try. “Take the parts you like,” he counsels. For example, run on the tax cuts, but maybe not on the Access Hollywood tape.
Back when Trump’s approval ratings were languishing in the 30s, there was little for Republicans to like, and even less to take. Now, the president has climbed back to the safer zone of the 40s. The generic ballot—which simply asks voters if they prefer Democrats or Republicans—saw a 13-point Democratic lead shrink in half (it has since risen to 6.9 points). Brian Walsh, a Republican consultant who runs a pro-trump super PAC, says a generic battle that continued to favor Democrats by only 5 points would portend only a “bumpy night” for Republicans, whereas anything like a 12-point advantage on the generic would be “devastating.” Because redistricting (i.e., gerrymandering) conducted
in 2011 heavily favored Republicans, explains veteran University of Virginia pollster Larry Sabato, “Democrats must win a clear majority of the popular vote by 5 to 6 percent nationally to have a good chance to take the House.”
In 2016, Trump’s chances of becoming president looked devastating too. But by beating Clinton, he seemed to prove that he could transcend history, demography, even destiny. And if he did it then, why can’t he do it again?
It is this promise of victory that unites the right behind Trump. It may be what defines Trumpism, this notion that he will somehow always elude defeat, especially when defeat seems certain— whether it is the November midterms or a CPAC straw poll, which he has still never won.
An Artful Combover
whit ayres is one of the establishment Republicans that Schlapp believes are fated to “misunderestimate” Trump, to borrow George W. Bush’s famous malapropism. A tall, courtly Southerner—on a business card, his name in full: Q. Whitfield Ayres—he carries himself with the bearing of a country judge. His consultancy, North Star Research, is based in a stately federalist row house in Alexandria, Virginia. Hanging on the foyer wall are photographs of Republican senators on whose campaigns Ayres has worked: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida, Bob Corker of Tennessee. Today, they happen to be among the GOP’S loudest Trump dissenters on Capitol Hill.
Ayres did not think Trump was going to be president. On September 23, 2016, with Hillary Clinton ahead by 6 points in national polls and Trump seemingly engaged in protracted self-immolation, he voiced his frustrations on a CNN podcast. “We need to adapt to the new America, not by changing our principles,” Ayres said, “but by applying those principles to a new kind of voter.”
In 2013, the Republican Party published an “autopsy report” on the 2012 presidential election. The report warned that Mitt Romney’s loss to Obama was the symptom of a deeper illness within the GOP. “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country,” the authors wrote. “We sound increasingly out of touch.”
“Ronald Reagan couldn’t win a Republican PRIMARY today.”
Five years later, the autopsy remains a divisive issue on the right—either a prophetic truth or the gloomy product of malcontents. Trump’s supporters say he has rendered the report irrelevant. “The autopsy talked about a lot of things,” Schlapp argues, “but it never talked about the left-behind Americans.” To him, Republicans have spent too much time running away from their own base, desperate to court constituencies that were never truly persuadable. The result was inevitable, embarrassing: Newt Gingrich cutting a television advertisement about global warming with Nancy Pelosi, Romney promising to open his “binders full of women.” As far as Schlapp is concerned, Trump reminded Republicans who they really were. Having tired of great Republican hair, they found salvation in an artful combover.
When I told Ayres about Schlapp’s argument, his lips wavered with something between dismay and disgust. “He’s whistling past the graveyard,” Ayres says. For him, data are destiny, and the destiny of a Republican Party that refuses to evolve is doom. In a sunlit conference room, he clicked through a Powerpoint presentation showing data from recent special elections and opinion polls. This had the distinct feel of a cardiologist examining the results of an inauspicious heart exam.
The most revealing slide was in a deck prepared by Republican analyst Adrian Gray. It looks like an alligator’s widening mouth. The upper “jaw” is an orange line that shows how people felt about the economy. The line rises, indicating people believe the economy is in excellent shape. There is also some indication that the GOP tax cuts late last year are becoming more popular, or at least not quite as unpopular as cholera.
But there is another line, a dark green lower jaw, which sags. This is the president’s approval rating, and the most troubling thing about it is how out of sync its gentle downward slope is with the growing economic optimism. Trump began his presidency with a 45 percent approval rating, according to Gallup. Only recently has it climbed back to that plateau, even as the nation approaches full employment, the economy grows at an impressive 2.3 percent pace, and the Dow Jones has seen 96 record closings under Trump. (More recently, there has been a sharp downward correction to the stock market, though economists do not believe this portends a broader slowdown.) And while the president’s approval rating has sometimes risen, it has not done so in a consistent manner.
“Virtually every president’s job approval has been driven by the state of the economy,” Ayres points out, but Trump “has severed the traditional link between presidential job approval and economic well-being.” That lends some credence to the president’s argument that he doesn’t get sufficient credit for the economy, though he may be the one who prevents that credit from being tendered. Trump “keeps distracting people from all the good news with his various tweets and conflicts and battles,” Ayres says. “President Trump’s job approval is being driven by his conduct and behavior in office.”
Economic renewal was the greater part of Trump’s appeal. Those who voted for him have repeatedly indicated that they don’t care about his behavior toward women, his troubling abrogation of norms, the ethical lapses of his Cabinet members. Now, however, they appear to have taken the economy largely for granted. “We really are about to learn if ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ is still a rule or just a guideline,” says Rick Wilson, one of the Republican establishment’s louder Trump critics.
Ayres believes he knows the answer, and it isn’t the one the White House wants to hear. He points to the numbers behind Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam’s defeat of Republican candidate Ed Gillespie in the 2017 Virginia governor’s race. That election was decided in the suburbs of northern Virginia, whose upper-middle-class residents have stood to gain significantly from Trump’s economic approach. Unlike the laid-off steelworkers in Pennsylvania, they benefit when the Dow climbs. If they work for a transnational corporation, they could see profit from Trump’s deregulatory push, as well as his tax reform.
Yet the state of the economy proved immaterial on election night. In Fairfax County, outside of Washington, D.C., 254,919 Democrats cast their ballot for Northam, nearly doubling their turnout from the 2009 Virginia governor’s race, which Republican Bob Mcdonnell won. In Loudon County, Democratic tallies nearly tripled from the 2009 number to 69,788 in 2017. For many of these voters, a ballot for Northam was a ballot against Trump. According to exit polls, 34 percent of Virginians chose solely to oppose the president,
not because they cared especially about the gubernatorial contest. Nearly the entirety of this resistance vote (97 percent) went to Northam.
Bannon likes to say that a nation is more than an economy. Voters who oppose Trump are coming to the same conclusion. Their retirement funds may be doing just fine, but their moral objections are too pressing to ignore. “I’m not convinced that voters are going to be so enamored of the economy that they are going overlook and forgive everything else that has turned them off for the last two years,” says Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Recalling Barry Goldwater’s cataclysmic defeat in the 1964 presidential race, Steele is troubled by what he sees as the party’s return to the intransigent extremism that marked the Arizona senator’s appeal. “Ronald Reagan,” he laments, “couldn’t win a Republican primary today.”
Tangled Up in Blue
conservatives are still trying to figure out Trump. Liberals did so many months ago. For the left, Trump is a cancer to be excised from the American body politic. Anger at the president has united the left like no policy proposal ever could. “Voters who are angry tend to vote in midterms,” observes Stuart Rothenberg of the political news outlet Inside Elections.
Websites devoted to counting down the time to the 2020 presidential election have become surprisingly popular (as of this writing: 992 days, 9 hours, 10 minutes and 29 seconds). Until then, the easiest way for Democrats to punish Trump will be at the 2018 midterms, which take place in 264 days, 21 hours, 9 minutes and 13 seconds.
This anger should trouble Republicans. “There’s almost nothing you can do to stop a wave,” says pollster Sabato. “It’s just beyond your control.” Republicans intend to spend the next several months trying to slow, if not entirely halt, this predicted Democratic onslaught. Such efforts will only intensify as the spring primaries approach.
In January, the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch invited top donors to their political
groups, Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, to Indian Wells, California, for an annual summit at which the midterms were a primary topic of discussion. The Kochs plan to spend $400 million on the midterms, $20 million of it to make the case for Trump's tax plan passed last year.
As Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign so aptly reminded, wealthy donors can’t bolster a lackluster candidate. And the Republicans are facing a candidate problem. While the Democrats are eager to take the fight to Trump, many GOP incumbents are electing not to fight at all. More than 30 Republicans have decided to retire from the House. Several are doing so because they face allegations of sexual misconduct; others are prevented by term limits from keeping their committee chairmanships.
Virtually everyone I spoke to agreed that there was ONE FACTOR that could save Republicans in the midterm elections: DEMOCRATS.
A good number, though, appear to have concluded that they aren’t nimble enough to dance without tumbling between a furious Democratic electorate and an unpredictable president who could scuttle an election in rural Iowa with a single tweet. “They fear for their elections—or the job has just become so shitty,” says former Reagan adviser Bartlett.
Democrats have reason to feel encouraged. Long derided for their lack of attention to down-ballot races, they have now won 36 state legislature special elections since 2016, including in districts that went for Trump. Republicans have won only four.
Those results are one reason why Corey Lewandowski is concerned. Having served as Trump’s first campaign manager until his firing in the summer of 2016, Lewandowski retains enormous influence with the president, despite having no official White House role.
When he came to the White House in December for a political strategy session, the meeting devolved into a shouting match instigated by Lewandowski. “Look, my message to the president, his team, was that it has to be prepared for where things have the potential to go in November,” Lewandowski tells me with a downward thrust of his index finger. Lewandowski’s target that day in December was Bill Stepien, the White House political director. “The White House is not currently structured to allow Bill to be successful,” he says. “He doesn’t have a 20-year relationship with the president, OK? He doesn’t have enough clout.”
Officials I spoke to at the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senate Committee disagree with this assessment.as does Stepien. “There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic” in November, he says. He and his team of 12 met with 116 candidates last year, in a process he compared to dating; they have begun to make endorsement recommendations to
Trump. “Candidates matter,” he tells me over and over again, almost like a mantra.
The reference was obviously to Roy Moore, the former chief justice of Alabama who won the GOP primary in a 2017 special election for the Senate, only to lose in the general to Doug Jones. Many Republicans regard the race as aberrant because of allegations of sexual abuse against Moore—allegations so abhorrent that they allowed a Democrat to win in one of the nation’s reddest states.
Resisting the Resistance
virtually everyone i spoke to agreed that there is one factor that could save Republicans in the midterm elections: Democrats. “Democrats are always holistically bad at elections outside safe seats, and tend to latch onto issues that only their base loves,” says Wilson, the Republican consultant with strong anti-trump views. For many Democrats today, the main issue motivating them to vote is the possibility of impeaching Trump. California billionaire Tom Steyer has stoked that wish, ostensibly collecting money (and email addresses) for an impeachment push, even as many members of Congress have urged him to quit what they see as his quixotic, self-serving campaign.
“If you’re a liberal with any interest in serving in Congress, you may never have a better chance than now,” Alex Seitz-wald of NBC News recently wrote. The resistance is energized, but that energy may be difficult for the Democratic establishment to meaningfully harness. A surge of liberal candidates could make for expensive, contentious primaries that pull the Democratic Party to the left, making it more difficult to attract voters in moderate-leaning “swing” districts. Those are the very districts Democrats need to win.
Nor is it clear how anger at Trump will translate into an electoral strategy. Writing for the progressive blog Daily Kos, Democratic activist Nate Lerner recently warned that the party lacks a message around which candidates could unite. “While it may seem obvious to state that Democrats need a defining vision and message,” he wrote, “all evidence thus far suggests one is not coming anytime soon. Too many key rising Democratic stars are focused on their own presidential aspirations, rather than the rebuilding of the party.”
It doesn’t help that Democrats will have trou- ble breaching what NPR’S Mara Liasson calls “the mighty fortress of redistricting.” The 2010 midterms saw huge Republican gains in both state houses and governors’ mansions. They used these to redraw congressional districts in ways that over-represented Republicans and under-represented Democrats. In a state thus gerrymandered, Democrats can win the overall popular vote but still lose House seats, simply because their votes count less.
Democratic fundraising has been anemic too. The Republican National Committee raised $132.5 million in 2017, versus the Democratic National Committee’s $65.9 million. And the party is riven by conflicts between Obama centrists and Sanders progressives. “They have never recovered from their primary,” Stepien says. “They have no party leader.” DNC Chairman Thomas Perez has vowed a “50-state strategy” to retake legislative majorities across the nation. Some think the plan is “empty rhetoric,” as one Democrat said to the Washington
Examiner, because it is predicated on grants to states, not direct DNC involvement in races.
Stepien, too, derides that effort. “I love that the Democrats are pursuing a 50-state strategy,” he says, adding that such a strategy would be inefficient. “There are some states that are not worthwhile investments for a political party to make.”
‘One-man Rule’
as roosevelt discovered, a president almost always loses in the midterms because voters want to remind him of their power to check his own. That is especially true when his party controls both chambers of Congress. “I am not willing, in the search for efficient management, to establish oneman rule in this country,” Senator Edward Burke said ahead of the 1938 midterms.
At the Cincinnati rally early in February, Trump said there would be no “complacency” in his approach to the midterms. It is not clear what he means, though it could have been a reference to his previously stated desire to campaign for candidates as many as five days a week.
And there is still the business of governing, however less glamorous it may be compared with the thrill of campaigning. Most candidates do not want the race to be about Trump because they can’t imitate him. Sometimes, they can’t
“This is a DEMOCRACY and it is healthy to have a strong OPPOSITION. No man is always right.”
explain him either. The president can help by giving them something else to campaign on.
The “policy” part of the equation in the White House today belongs to Marc Short, its director of legislative affairs. A longtime adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, he wants to corral Republicans behind Trump’s message, so that they in turn have more than just last year’s tax changes to run on.
The president’s biggest priorities are immigration, the centerpiece of which is a border wall with Mexico estimated to cost at least $25 billion, and an infrastructure plan that could cost $1.5 trillion, with much of that cost absorbed by state governments. But Trump will need the support of Democrats in both cases. If he doesn’t get it, he could face a second year without any significant legislative accomplishments.
Short acknowledges that Democrats are unlikely to help Trump, even on issues they nominally agree on, like infrastructure spending. “They are entrenched in their opposition to this president,” he says. “They want to be more of a resist movement to stop anything that this president can do.” This was the posture of Republicans when they tried to make Obama a one-term president. They decided that no policy compromise was worth ceding a political victory. Democrats are now making the same calculation, waging that voters will reward combativeness more than compromise.
Meanwhile, each day brings a new poll and, with it, new suggestions about what the American people want and what politicians should expect. History is pretty clear about what we should expect. Then again, in politics as in all else, we want to believe ourselves superior to statistical trends. So we look for assurance in outliers, take comfort from the counterintuitive prognostications of pundits.
In the fall of 2009, exactly a year before Republicans stormed the House, Democrats lost gubernatorial special elections in New Jersey and Virginia. Some took these as the portent of a midterm rout. In The New York Times, Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira assured that no such cataclysm was coming. “If any repudiation is going on, perhaps it is of the conservative wing of the Republican Party,” he wrote, just as the Tea Party movement was gathering strength across the land. And then there was the title of Teixeira’s op-ed, perhaps its most memorable feature: “Relax, Democrats.”