- Republicans are facing a “no-win situation” after Trump’s presidency, experts told Insider.
- How do they satisfy Trump supporters, avoid alienating moderate Republicans and build the base?
- And the biggest question on the minds of Republican lawmakers is what Trump’s next role will be within the party.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
During the 2016 presidential primaries, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham made a now infamous forecast for his party: “If we nominate Trump, we will be destroyed … and we deserve it.”
The senior senator from South Carolina seemed to be referring to that fall’s general election, in which case he was wrong. Donald Trump, a real estate tycoon who became a reality show star, won the election as a Republican candidate.
But in a broader sense, Graham may have been right, at least according to some experts who now say the Republican Party is in a precarious position.
“They are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Jonathan Krasno, professor of political science at Binghamton University in New York, told Insider after the deadly riot at the United States Capitol. He described it as a “no-win situation” for the GOP.
Do they appease Trump’s diehard supporters at the risk of alienating moderate Republicans? Or do they distance themselves from Trump and risk losing the most enthusiastic segment of the party base?
Experts told Insider that the Republican Party made a short-term calculation based on Trump’s popularity among party voters, but now, especially after the Capitol siege, only time will tell how that calculation will end.
Trump’s Grand Old Party
Trump, perhaps unlike any politician before him, dominated his party.
“For the first time, in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican Party platform was whatever that guy in the White House says,” Kevin Kosar, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-editor of “Congress Overpressed,” said Insider.
Trump basically set the party’s agenda for the entire time he held power, even when that agenda contradicted traditional republicanism, and even though many lawmakers initially criticized him. Graham, for example, ended up becoming one of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.
And while lawmakers may have different reasons for sympathizing with Trump, the simplest explanation is that he was popular with voters while strongly criticizing any form of dissent. “Republicans felt they needed to align themselves,” said Kosar.
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Supporting the president boiled down to a political movement by some in Congress who knew that many of his constituents voted for him, especially during a time when the chambers of Congress perpetually feel at odds because of the relatively small majority.
“House and Senate control has fluctuated between Democrats and Republicans more quickly in the past 20 years than at any time in the 20th century,” said Kosar. “Because it is at stake, incentives are strongly oriented, particularly in the Chamber of Deputies, to think about two-year increments.”
In addition to worrying about losing Republican seats, individual lawmakers were also concerned about being “primary” or challenged by another Republican candidate who could pledge allegiance to Trump and get the president’s own endorsement.
The perceived short-term gains were sufficient for many Republican lawmakers to adopt Trump, but they came at a cost, according to Kosar.
A divided party
In an Ipsos / Axios poll conducted after the Capitol riot on January 6, 56% of Republicans interviewed described themselves as “traditional Republicans”, while only 36% called themselves “supporters of Donald Trump”.
In the November elections, Trump outperformed the Republican Party in general. Split tickets, especially in the suburbs, contributed to Trump losing the election, even as Republicans won 11 seats in the House.
Supporters of the president cited this fact to support unfounded allegations of widespread electoral fraud, although Krasno says the reality is that many traditional Republicans simply do not love the president.
That’s why, according to Krasno, focusing on appeasing Trump’s loyal supporters can be detrimental to the Republican Party in the long run.
“That base is not enough for them to win elections,” said Krasno.
But unlike most presidents who tend to take a back seat after leaving office, it is clear that Trump has no intention of doing so and will likely afford the possibility of a 2024 run for the Republican Party for years.
Because of that, “everything remains a kind of test of loyalty,” said Krasno.
“Republican politicians recognize that if Trump continues to do everything about a referendum on him, they will have to choose one group or another,” he said.
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However, Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, told Insider that the election shows that the party as a whole is still embracing Trump’s ideals, if not the man.
“Trump himself lost, but Trumpism didn’t,” she said. “Trump took advantage of this anger that had been building for some time, among a band of American audiences who felt very ignored.”
As long as some Republican lawmakers continue to win by appealing to the crowd, they will continue to embrace Trump, Dagnes said.
The issue for the party as a whole then, she says, is to satisfy the “Trumpy wing” and the “non-Trumpy” wing of the party enough to win a majority in Congress and, eventually, the White House.
While some Republicans appeared to be following this line during the Trump years, the consequences of the Capitol revolt are likely to change that, as some moderates feel even more opposed to Trump than before.
Republicans attacking Trump
Some Republican politicians have already started to turn against the president.
Ten House Republicans voted with Democrats to impeach Trump, making it the most bipartisan impeachment in US history. And while most Senate Republicans, including leader Mitch McConnell, voted on Tuesday to declare the impeachment trial of an unconstitutional former president, five Republicans did not support the move.
Prior to that vote, McConnell did not publicly say how he would vote at the trial and told his colleagues that his choice should be a vote of conscience.
And last week, McConnell, who gave in to Trump’s electoral fraud allegations in the fall without initially acknowledging Biden’s victory, came out and explicitly blamed Trump for inciting the crowd that attacked the Capitol.
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Krasno said that McConnell, and others like him, are buying time to avoid definitively declaring themselves for or against the president.
Federal officials said they are investigating “significant cases of crimes related to sedition and conspiracy” after the Capitol rebellion, and there is still the possibility that Trump may face legal consequences that could alienate some Republican Party voters even further from the former president.
“They are all waiting to see what this is,” Krasno said of Republicans in Congress.
One example he gave was related to reports that Trump resisted calls to send the National Guard to the Capitol during the breach, resulting in then Vice President Mike Pence taking the lead and doing so himself.
“If there is a big judgment on paper to prove this, it can be very damaging,” said Krasno.
A GOP financing problem
Even if the party managed to keep Trump’s voters engaged without alienating moderates further, the Republican Party would have to face another significant obstacle: fundraising for the campaign.
In the wake of the Capitol siege, Amazon, Walmart and other corporate giants announced that they would suspend contributions to politicians who supported the president’s challenge to election results.
Due in part to a younger base that embraces donating to online campaigns, Democrats fared better with raising small dollar funds, says Krasno. Meanwhile, Republicans rely more heavily on raising big dollars from super PACs and corporate donors.
“If these people start to leave, you will have serious problems,” said Krasno of the GOP.
Keeping the party together in a way that satisfies Trump supporters, moderate Republicans and corporate donors will be virtually impossible, due to Trump’s ability to leverage his power over much of the party, Krasno said.
“How do you survive as a Republican who wants the support of corporate America,” he said, “and the support of the people who are most enthusiastic about Trump?”
An uncertain future
The biggest question at the top of the minds of Republican lawmakers is what Trump’s role will be in the party that moves forward.
“At the end of the day, it wasn’t the people in Washington who elected President Trump,” Matt Terrill, a partner at Firehouse Strategies and former chief of staff for Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, told Insider. “But its ability to persuade grassroots voters.”
What Republican lawmakers want to know, he said, is where those voters are and how they feel. This will determine not only how big Trump’s role in the Republican Party will be, but also how other lawmakers may or may not adopt the former president.
Terrill said that only time will answer these questions, but lawmakers will be watching polls and listening carefully to voters to find out.
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He also argued that the 2020 election was not the “explosive” race that many had predicted, although Republicans lost the White House and the Senate. In addition to getting seats in the Chamber, they also won some important Senate contests and performed well at the state and local levels.
So while Terrill agrees that the challenge at the head of the party is to maintain the base and at the same time increase it, he says it is still unclear what voters stand for Trump and other party concerns.
The other, and perhaps more difficult, question that the Republican Party has to answer is existential: who are we without Trump?
The role that presidents play in US political parties has evolved a lot over the 20th century, according to Kosar. He says the president used to be a “party creature”, but over time he became the “de facto party leader”, something that Trump was able to achieve on a whole new level.
During Trump’s years, some traditional Republican Party values have even fallen by the wayside, Kosar said.
“Anti-free trade, attacking big technology, alienating our international allies, retreating from NATO. This was new for the Republican Party,” he said. “Now that he’s not here, they have to find out what they stand for.”
It is possible that the Republican Party will rebuild itself around resistance to the Biden-Harris government’s agenda, experts said, in a similar way to how the party existed during Obama’s presidency.
But if they want to keep Trump enthusiasts and Republicans moderate while also building on the ground, resistance to Democrats may not be enough.