Oh, It’s A Party All Right

Photo by 7beachbum from Tsuruoka, Japan, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Reading the recent piece by Dennis I was musing that I agree with a lot of it, particularly the observations about GOP politicians opposing Trump and then losing… but find there’s a missing contextual piece that’s important enough it was worth writing about.

(Consider this an attempt to restart the old blog-o-sphere where folks spend more time writing posts responding to posts than complaining on Twitter or something.)

The problem that I have with the piece is that it’s… passive.  The problems with the Republican party, as laid out in the piece, are problems that have happened to the GOP.

The problem is that most of those that have spoken out tend to end up out of office.

In a democracy, political parties select candidates, mobilize voters, raise money for candidates and hold government accountable, among other things. These are all duties that the Republican Party used to do. However, over the last few years, they have lost control of each of these functions.

Reforms like the primary system have weakened both major parties, but while it might have damaged the Democrats, it eviscerated the Republicans by driving out moderates and lifting up fringe candidates.

The national party had no way to stop him and the primary system allowed him to win a plurality… But “the party decides” amounted to primary voters who wanted Trump.

Allow me to offer an alternative hypothesis:

The whole existence of Trumpism, and the changes in the GOP since George H.W. Bush left office, have been foreseeable consequences of decisions made by the Republican Party, particularly since 2009.

Moreover, they are ongoing, active decisions upon which the party continues to double-down.

Let’s first talk about primaries.

On the national stage, there’s a significant difference between how states handle national offices representing the state and how Presidential candidates get on the ballot.  But the big note is that the two parties control their own nomination process for how folks get from “I wanna run for President” to the national convention where the actual candidate is chosen.  Back when the 2016 primary cycle was ongoing, there were gobs of articles about the differences between the Democratic primary (a proportional system, where delegates are distributed according to proportional primary results, be they caucuses or open primaries or anything in-between) and the Republican primary (a winner-take-all system, where the candidate with the most votes gets all of the delegates for each state).  There are more than a few posts about that here on this site, with comment threads noting that the Democratic system results in a higher likelihood of a contested nomination at a convention (something that’s almost impossible in the Republican system).  The flip side is that a Republican candidate can become the de facto party nominee while representing a minority of the party, simply by coming out ahead in a list of candidates in early races.  Which is, coincidentally, exactly how Trump got the nomination in 2016.

Did the GOP change its primary rules after 2016?  No.

But that’s just the icing.  The actual cake is the bigger issue.

In 2008, famously, the GOP were concerned with how badly they got trounced in the 2008 election.

But then the economy didn’t recover from the 2007 financial crisis fast enough, and a whole Tea Party movement took hold of the GOP primary cycle in 2008-09.  As per predicable norm, the youth vote turned out in low percentages in the off-cycle election so quite a few of these folks got elected in the 2010 cycle, representing a major coalition in the GOP House.  This was largely, internally to the party, considered a sign of success, even while GOP party identification was declining.

So much a success that when Obama – a reminder this was a sitting President whose approval rating was at or below 45% for most of the 2012 primary election cycle (from June 6, 2011 to Sep 2012 he was under 50%) – beat Romney by 4% in the popular vote and 126 Electoral College votes, it was considered a big enough crisis that then-GOP party head Reince Priebus created The Growth and Opportunity Project (a.k.a. the “autopsy”).

Also in that report is this observation:

Republicans hold governorships in 30 states with 315 electoral votes, the most governors either party has had in 12 years, and four short of the all-time GOP high of 34 governors who served in the 1920s.

Republican governors are America’s reformers in chief. They continue to deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people’s lives better. They routinely win a much larger share of the minority vote than GOP presidential candidates, demonstrating an appeal that goes beyond the base of the Party.

Now we need to step outside of this conversational track a second, bear with me, we’ll get back to it.

Parallel to these national political impacts on the party, the success of the GOP at the governor level had led to another group of events, occurring at the state level: an explosion of gerrymandering.  After the 2010 Census, as is required by law, every state redraws its internal electoral maps.  Republican strategist Karl Rove spearheaded the REDMAP for Redistricting Majority Project, which thanks to the GOP ground game at the state level meant that those 30 governorships in those 30 states approved electoral maps that resulted, in 2012, in wild outcomes like Democratic statehouse candidates winning 51 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, (which Barack Obama in the presidential election) yet those candidates ended up with only 28 percent of the seats in the legislature.  In 2012 Georgia Republican House candidates won 59% of the vote, and 64% of the House seats.  Lawsuits about gerrymandering after the 2012 election cycle went down in flames when SCOTUS essentially overturned the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder.

This had the entirely unsurprising result that in Georgia by 2018, that was down to 52% of the vote… but 71% of the House seats.  This is a repeatable observation in almost every state that had a GOP governor and legislature between 2011 and 2018.

So back to the GOP autopsy.

Rather than initiate the reforms suggested by the Growth and Opportunity Project, during the 2014-15 period the GOP actually went the other way.  And why not?  The project says we need to reach out to people of color, we need to support comprehensive immigration reform, we need to change our primary system to produce candidates more friendly to national level voters… but structurally the GOP had just created and enforced a primary and general election system that did the precise opposite, moving their most controversial members into safer seats, ensuring that any district that was R+5 or greater (which is a massive number of the Republican seats, nationwide, post-2010 gerrymandering) is going to produce a candidate more focused on the GOP base, and less focused on the national median voter.

Hard to reform your party to be more inclusive when you’re making the vast majority of elected seats ones that can only be won by people to the right of Michele Bachmann.

And the GOP, for all of its moderate members worrying about the results they are getting from the system they have actively chosen, is not just continuing this pattern, it’s got its foot firmly on the accelerator. The party platform hasn’t been updated in years.

After the 2020 Census, they doubled down on the gerrymandering strategy.  Note that this is now producing diminished returns in the results of structural power at the national level, which is leading lots of pundits (including folks at The Brookings Institution) to downplay the effects of gerrymandering on outcomes.  But the impact is not just in the distribution of seats (note that both of those links focus on the House, not on state legislatures), but also who can run and win in those races.

And until a significant number of folks can run as someone who the base thinks is a “RINO” or a “anti-Trump turncoat” and still win, the folks who represent the GOP as sitting elected officials will continue to skew heavily towards folks who… aren’t that.