UPDATE (May 12, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ET): This piece has been updated to reflect that Republicans voted to oust Rep. Liz Cheney from her House leadership position.
House Republicans have many disagreements with Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Foremost among them is that she won’t stop expressing her contempt for the obsessive way Republicans — especially the Republican former president — insist on relitigating the 2020 election. Cheney has made such a pain of herself, in fact, that the conference is set to drum her out of leadership. Given her penchant for candor, it should come as no surprise that Cheney didn’t go quietly, even as House Republicans voted on Wednesday to remove her from her caucus leadership position.
Given her penchant for candor, it should come as no surprise that Cheney isn’t going quietly.
Over the weekend, a Washington Post report suggested that the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, deliberately misled its members to prevent them from taking a dim view of Donald Trump’s political utility. It alleged that the NRCC withheld polling data indicating that Trump’s unfavorability ratings were a staggering 15 points underwater in core districts the party needs to retake the House.
For an institution with the singular mission of helping Republicans win elections, that is malpractice. If the allegations are true, they suggest that the committee’s instinct is to protect Trump even at the expense of its members’ positions. That’s a bad sign for the party’s candidates ahead of the 2022 cycle. And yet, the GOP’s bizarre decision to shackle itself to a political corpse isn’t destined to prove the party’s downfall. Trump’s Republican opponents are going to need a better argument than short-term political expediency if they hope to persuade their fellow conservatives to finally exile him.
“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Cheney wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed. This argument should theoretically resonate with GOP officials who care about winning but are unmoved by moral suasion. But what if Republicans continue to win?
What if Democrats fail to brand the GOP as anything other than the generic opposition? What if conventional midterm dynamics overcome any residual distaste persuadable voters have for the memory of Trump’s term in office? What if the working-class voters and minorities who gravitated toward the GOP when Trump was on the ballot continue their migration in his absence?
That outcome may be more likely than not. If Republicans are as desperate to focus on the coming midterm election cycle as they claim, the issues Democrats have presented them with are an absolute godsend.
Among them, the persistence of school closures, remote learning protocols, half-days and “Zoom in a room” proctoring despite everything we know about the negligible risks associated with in-person education. Republicans could rail against the unjustifiably massive spending programs and naked giveaways to Democratic constituencies under the guise of Covid-19 relief that are making it harder for employers to fill America’s 15 million vacancies with workers. Republicans would be foolish not to highlight the rising cost of consumer goods, just as they would be negligent to avoid noting the increasing risk of inflation and the administration’s own admission that borrowing costs are likely to go up as a result. And this is just the view from May 2021. The view closer to Election Day could be markedly worse from the perspective of incumbent Democrats.
Even if the GOP can’t stop distracting itself with purges of its more honest members, Trump skeptics on the left and the right alike should at least be able to imagine a situation in which these issues energize more Republican voters than Democrats. The Trumpified GOP has already beaten the experts’ expectations.
In the end, Trump lost his bid for re-election, but not by the 8.4-point margin the FiveThirtyEight average of polls suggested on Election Day. Trump lost by just over 4 points, and he outperformed forecasts in nearly every toss-up state save Arizona and Georgia.
Nor could Democrats have been happy with their performance farther down the ballot. In the Senate, two vulnerable Republican incumbents lost to Democratic challengers, but the GOP beat the odds to hold all its remaining toss-up seats. In the House, Republicans were expected to lose 10 and 20 seats because, as elections expert David Wasserman noted, “toss-ups tend to break disproportionately towards the party on offense.” Instead, the GOP gained 14 seats in the House, in part because of unanticipated strength among Hispanic voters.
The Democratic Party’s most humiliating defeats arguably occurred at the legislative level. “Ominously for Republicans,” the Cook Political Report warned in late October, “the GOP holds 14 of the 19 vulnerable chambers on our list. This suggests that the Democrats are well-positioned to net up to a half-dozen new chambers this fall.” Not only did Republicans fail to lose a single chamber; they gained control of both legislative houses in New Hampshire. Nowhere did Democrats win a single new majority.








