If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose -- Big

If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose -- Big

If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big
To dominate the country once more, Republicans need to hasten the move to a post-Trump party.

By JONATHAN MARTIN

Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.

Accepting his party’s nomination in 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale vowed to cut the deficit with a memorable line about the tough medicine either he or Ronald Reagan would have to administer to the country.

“Let’s tell the truth,” Mondale said, “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Now, as Labor Day marks the final stretch of another presidential campaign, it’s time for another round of truth-telling.

The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly. GOP leaders won’t tell you that on the record. I just did.

Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.

Harris is less a doctrinaire progressive than she is up for grabs on policy, but any liberal course she takes would be constrained by a GOP-held Senate. No, that’s not a sure thing, but it’s the safest electoral bet in this turbulent election. What is virtually certain come January is that conservatives will have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, which will also serve as a check on the law and rulemaking coming out of a Democratic White House.

Harris is effectively an emergency nominee, has few policy proposals, scant governing history in Washington and a history of churning through staff. Oh, and she would be the first Democrat to enter the presidency since 1884 without majorities in both chambers, should Republicans flip the Senate.

That adds up to a recipe for gridlock — and perhaps some deal-making to fund the government and avoid across-the-board tax hikes — but not a Scandinavian social welfare state.

2026 would represent the sixth year of one party holding the presidency, always a promising midterm for the opposition. Those conditions, along with a diminished, twice-defeated Trump, would make it easier for Republicans to recruit Senate candidates.

Consider just the governors: Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Georgia’s Brian Kemp and New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu would all be prime targets for Senate Republicans. As one GOP senator put it to me in hoping for Trump’s defeat: Who do you think would have a tougher 2026 reelection, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) under Harris or Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) under Trump?

A Democratic House majority would also be far easier for Republicans to reverse under Harris than Trump. And the GOP would almost certainly find more success in the 36 governors’ races taking place that year if they were running against the so-called six-year-itch.

For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th Hole.

One high-level Republican, conceding it may only be “wishful thinking,” even floated the idea of a Harris victory followed by Biden pardons of both his son, Hunter, and Trump. That would take the issue of both cases off Harris’ plate and, more to the point, drain the energy behind Trump’s persecution complex so that Republicans can get on with the business of winning elections.

The broader question among Republicans: Would it be best to endure a Harris presidency to keep Trump out of power, likely for good? Or is the better way to hasten his departure from the scene for him to win so that he could only serve one more term and be done for certain in 2028?

The argument for the second of these cases being that, should he lose this year, he would once again insist he was cheated and hold out the possibility of a fourth consecutive bid, prolonging the party’s capture.

Now, this is the point to acknowledge that none of these scenarios will prove tidy, or perhaps even feasible.

As they’ve demonstrated for going on a decade now, Republican leaders will repeatedly bow to the preference of their base over their own judgment when it comes to Trump.

And if their voters aren’t looking for a reformation, well, the would-be Martin Luthers of the GOP will fare about as well as John Boehner, who liked to say: “A leader without followers is simply a guy taking a walk.” (This must be the first time a founder of Protestantism and the well-tanned former speaker have been used in the same sentence.)

“You’re assuming Republicans have a top of the ticket problem and not a voter base problem,” said Terry Sullivan, a former GOP strategist. “It’s not like our leaders have been leading the voters to the wilderness against the voters’ judgment.”

Would the vast majority of Republican activists suddenly embrace their own version of the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed Democrats toward the center after their repeated losses in the 1980s? Probably not.

Many would stew in fetid waters, believing their nominee was somehow cheated when the Democrats swapped in Harris for President Joe Biden. Those conspiracies would be nourished by, well, Trump himself and surely flourish in the closed-off information channels in which so many on the right confine themselves.

So, yes, moving past Trump in the aftermath of another defeat will hardly be easy.

But it’s essential if Republicans want to become a viable national party once more.

Just consider the history. The party has won the national popular vote only once since 1992 — and that was in 2004, when George W. Bush was running as a commander-in-chief during two wars. Bush tallied 50.7 percent of the vote, besting John Kerry by 2.4 points.

Twenty years later, Republicans have captured the presidency just once, when Trump won narrowly thanks to two third-party candidates siphoning votes. But he only netted 46 percent of the vote in 2016 and just under 47 percent in 2020.

It’s not just Trump, though, it’s also the down-ballot candidates he’s foisted upon the party. Republicans vastly underperformed a promising midterm in 2022 in part because of below-replacement-level figures he elevated. And they may lose winnable races again this year — think the Senate race in Arizona and governor’s race in North Carolina — because Republicans have become overly captive to candidates in his image.

This is not all to say things are hunky-dory for Democrats. But that’s the point. Their precarious coalition is entirely dependent on sharing a common enemy, Trump, and has been for nearly a decade. Why do Republicans want to keep propping up their opposition?

The day after Trump leaves the scene, Democrats will lose their best force for unity, fundraising and enthusiasm. But they’ll have the same challenges they do today with the Electoral College, the Senate and the House and the distribution of voters therein.

Of course, it won’t be easy to kick the habit. Millions of Republican voters don’t want to go to rehab. And GOP leaders, as former Representative Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.) put it, “live in fear that their base is going to desert them.”

But the Republican who forges a hybrid coalition — a modern-day conservative fusionism — between the pre-Trump party and his enthusiasts will be rewarded. No, it can’t be anti-Trump. But it must be post-Trump.

The best case for Trump’s defeat may, predictably, be Trump himself. He’s incoherent on abortion rights, unable even to appear at a cemetery without creating a political mess and is so bothered by those who’ve suffered the wounds of war that he slights Medal of Honor recipients. And, running against a female opponent, he’s pushing blowjob jokes about her and his last female opponent.

And that’s just the last two weeks.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s routine self-sabotage, mocking his advisers’ attempt to keep him on message, refusing to learn the basics of issues over nine years after he entered politics and making little effort to appeal to those in his own party who are uneasy with him.

To repurpose another resonant political line from yesteryear, Republicans should ask themselves: Had Enough?

Mike

Posts: 21961 | Registered: 03 January 2006

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