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295. That is how many state legislature seats Republicans lost in the 2018 elections. This number doesn’t include special elections. Nor does it include the recent Virginia elections, where Democrats added two seats to the 25 won in 2017 to gain a majority over the entirety of Virginia’s government. This also does not count the 41 seats Democrats won in the US House of Representatives in 2018.
As a percentage of the national vote, Republicans lost by 8.6%. This was a larger margin of loss than 2006 when Republicans ran against the unpopularity of the Iraq war as well as a variety of legislative blunders and scandals.
More recent elections underscore the shift away from the Republican Party. In Kentucky, a state that went for Donald Trump by 30 points in 2016, Matt Bevin lost his re-election bid to Democrat Andy Beshear. The final frightening national statistic worth mentioning is that since Donald Trump has taken office, 41 Republicans have retired or announced they are retiring. Everywhere one looks, Republicans are in retreat.
It should go without saying, but I am forced to reiterate, that one word explains this phenomenon: Trump.
To say that Donald Trump has been detrimental to the party is an understatement. He is downright toxic to both the Republican Party at large and to the conservative movement that purports to support him. This unpopularity and toxicity are unique to President Trump himself.
When this fact is brought up, many of his defenders point to other mid-term elections where the President’s party suffered. This includes the 2010 election when Democrats under Barack Obama lost 63 house seats to Republicans and the 2006 election when Republicans under Bush lost both the House and the Senate to Democrats.
These comparisons are fallacious because these elections are dissimilar in characteristics. As stated above, Republicans were running against a bevy of unpopular issues in 2006. The same is true for Democrats in 2010. Most famously, the Affordable Care Act, colloquially called Obamacare, acted as an unshakeable anchor that weighed down congressional Democrats. Neither of these facts held true in 2018.
In 2018, Republicans had cut taxes, the economy was strong, there were no major foreign conflicts, and few scandals had rocked Congress. Nevertheless, people turned out in droves to replace Republicans, with pollsters registering the highest percentage of turnout for a midterm election since 1910.
President Trump, and the Republican Party’s unwavering faith to him, represent the singular cause for these startling losses. I must note that these losses are not across-the-board. They have been driven almost entirely by a suburban exodus from the Republican Party. The middle-class, the most prominent member of the Reagan coalition and the strongest proponents of fiscal conservatism, have fled Trump’s heterodoxy. In doing so, they are refuting 40 years of conventional Republican thinking.
This mass exit was not inevitable. Indeed, it would have been unthinkable before 2015. In 1969, Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist and political commentator, published a book titled The Emerging Republican Majority. In it, Phillips discussed Nixon’s 1968 win and the strategy Republicans would need to adopt for continued electoral success. The book accurately predicted that Republicans could dominate presidential and congressional elections for the rest of the century by relying on an increasingly conservative suburban middle class.
By moving away from the Rockefeller East Coast Republicanism that had been a hallmark of the Eisenhower years and instead embracing fiscal and social conservatism, the Republican Party was able to tear apart the New Deal Coalition of farmers, laborers, and white Southerners built by FDR.
This strategy culminated in the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans swept to power in both houses of Congress for the first time in almost 50 years, placing the Reaganite Newt Gingrich at the helm. From 1968-2000, Republicans won five of eight presidential elections; in comparison to the two they won from 1932-1968. Indeed, this new coalition brought Republicans back to national relevance.
However, with the turn of the millennium, something seemed to change — the middle class had begun demonstrating more openness to socially liberal ideas. Shifting demographics had also begun slowly reducing the white-majority coalition Republicans had built. In particular, rising Hispanic populations in the Sun Belt were threatening Republican dominance in that area of the country.
Initially, the solution seemed simple: change with the times. As the populace became more socially liberal, the Republican Party could slowly move in that direction while retaining certain ‘family values’ principles. The influx of Hispanic voters did not have to be a liability. ‘Family Values’ are very strong in Hispanic culture, and by appealing to these voters, Republicans could keep their coalition competitive.
Republican politicians began to learn, and speak, Spanish. The party adopted a merit-based immigration plan. Moves such as these seemed to work. Republican politicians in Texas and Florida routinely won 40% of the Hispanic vote. Republicans held the House of Representatives from 2000 to 2018 with only four years, 2006-2010, as the exception. In 2015, fiscal hawk Paul Ryan became Speaker of the House, and it seemed that, barring some catastrophe, Republicans would continue to hold power for years to come.
It’s funny what one escalator ride can change.
On June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump announced that he would run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. The brash New York Democrat brought unorthodox policies into the party, including a disdain for free trade agreements and a pledge to end the War on Terror in the Middle East.
But the greatest paradigm shifts involved his blunt rhetoric. He called illegal immigrants from Mexico “rapists”, denounced the media as “fake news”, and called for a complete Muslim ban.
These positions, while playing well with a Republican base that was angry at being run roughshod over by Obama and the media for eight years, did not play well with suburban voters. These voters were increasingly college-educated and opposed to the rhetoric and policies Donald Trump was peddling. The Trump campaign also turned off many Hispanic voters, who were concerned by his nativist immigration rhetoric. Detractors often discount these trends, since Donald Trump did go on to win the presidential election. Too often, they ignore just how horrendous Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was.
A normal Republican sensibility would have looked at Donald Trump’s victory and recognized it as an anomaly, concluding there was still a need to continue implementing the previous plan of increased inclusiveness. However, many Republicans, desperate for a win, embraced Donald Trump’s victory as punctuating and transformative. They contended that his win constituted a new coalition. Since 2016, Republicans have continued to embrace President Trump emphatically. I see this as quite obviously foolish. Abandoning 40 years of Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration for the slim chance of winning in Pennsylvania and Michigan is absurd.
If Republicans want to salvage the party, they need to recognize what plagues it. Only by facing the fact that Donald Trump has become toxic down-ballot can Republicans work to reclaim their lost majority.
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