In Colorado, Republican Senator Cory Gardner trails Democrat John Hickenlooper by eleven points. In Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst, a veteran and one of the party’s six female senators, also trails her opponent by a sizable spread.
Both seem to be people a party would kill for: attractive, articulate, coalition builders and plausible future contenders for national office, whom a party with only the most feeble instinct for self-preservation would fight like the devil to keep. But they are only two of the very large number of people the party has lost or is poised to lose with Donald Trump as president and party leader. He is the rare politician who has not a clue in the world how to build coalitions, to expand coalitions, or to keep his own party intact.
In fact, he has been trying to undo, divide, and unravel this party since he began his campaign. He was a minority winner of the presidential election, losing the national popular vote by nearly three million. He was a minority winner for the Republican nomination, never winning half the votes cast in the primaries. As president, his approval ratings have never strayed much above the low to mid-40s. It is as if he has decided that driving people away is the key to success in elections, as he has been doing so much of it.
After winning the most vicious campaign in American history, Thomas Jefferson said, “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.” Eight years later, he left a one-party country; even Richard M. Nixon said after his 1968 victory that he wanted to “bring us together,” though that didn’t last long.
Trump, in contrast, began his reign on a sour and truculent note, making no effort at all to co-opt or recruit his Republican critics, or to coax one-time foes into a broad coalition. Instead, he tried to widen the split between his own fans and the Republicans who voted for him out of party loyalty or loathing of Hillary. He put a huge strain on those who did not reside in deeply Red states and districts, even though he really needed the votes of both kinds of Republicans to survive.
This is what puts the huge burden on the Cory Gardners, the Martha McSallys and the Joni Ernsts of the world. That is what caused the wave of House losses in the 2018 elections, and it will likewise cost Republicans big time next year.
The Senate map in 2018 favored Republicans, so the impact there was muted. This will not be true in the 2020 elections, or in those of the years that follow. The problem was less in the numbers lost than in the people behind them — the kind of people the party will need, the young and the restless, the non-white or non-male. Think of former Rep. Barbara Comstock from the ultimate swing county of Fairfax in Virginia; former Rep. Mia Love, the Haitian Mormon from Utah; retiring Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, the Republicans’ lone non-white House member, who surrendered like a number of others to Trump-induced stress and fatigue.
What the Republican Party must now fear is not merely five more years of Trump in the White House, committing crimes against ethics and common sense — five more years of bad decisions to site the G7 at his own property, or to pull out from Syria. Rather, they must worry about Trump doing to his party what Obama did to his previously — mowing down crop after crop of promising Republican officeholders.
They stand to lose elections because of the climate that Trump has created. They cannot appeal to his core supporters and to the more centrist voters at the same time. In that case, the Republican Senate majority will become a mere memory, along with its power in the confirmation of judges — something that Senate Leader Mitch McConnell may think about later, if he has ever to choose between his much cherished Senate majority, and the less cherished interests of Trump.
