Why hasn’t there been more disruption in Congress? Looking at the highly disruptive presidential primary campaign, some analysts are scratching their heads and asking that very question. In primary election after primary election, Republican congressional incumbents—such as Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Marco Rubio—triumph over their foes. Some have argued that this is a sign that Trump’s disruptive candidacy is a one-off—an angry spasm that will depart after November so that the GOP can return to business as usual.
However, the primary victories of Speaker Ryan, Senator McCain, and Senator Rubio in their respective primaries should not necessarily be taken as a major endorsement of the current ideological status quo. In part because they are often skilled politicians, incumbents are very hard to defeat in a party primary. According to statistics compiled by Greg Giroux, outside of cycles that happen right after congressional redistricting, only a handful of congressional incumbents (if even that many) are usually defeated in primary elections. Since 2000, only 6 incumbent senators have lost their party primaries. One of those incumbents was Arlen Specter, who lost the 2010 Democratic primary after abandoning the GOP in 2009, and two other of those incumbents ended up winning reelection as third-party candidates (Joe Lieberman in 2006 and Lisa Murkowski in 2010). Even as the ideological composition of a party changes drastically, the record of incumbents in primaries often presents an image of surprising serenity. When the Tea Party rocked the GOP in 2010, only four incumbents (two in the House and two in the Senate) lost their primaries. The Democratic party shifted from a position of divided support for the Iraq war to a vehemently anti-Iraq tone between 2002 and 2006 with Joe Lieberman being the only incumbent to be defeated in the primary over principally Iraq (and he ended up winning reelection in the general). For Democrats, Iraq played perhaps the most disruptive role not in congressional primaries but in the presidential primary of 2008, when Barack Obama used his opposition to the start of the Iraq war to outmaneuver Hillary Clinton and secure the nomination; it also played a role in fueling Howard Dean’s insurgent primary campaign in 2004.
So when one sees that many incumbent Republicans are surviving primary challenges, that should not necessarily be the biggest evidence that the disruptive forces associated with Trump are simply a flash in the pan. It’s certainly true that, in choosing to focus on the figure of Trump, the Trump campaign has not really put that much work into shifting the overall ideological composition of the Republican party. Moreover, Trump’s star power is not something many other candidates can replicate. The Trump phenomenon has been most consistently marked as a kind of style (brash, bare-knuckled, sentences studded with exclamation points). This style is not new to Trump; Chris Christie and Paul LePage have used tough-guy rhetoric to try to push through reforms in New Jersey and Maine, respectively. However, fire-breathing, take-no-prisoners rhetoric has not exactly taken the GOP by storm, and there are reasons to believe that incendiary rhetoric has its limits in the general election. It’s also possible that Trump has acted as a lightning rod, attracting insurgent sentiment and thereby sapping grassroots appetite for congressional insurgencies.
In terms of policy, we might have seen less disruption in congressional primaries in part because some “populist” ideas are better represented among congressional Republicans. Such as they are, many of Trump’s positions on domestic and economic policy are not actually far out of the mainstream for elected Republicans. Many Republican members of Congress have subscribed to some of the ideas Trump has championed, especially on trade and immigration. Where Trump stands out is the fact that he is a presidential nominee with these views. Republican majorities in Congress have a more diverse set of viewpoints, and perhaps one of the reasons why Republicans have been so successful as a congressional party over the past 20 years even as they have failed as a presidential party is because candidates for Congress have not been subjected to the same litmus tests as presidential nominees. (The fact that Democrats have done so well in presidential elections might also be part of GOP success in midterm congressional elections.)
On immigration, a hostility to “amnesty” and support for increasing barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border are boilerplate for many congressional Republicans. On trade, too, there is more diversity among congressional Republicans than popular media narratives might suggest. A skepticism about trade agreements has long been a mainstream, albeit minority, position for Republican members of Congress. About a quarter of Republicans in the Senate and the House voted against NAFTA. And all those who opposed NAFTA were not exactly members of the party’s fringe. Many House opponents of NAFTA later were elected to the Senate (including Jim Talent, Rick Santorum, Jim Inhofe, and Mike Crapo). The current Chair of the House Appropriations committee, Hal Rogers of Kentucky, voted against NAFTA. Senate opponents of NAFTA included Republicans William Cohen (Maine) and Ted Stevens (Alaska). The 2000 vote on normalizing trade relations with the People’s Republic of China shows a similar trend. A quarter of House Republicans opposed trade normalization and about 15 percent of Senate Republicans opposed it. House opponents of normalized trade relations with China included Nathan Deal, now governor of Georgia, and Lindsey Graham, currently a senator from South Carolina. While serving in the Senate, Senator Graham also voted against the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2005.
Whether one thinks that trade agreements are a good idea or not, it’s true trade-agreement skeptics have historically had a substantial representation among congressional Republicans. Moreover, exiling these skeptics from the party’s congressional wing would end the GOP’s congressional majorities. Of course, exiling so-called “free traders” from the party would also destroy its congressional majorities.
Moreover, many embattled Republican members of Congress are now taking a much more skeptical view toward trade pacts. Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, the former president of the Club for Growth, now says that he opposes the Tran-Pacific Trade Partnership. Former U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman, up for reelection in Ohio, also has come out against TPP and run ads promising to be “tough on China.” Hammered by his Democratic opponent on trade, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has started to emphasize his “doubts” about TPP. Marco Rubio’s primary victory over Carlos Beruff has been read as some as a rebuke of Trumpism, but it’s worth noting that Rubio has backed away from his support from the Gang of Eight immigration bill and has not committed to support TPP (in the weeks before the primary, Florida news organizations ran stories headlining Rubio’s willingness to oppose the deal). It’s hard, then, to see Rubio’s win as a decisive popular rejection of a more skeptical approach to trade. Even Paul Ryan, when he decisively defeated the Paul Nehlen (perhaps the most Trumpian candidate this primary season), stressed his commitment to border security—not his past willingness to work with Congressman Luis Gutierrez on immigration. Speaker Ryan’s website even says that he is “withholding his support for TPP because he believes President Obama did a poor job negotiating the agreement.”
Perhaps these are simply election-year panders. But they might also be a sign of elected Republicans with solid conservative credentials trying to find some middle path that adapts to some populist currents without sacrificing core conservative principles (and, whatever one’s own preferences, support for “free trade” is distinct from support for various individual trade agreements). The legacy of the Trump campaign may end up being less a radical takeover of the GOP by an extraneous ideology and more a recalibration of some of the interest groups and ideas already inside the Republican party. If it is more of a recalibration, we might expect less disruption in down-ballot races because many elected representatives might already hold some of the views championed by the presidential insurgency.
Healthy political coalitions change their priorities, approaches, and policy preferences in response to changing circumstances. There may be some evidence of an evolution in the GOP. Which direction it will take, and whether such an evolution will ultimately be realized, remains to be determined.
Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.
