As President-elect Joe Biden’s team has started taking shape, Republicans have shifted from casting his incoming administration as a collection of Bernie Sanders socialist castoffs to establishment corporate shills.
The prevalence of more centrist figures in the early stages of Biden’s team building rather than the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party strengthens the position of Republicans who would like to anchor their own party in the populism associated with President Trump, who still has yet to concede the presidential race and continues to contest the results in multiple states.
“My concerns, as I’ve said before, about what I’m seeing from Vice President Biden is [that] the people who he wants to be in his Cabinet are all a bunch of corporate liberals and warmongers,” Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, told reporters. “So I’d like to see him break the mold.”
Hawley has attempted to distinguish himself in his first Senate term as someone trying to formulate a coherent legislative agenda around Trump’s populist rhetoric that differs from the conventional Republican policies that have dominated since Ronald Reagan, which has earned him intraparty critics.
But this differs from the standard GOP criticism of Biden on the campaign trail. “If Biden wins in November and appoints Bernie Sanders as Secretary of State,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted in September, “we’ll see open hostility to our friend and ally Israel and an open embrace of tyrannical socialist dictators like Venezuela’s Maduro.”
One intraparty critic of Hawley suggested this is a departure from the Missouri lawmaker’s own warnings about a Biden administration, noting he told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that the former vice president was “in thrall” to the “Marxist Left.”
“Let me explain this to you. Corporate liberals are woke capitalists,” Hawley shot back. “The corporatists love critical race theory and all the other warmed-over Marxist garbage. They sell out working Americans and sneer at them at the same time. That’s the new Left.”
This development comes as congressional Republicans, already balking at the price tag of new COVID-19 relief legislation, an issue on which Hawley has been outnumbered in his party, were expected to rediscover their inner libertarians in time to oppose Biden’s spending initiatives.
“There haven’t been as many AOC types on Biden’s team as we thought, though they are plenty liberal enough,” said a Republican strategist. “This is kind of where we are now.”
“He is no Howell Heflin, he is no Sam Nunn,” a second GOP strategist said of Biden, referencing Southern centrist Democrats of the past.
Biden sticking with familiar faces in staffing his administration could nevertheless force Republicans to reevaluate their messaging in the coming months. “His historic advisers are going to try to push him toward the middle,” said Timothy Head, executive director of the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition. “Those trying to push him to the left, those are new voices for him.”
Republican opposition to nominees like Office of Management and Budget pick Neera Tanden could help quiet liberal skepticism of some of Biden’s choices. Democrats are trying to hold together an electoral coalition that stretched from Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to dissident Republicans such as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake in the absence of Trump as a unifying figure.
The confirmation process for Biden’s Cabinet nominees and other personnel that require Senate approval will be among the first tests of that unity. Republicans gained seats in the House and may yet retain control of the Senate pending the outcome of two special elections in Georgia. Even if Democrats win both of those seats, it would create a 50-50 split and their Senate majority would rely on Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote — giving them little margin for error.
Republican gains down ballot plus Trump’s inroads with Hispanics and black men as he remained competitive in the Rust Belt raised hopes the party could create a multiracial, working-class coalition to compete with the Democrats in the future. Trump had some success siphoning off Sanders supporters or persuading them to vote third party in 2016, though Biden largely held on to these voters this November.
On issues ranging from trade to the Iraq War, Trump tried to appeal to Sanders backers, whose views differed from Democratic nominees Biden and Hillary Clinton. Some Republicans would like to retain that advantage. Barring a major reversal of fortunes for Trump’s election lawsuits, Biden will be sworn in as president in January.
