The November 7 elections, in which Democrats took governorships in Virginia and New Jersey and most of the other closely contested offices, have been analyzed and debated in the way off-year races always are. The winners interpret their wins as a sign of imminent triumph; the losers make excuses.
What the overall outcome makes clear, however, is that Republicans up for election in 2018 face a dilemma. If they don’t embrace Donald Trump and his brand of political disruption, they will dampen the enthusiasm of the Trump-friendly GOP base. If they embrace Trump’s brand, they will alienate the nearly 6-in-10 Americans who disapprove of Trump’s presidency. His base loves him and distrusts anyone who doesn’t share its passion for the man and his works. But in poll after poll, a majority of Americans take the opposite view.
GOP primaries begin in just a few months. Republicans who keep their distance from Trump will invite challenges. But those who win by embracing Trump will have made themselves less attractive general-election candidates. There will be exceptions based on the makeup of districts and states, and, of course, a year is a long time in politics. Still, it’s hard to see how the Republicans’ dilemma will become any less perilous between now and Election Day 2018.
Trump boosters claim that the only answer is an unqualified embrace of the president and all that he brings. For evidence, they point to Ed Gillespie’s failed gubernatorial run in Virginia. Gillespie began his campaign as a traditional Republican—he emphasized tax cuts, a more efficient use of transportation funding, education reform, etc. He started as the presumptive GOP nominee, but barely defeated a fervent Trump supporter named Corey Stewart in the primaries.
Gillespie began running a more aggressive campaign that made use of some of Trump’s culture-inflected concerns, and sure enough his poll numbers rose. He stressed the need to deal with illegal immigration and criticized his opponent, Ralph Northam, for stances thought to be soft on gang crime. When Northam said he would lead an effort to remove Confederate monuments, Gillespie pounced. His campaign even sent out a flyer implicitly chiding NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem (“You’d never take a knee . . . so take a STAND on election day”).
Even so, Gillespie was never the Trump-backing reactionary candidate many in the media portrayed him to be. He is something of a wonk, and his campaign talks were frequently policy-heavy and rather dull. They were nothing like the rah-rah rallies of Trump clones like Kelli Ward of Arizona or the aforementioned Corey Stewart. Gillespie’s remarks on immigration were hard-hitting but not extreme; and his criticisms of Northam’s comments on Confederate monuments were legitimate—as Northam implicitly admitted by stepping back from his promise. Gillespie didn’t run as a populist or a nationalist; he ran as a conservative Republican who wasn’t tone-deaf to the concerns of suburban and rural Republicans who, rightly or wrongly, worry that their culture has changed too much and too fast.
Gillespie had very little to say about Trump himself, though. The president’s aid to Gillespie was mainly confined to Twitter. Mike Pence came to Virginia in person, but not Trump.
The ambivalent approach didn’t work—Gillespie lost to Northam by 9 points.
But gubernatorial elections remain local contests, and Gillespie had weaknesses of his own. He is not a prepossessing candidate and was easily outshone by Northam. Gillespie is from New Jersey, not Virginia. Democrats, animated with an anti-Trump zeal, should always have had the momentum in a bluish purple state like Virginia. That the race was as close as it was says as much about the Democrats’ post-Hillary travails and incompetence as it does about Gillespie’s supposed “model” of winning as a Republican.
For Trump and his supporters, though, the only reason Gillespie lost is that he didn’t express sufficient love for the president. “Ed Gillespie worked hard,” Trump tweeted after Northam’s victory, “but did not embrace me or what I stand for.” Trump loyalist and Fox News host Laura Ingraham took a similar line: “Maybe Gillespie wouldn’t have won if President Trump campaigned with him, but trying to be half-in, half-out with Donald Trump was never going to work.” If you can’t decide what you think about Trump, Ingraham said, you’re going to “turn out like Ed Gillespie: political roadkill.”
It may be true, as the British socialist Aneurin Bevan once remarked, that those who stay in the middle of the road get run down. Anyone who thinks Republicans won’t get run down if they just stick close to Trump is mistaken. According to the most recent Fox News poll, Trump’s approval rating is 38 percent. His disapproval is 57 percent. And 49 percent of those asked say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job performance. And it’s not just Trump the man. Trump’s net disapproval rating is higher than his approval on issues like health care (-27), North Korea (-24), Iran (-21), taxes (-14), and, remarkably, the economy (-5). An unqualified embrace of Donald Trump is a strategy for losing.
If you distance yourself from Trump, you invite primary challenges. If you embrace Trump, you risk losing in the general election. How to handle the Trump factor in 2018, then?
We suggest honesty. Where Trump is right, praise him without ambiguity or equivocation. Where he is wrong, criticize him without apology. There is no formula for running a conservative campaign in the age of Trump. Denouncing him won’t win elections, and neither will mimicking his antics or lauding his leadership. Winning as a conservative will take what it’s always taken—sound arguments, cogently expressed by principled men and women.
Trump will be an issue in 2018, for sure. But despite what Trump and the media may think, he doesn’t have to be the only issue.
