When Steve Bannon became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, Trump was far behind Hillary Clinton, according to Bannon. “We were 16 points down,” he said.
That wasn’t the only distressing poll number, he said in a recent speech to California Republicans. “I think [we were] double digits down or thereabouts on every battleground state. We were 70 on the generic ballot of Republicans. You gotta be at 90. Nine out of every 10 Republicans have to vote for you for the president of the United States to win.”
That Trump trailed Clinton so badly but won three months later would seem to crown Bannon as a kingmaker. But there’s a problem: His numbers are way off. On the day Bannon arrived as Trump CEO, the Real Clear Politics average of presidential campaign polls put Clinton’s lead at 6.7 points.
And Trump was behind by double digits in only 1 of the 11 “definite swing states” in the RCP average—Colorado. He trailed by single digits in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Virginia and ended up winning six of those states.
Nor was Trump in deep trouble on the generic ballot. A Quinnipiac poll conducted August 18-24 found that of likely Republican voters, 84 percent intended to vote for him. On Election Day, he got 90 percent. A Bannon surge wasn’t needed and didn’t happen.
What we see here is the Bannon myth, created by the mythmaker himself. While it’s true Bannon made Trump a better candidate and helped him defeat Clinton, he wasn’t responsible for pulling off an amazing come-from-far-behind win. He wasn’t indispensable.
Yet the media treat Bannon, 63, as if he were. Fired in August as Trump’s chief strategist at the White House, Bannon is now committed to ousting Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader and recruiting conservative insurgents to run against incumbent GOP senators in primaries. He says McConnell and establishment Republicans don’t know how to win. But he does.
“It is about winning,” Bannon said in his California speech. “Nothing else matters. . . . We pulled off the win by having the RNC and the Republican establishment put their shoulder to the wheel with the Trump campaign state by state.” Nothing new with this. It’s Republican politics 101.
“We had a strategy,” Bannon said. “We knew we had to win Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa just to get to the table. I don’t think a Republican in living memory has done that.” Wrong. Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George W. Bush in 2004 did just that.
Bannon forgets there’s one person who was essential to Trump’s election. His name is Mitch McConnell, the guy who supposedly doesn’t know how to win. Trump could have won without Bannon. Absent McConnell, no way.
When Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell declared the Scalia vacancy would not be filled by President Obama in his final year in office. Democrats protested, though they would have done the same had the roles been reversed. McConnell never wavered, even when liberals claimed he was required by the Constitution to grant Obama nominee Merrick Garland a vote on confirmation.
Here’s how McConnell’s intransigence was critical to winning the White House: Trump promised if he were elected to choose a nominee from a list of conservative jurists to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. Millions of Republicans who were leery of Trump—especially social conservatives and evangelicals—wound up voting for him on this issue alone. They didn’t want Hillary Clinton to create a liberal majority on the Court.
Speaking of winning, McConnell has a strategy for gaining Senate seats. His goal, he said at a joint press conference with Trump on October 16, is “to keep us in the majority. The way you do this is not complicated. You have to nominate people who can actually win, because winners make policy and losers go home.”
GOP Senate leader since 2007, McConnell didn’t intervene in Senate races until 2014, after Republicans had suffered embarrassing losses in 2012. A handful of candidates “were not able to appeal to a broader electorate,” McConnell said.
In 2014, “we changed the business model.” McConnell and the party’s Senate campaign committee intervened in five primaries. “We nominated people who could win everywhere.” The result: Republicans won nine seats, captured control of the Senate, and McConnell became majority leader.
The Bannon strategy is to recruit insurgents and Trump enthusiasts and back them in the primaries. In most cases, the best candidates are already taken. They’re either incumbents or establishment favorites—Bannon’s intended victims. To get his approval, these upstart candidates are required to vow to vote against McConnell as Republican leader. But some have balked at this.
Republican leaders, including McConnell, don’t take Bannon lightly. He’s a force they must reckon with. He has ties to big donors and can steer campaign dollars to his candidates. He runs Breitbart News, a significant force on the right. He has allies on Fox News. He’s an intellectually interesting character. Reporters like him. He almost always takes their calls, and he leaks.
And the myth of Bannon the magician works wonders. “This guy is an expert at showing up late and taking credit for the whole thing,” a Republican operative laments. “It’s like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.”
The latest example came in the Alabama Senate race. Bannon jumped in—late—to back Roy Moore, who won the Republican runoff and is likely to win the general election in December. The press gives Bannon credit but shouldn’t. In the primary, “Moore’s win was baked in the cake from the start because of his loyal following,” says Quin Hillyer, a political columnist in Mobile. Moore is supported by Alabama’s large evangelical community.
“I and almost every seasoned observer down here—in fact, even just people I run into randomly at lunch—think it is absurd for Bannon to get any credit/blame for Moore’s victory,” Hillyer says. “His influence was, if possible, less than zero.”
In polls, Moore led in low double digits before the runoff and won by nine percentage points over appointed senator Luther Strange, a smaller margin than pre-Bannon. But the myth lives on.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
