Two hours before Joe Biden is inaugurated the 46th president, conservative operative Grover Norquist will convene a weekly Wednesday meeting of Republican activists to chart a strategy for navigating a Democratic-run Washington and map a path back to power in 2022.
The Republican Party, Norquist planned to remind the gathering, has emerged from bruising elections powerless twice before, most recently after Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, but also after Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. Then as now, Norquist will say, the way out for Republicans in Congress is to resist Biden’s liberal domestic initiatives down the line while identifying a few noncontroversial issues where they can cooperate with the new administration to demonstrate bipartisanship without alienating their base.
“The number of times the modern Republican Party has been finished is a long list, and every time, it was just the Democrats projecting their wishes. So, don’t get spooked,” the 64-year-old Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told the Washington Examiner two days before Biden’s inaugural.
Norquist is right on the history. The GOP was supposedly finished in 1964, after presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was shellacked by President Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, Richard Nixon won the first two White House terms. Republicans were likewise toast after Nixon resigned in the summer of 1974 in the wake of Watergate. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the first of two national landslides, followed by the 1988 victory of his vice president, George H.W. Bush.
And, of course, Republicans won the House majority for the first time in four decades, plus captured the Senate, two years into the Clinton administration; and they won a historically large House majority and came close to winning back the Senate two years into the Obama administration. However, as Biden enters the White House, Republicans are dealing with challenges unique by comparison.
Outgoing President Trump is a source of intraparty strife who remains popular with grassroots conservatives even as he exits the White House deeply unpopular with the broader electorate. Rather than follow his predecessors, Democratic and Republican, into quiet retirement, Trump plans to remain active in national politics from Mar-a-Lago, his iconic country club in Palm Beach, Florida. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are still reeling from the Jan. 6 ransacking of the United States Capitol by Trump supporters.
“The walk in the wilderness has begun,” a Republican lobbyist said. “The weaknesses of the GOP are pretty clear right now, most of which is the Trump effect on the party, pushed by the establishment press.”
Republican strategists say the party is not facing any problem that cannot be fixed by overreaching Democrats.
Biden is proposing to regularize illegal immigrants, raise the federal, hourly minimum wage to $15, hike income taxes for people earning more than $400,000 annually, and cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline. That liberal agenda could go a long way toward coalescing congressional Republicans divided over Trump and quelling the frustrations of a voting base that believes the GOP establishment did not fight hard enough to support his unfounded claims that the November election was stolen.
“The single most important thing that can be done to unify the Republican Party is to turn over the government to Joe Biden and wait for the progressives to start doing crazy s—,” said GOP campaign consultant Corry Bliss.
Normally, on the eve of the inauguration, nearly three months after Biden defeated Trump, congressional Republicans would have been more prepared to take on the new administration and the Democratic-run House and Senate.
But the Georgia runoff elections that handed the Senate majority to the Democrats occurred two short weeks ago. Ditto the Capitol siege that unfolded the next day as grassroots Trump supporters sought to overturn his loss by preventing Congress from certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory. One week later, Trump was impeached (a second time) on charges of inciting the Capitol uprising, sparking a mini civil war among Republicans over Trump’s culpability and his place in the party.
With these events fresh and their aftershocks still being absorbed as the 69th presidential inauguration dawns, shellshocked Republicans had yet to turn the page on the 2020 election cycle and plot next steps. Party insiders involved in past Republican recovery efforts say discussions about life after Trump must take place, with a positive legislative agenda put forward to offer voters an alternative to Biden and the Democrats, if they hope to win control of Congress two years hence.
In 2009, Obama followed an unpopular Republican into the White House amid historic GOP losses the previous November. After consulting with his leadership team, John Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader and future speaker, settled on a messaging strategy that attempted to boil down the looming 2010 campaign to a simple question: “Where are the jobs?” In an economy mired in the Great Recession, it worked. The Republicans went on to flip 63 Democratic seats and end the Democratic House majority after only four years.
David Winston, a GOP pollster who advised that effort and still counsels congressional Republicans, said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky need to develop a similarly succinct messaging that speaks to voters’ biggest concerns. Today, that means focusing first on arresting the coronavirus pandemic and then pivoting to economic revitalization.
“Part of the challenge on the Republican side is, it’s not just about what Democrats are doing wrong,” Winston said. “It’s also about defining what the alternative is and why it’s better.”
