The defeat of former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in the state’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday night continued a bad election cycle for populist, nationalist conservatives in the mold of President Trump.
While many Republicans celebrated Kobach’s loss to Rep. Roger Marshall, believing Marshall is much likelier to win the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Pat Roberts and will require fewer party resources to do so, the immigration hard-liner’s defeat raises questions about how much Trump has transformed the GOP into his own image — and how important populism and nationalism were to his 2016 appeal in the first place.
Already in this election cycle, Rep. Steve King lost a Republican primary in Iowa, and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was defeated in a primary to reclaim the Alabama Senate seat he held for 20 years. Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio also narrowly lost a primary to win back his old office on Tuesday night. All are immigration restrictionists with ideological and stylistic similarities to Trump. Sessions and Arpaio were Trump endorsers in the Republican primaries four years ago.
“We may learn that Trump hasn’t changed the party as much as we thought,” said a Republican strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “But that might not be decided until November.”
Kobach didn’t even come particularly close, winning just 26.3% of the vote to Marshall’s 40.3%. Several other candidates split the rest. Sessions was competitive in the first round of balloting but took just 39.3% in the runoff last month. Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville received 60.7%.
The failure of these candidates leaves the populists’ cupboard bare. Only a handful of GOP lawmakers, led by Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, can plausibly claim the mantle. A few others — Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida — have clearly been influenced by some of their attempts to rethink Republican economic orthodoxy. But the number of full-spectrum nationalists who share both Trump’s skepticism of immigration and foreign wars for regime change is smaller still.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently told the Washington Examiner that the future of conservatism post-Trump would be both populist and libertarian. “I think properly understood, those concepts are complementary, and they’re not antagonistic. So I am a conservative, an unabashed conservative. I’m also a populist. I am deeply a populist,” he said. “And I also have deep libertarian principles.” Cruz, like Rubio and Hawley, is widely seen as a possible candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and is well versed in popular conservative sentiment.
But the post-Trump intellectual ferment that has seen First Things magazine decry the Reaganite “dead consensus” and the rise of pundits from the Hill’s Saagar Enjeti to the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari hasn’t yet translated into the same success at the ballot box, with the significant exception of the president himself. Five years after the “libertarian moment,” there are still more libertarian-leaning GOP members of Congress, even after Justin Amash’s departure from the party, than unabashed nationalists.
“Part of the problem is the White House gets the president to endorse totally conventional candidates,” said a second Republican strategist who has advised populist candidates. Trump’s endorsement of Tuberville over Sessions, with whom he had a major break over the latter’s recusal from the Russia investigation while serving as attorney general, had a major impact on that race. King, who was increasingly accused of racism, was a Cruz supporter in 2016. While Trump has considered Kobach for several federal posts, he did not get involved in the Kansas primary. Kobach was also weakened by losing what many Republicans considered a winnable gubernatorial race in 2018.
But Republicans closely identified with the party’s pre-Trump brand, such as Vice President Mike Pence and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, are better positioned to succeed the president in 2024 than the Steve Bannon wing of the Trump movement. If Trump loses in November, especially if it is by a decisive margin, there will be a push to move away from his image and policies. Trump is currently trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 7 points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average.
Republicans are hopeful that Kobach’s defeat means that Kansas will not be among the states the party has to defend in the fall as they seek to protect their 53-47 Senate majority. Democrats are currently favored in several competitive Senate races.
