After ousting Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from the House Republican leadership team, the party hopes it can turn the page from relitigating all things Donald Trump to prosecuting its case against President Joe Biden’s record.
In recent days, parts of the United States have experienced gasoline shortages. Inflation is on the rise, with the biggest rise in consumer prices since 2008. Nearly 180,000 people were caught attempting to enter the U.S. border illegally, bringing apprehensions to a 21-year high. Hamas is firing rockets at Israel.
Republicans see this as a target-rich environment reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, who lost his bid for reelection in a 44-state landslide that also saw the first GOP-controlled Senate elected since the 1950s.
But only if they can get out of their own way.
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Trump on Wednesday described the Biden-Carter comparison as “very unfair to Jimmy Carter,” going on to say the latter had to deal with crises, while the former is busy making them.
“The House will be a fight in 2022,” said GOP strategist Matt Gorman, a former communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We have to litigate President Biden’s disastrous policies every single day from here on out.” Cheney’s removal is expected to enhance the Republican leadership team’s message discipline on this front.
Democrats will be defending a 50-50 Senate they control only because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. Their House majority is barely larger, and Republicans unexpectedly gained seats last year. In the first midterm elections of the last two Democratic presidents, Republicans picked up 52 and 63 seats, respectively. They need a net gain of just six next year to wrest the gavel away from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But Republicans have remained split over how to deal with Trump after his defeat at the hands of Biden and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The former president has remained in the public eye, teasing a possible 2024 presidential run, and continued to cast doubt on 2020’s election results. Before losing her job as the third-ranking Republican in the House, Cheney repeatedly pushed back against Trump’s election claims and said he should never be permitted to return to the Oval Office again.
This has made it more difficult to focus on Biden, whose job approval ratings are higher than Trump’s. An Associated Press/NORC survey out this week found 63% approved of how Biden is doing as president after more than 100 days in office, though most other polling shows him in the low to mid-50s.
Democrats are confident they will continue to receive high marks for managing the pandemic as the public gets vaccinated and the accompanying economic recovery as people return to work. But reentry into the workforce has been slower than anticipated, and unemployment actually rose slightly to 6.1% in April as the economy created a little more than a quarter of the expected number of new jobs. Republicans have stepped up their arguments that this shows Biden’s “tax-and-spend” policies will suppress rather than advance the recovery.
Biden has already signed into law one nearly $2 trillion spending bill this year while proposing three others in that basic price range. Republicans are involved in negotations on infrastructure but have balked at most of the social welfare spending and tax increases in Biden’s plans.
Republicans are betting that voters will inevitably turn their attention away from events of the past toward Biden’s record.
“Be careful about spending too much time on inside the beltway intrigue is my advice to armchair pundits and Never Trump tweeters,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “The American people care more about inflation and out-of-control gas prices than they care about who is serving as the GOP conference chair.”
House Republicans opted to keep Cheney in her leadership position after she joined nine other GOP lawmakers in voting for Trump’s second impeachment, a single charge of inciting an insurrection. But the conference began to turn against her after she continued to lash out against Trump, who responded in kind, instead of focusing on the anti-Biden messaging expected to dominate next year’s midterm election campaign.
Cheney and her allies, such as Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, remain adamant that Republicans must continue to push back against Trump’s claims of a rigged and stolen election both to win back the suburban voters they lost under his watch and as a matter of democratic principle.
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Kinzinger has suggested his political action committee may support primary challenges against sitting Republican members. Cheney may face a challenge herself in Wyoming, having encouraged one against Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie last year. Some House Republicans did not want members of the leadership team to be involved in such efforts against incumbents.
“By the time the next election rolls around, lunch bucket issues will be far more important to voters than the events of Jan. 6,” Feehery said.
