As Gov. Glenn Youngkin promised a “new day” in Virginia, former President Donald Trump was in a small prison town in Arizona relitigating the past.
The juxtaposition between the GOP’s future — embodied to some by Youngkin, who carefully trod the line between Trump supporter and establishment Republican to flip the governor’s seat in blue-trending Virginia — and its recent past as the “party of Trump” is particularly stark as the party, which enjoyed a 14-point swing in 2021 to gain an edge over Democrats with regard to voter registration, made gains at the national level.
“It’s going to be an outstanding cycle for Republicans up and down the ticket. You really have a perfect storm,” John Thomas, a Republican strategist and president of Thomas Partners Strategies, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s still a while to November, but if you do historical comparisons to the wave in 2010, almost by every indicator, Republicans are in a stronger position now than they were in other wave years.”
US PARTY IDENTIFICATION SHIFTS TOWARD REPUBLICANS IN LATEST GALLUP POLL
Thomas noted that Republicans are performing very strongly across the board in polling. He said Republicans also appear to have an edge in small-dollar donations — a potential indicator of strong Republican voter turnout in the 2022 midterm elections.
Political experts offered varied explanations for the shift in national sentiment. Many argued that the failures of the Biden administration are the root cause of the change.
“The biggest reason Republicans are looking so much better is because the Democrats are just screwing up so bad,” Republican strategist John Feehery told the Washington Examiner.
“Trump not being responsible for COVID policy is definitely helping the GOP. The blame is all Biden’s now,” he continued. “Inflation, global supply chain, crime on the streets, Russia on the move. All of this is directly attributable to Democratic incompetence. And that is probably the biggest factor.”
President Joe Biden has seen plummeting poll numbers since assuming office, with his job approval in the low 30s, according to recent polling. Thomas noted that presidents can either drag or lift vulnerable politicians in their party.
“Biden adds nothing to a Democrat that needs saving right now,” Thomas said. “Part of the benefit of having a president in the White House is that you can dispatch the president to tilt key swing races to your party. In this case, you want to lock Joe up and put him in the basement and hope he doesn’t come out until after November.”
Terry Holt, a Republican strategist and founder of Holt Communication Strategies, said the GOP should focus on the shortcomings of the Biden administration in the midterm elections and steer clear of intraparty squabbling.
“Biden is the driving force of GOP opinion right now. Candidates highlighting Biden’s agenda will do the best, and that will work to take back the House and Senate,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The Democrats would love nothing more than to make Trump the issue on the campaign, and we shouldn’t take the bait.”
Many Democrats throughout the nation stuck to that Trump-era playbook, attempting to tie their political opponents to the former president. One, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, even sent out a tricky mailer last September flaunting Trump’s endorsement of Youngkin — a strategy that ultimately failed to install McAuliffe in the governor’s mansion.
But Trump has largely retreated from public visibility during the past year. He has done interviews and continues to release statements commenting on recent events through his Save America PAC, but even friendly Fox News declined to air his most recent rally in full, a departure from the 2016 campaign and the days of the Trump administration, leaving it to smaller networks such as OANN and Newsmax. Despite conflicting reports, Trump did not appear in Virginia either in person or virtually to rally on behalf of Youngkin’s successful candidacy. And Google searches of Trump have nosedived, reaching their lowest levels in 2021 since he first announced his candidacy in 2015, according to Google Trends.
“Right now, the secret to recapturing power in the midterms is to allow the focus to be on the ineptitude, incompetence, and horrible woke agenda of the Democrats,” Thomas said. “Trump, by his very nature when he is the center of attention, shifts that attention away from how bad the Democrats are. And so the fact that the former president is not front and center is an excellent thing as we go into the midterm cycle.”
Some GOP experts suggest that the party might have been well served by Trump’s diminished power on social media platforms after he was deplatformed from Facebook, Twitter, and others following the Jan. 6 riot, saying the former president’s inability to box candidates into uncomfortable positions has been a boon to the party.
“It probably helps that Trump isn’t on Twitter. He can’t just tweet out whatever comes into his mind, and Republicans aren’t put in the position of reacting to it,” Feehery said.
Ed Rogers, a Republican consultant who founded the BGR Group, argued that the dynamic of Biden commanding center stage as Trump largely lurks from behind the scenes marks a reversal of the lead-up to the 2020 election when the Democratic nominee won the White House by laying low during the campaign.
“Trump was supposed to win. The incumbent president was supposed to win. And I think he didn’t because of Biden’s campaign of essentially hiding and letting Trump kinda blow up and offend people,” he told the Washington Examiner, arguing that Trump had good policy instincts. “At the human level, a lot of people had problems with Trump, [whereas] Biden seemed to be a benign alternative.”
While this would seem to suggest that Trump could reap the rewards from keeping a low profile, Rogers said the “unanimity of the conventional wisdom that Biden is finished is just greatly overstated,” pointing to historical trends that indicate the party out of power tends to make gains during midterm elections.
“I believe what’s supposed to happen in American politics tends to happen. The party in power tends to lose a bunch of House seats. To treat it as not just your typical loss, but something as a major downdraft — I think it’s premature. We’ll see,” he told the Washington Examiner.
The president’s party has consistently lost seats in the House in every midterm election since 1962 with only two exceptions, both of which many chalk up to the extraordinary political circumstances of then-President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Republicans have unveiled an aggressive approach to the midterm elections, releasing a five-figure Christmas-themed ad in December that aired in districts represented by 40 of their total 57 House Democratic targets.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Under Trump, Republicans managed to strengthen a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and implement parts of their agenda, such as tax reform. But they also lost the House, the Senate, and the White House in four years. An analysis by the Guardian found that Republican House candidates outperformed Trump in the majority of counties during the 2020 election, and he left office with a 41.1% approval rating on the RealClearPolitics aggregate.
A representative for Trump did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
