For a few years now, we’ve been told the Republican Party is in a state of long-term decline. Young people reject the party in droves, women are angrily leaving it behind, and immigrants and minorities are oblivious to Republican appeals.
But somehow, Republicans manage to avoid the death sentence declared by scholars and the political guru establishment. They escaped again on Nov. 3. True, a Democrat won the White House, but Republicans captured a minimum of 10 House seats, though “experts” predicted they’d lose that many or more. The result: They’re positioned to win the House in 2022 and install Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker.
This is far from what the grassroots political community expected as well. House Democrats were geared up to pummel Republicans, making it difficult to win a House majority again. Instead, the supposedly irreversible Republican decline would continue. And we’ll soon find out if that’s the case.
In 2021, the first test of Republican strength comes in the runoffs in early January for Georgia’s two Senate seats. Republican incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler scarcely laid a glove on their Democratic opponents in the general election. They’re bound to get tougher in the runoffs.
Republicans need to add only one seat to control the Senate, but they have a better-than-even chance of winning both. That would create a 52-48 GOP Senate for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to manage.
In the House, Republicans had won seven seats after a few days of ballot counting and led in as many as five more. Republican officials estimated the party would wind up with 210 to 212 seats, tantalizingly close to a 218 majority.
What about state legislatures? Democrats made a strenuous effort to take over the legislatures of Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Their plan was hatched in the Obama era and engineered by Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s first attorney general. It failed in all three states.
A striking feature of the Republican campaign in the House was its resourcefulness. In Miami, the issue of socialism contributed to the defeat of two unsuspecting Democrats. But with communist Cuba 90 miles away, socialism had a special resonance. And given the sharply left-wing agenda of Democrats, it was far from extreme to mention. “We had the right message,” said Tom Emmer, the Minnesota congressman who runs the National Republican Congressional Committee.
To her regret, Democrat Donna Shalala explained she is merely a “pragmatic socialist.” A one-term House member, she was Health and Human Services secretary in the Clinton administration and later the University of Miami’s president. She lost to Republican Maria Salazar, a Miami TV host. The other victorious Republican was Carlos Gimenez, the former mayor of Miami.
In California, Republicans made headway in a state that Democrats dominate. They did it by electing two Korean American women, Michelle Steel and Young Kim. In Indiana, businesswoman Victoria Spartz, an immigrant from Ukraine, won a House seat Republicans had expected to lose. So much for the GOP’s lack of appeal to immigrants.
That wasn’t the only surprise. Republicans feared a Texas seat from which Will Hurd, a widely respected GOP congressman, was retiring was a lost cause. The seat, stretching for miles outside San Antonio, is minimally Republican and heavily Hispanic. Yet Tony Gonzales, a former Navy cryptologist and college professor, captured it. Democrats were stunned.
The opposite of long shots are seats Republicans were embarrassed to lose two years ago. They won both back. Nancy Mace narrowly took the House seat in Charleston, South Carolina. A tough cookie, she was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, in 1999. And Stephanie Bice ousted Democrat Kendra Horn from the Oklahoma City seat she had shockingly won in 2018. Bice, a state senator, told voters she would “work for you — not Nancy Pelosi.”
In an election in which 91% voted a straight ticket, President Trump had coattails, helping Republican candidates running under him. He deserves credit. As a result, pollster Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies said, “Senate Republicans bucked the dire predictions to hold on to at least a tie in the Senate.”
That wasn’t all. “House Republicans not only picked up a half-dozen or more seats when they were expected to lose double-digits,” Newhouse noted, “but they didn’t lose a single incumbent in the general election, and Republicans didn’t lose control of any state legislative body across the country. And you know why that’s important — redistricting.”
Perhaps the big minds who dis Republicans will take this under consideration.
