On July 16, Representative Martha Roby won a tough GOP primary runoff election in Alabama’s 2nd District. It was a strange contest. Roby’s challenger, Bobby Bright, was the Democrat she defeated back in 2010, only now he was running as a zealously pro-Trump Republican. Roby received just 39 percent in the June primary on a crowded ballot, but she easily won the runoff against Bright. What made this otherwise insignificant election interesting—interesting, at least, for the political scribes of Washington and New York—was that it was almost exclusively concerned with the question of which candidate was the more likely in Congress to vote as Donald Trump wished.
Two years ago, after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women, Roby had called on the GOP nominee to withdraw from the presidential race. That, of course, was a time when nobody thought Trump would win. In 2018, Roby was faced with the choice of either maintaining her distance from the president or embracing him. She chose the latter, stridently supporting his policies and earning his endorsement. Hence Bobby Bright’s attempt to transmogrify from Democrat to Trumpian revolutionary came to nothing, and Roby stays in Washington for two more years.
Republicans in Alabama’s 2nd District surely care about more than whether President Trump is doing a good job and whether their representatives in Congress support him with sufficient gusto. But regional elections have now become referenda on national phenomena—and especially on the presidency.
In the Texas Senate race, Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke is sharply criticizing Ted Cruz for the senator’s “weak” response to the president’s remarks in Helsinki—which O’Rourke insists are an impeachable offense. In California’s 22nd District, Andrew Janz says he’s running against Republican representative Devin Nunes “to see what I can do to make sure that there is never a Trump presidency again.” Nunes, meanwhile, has raised more than $7 million in this election cycle, much of it coming from people and corporations far from his district who evidently believe he’s besieged by the anti-Trump “resistance” in the safe GOP seat. In Wisconsin, Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin is sparring with her GOP challenger over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. And in South Carolina, Governor Henry McMaster’s campaign is based almost wholly on the fact that Trump enthusiastically supports him—this despite the fact that McMaster is about as unlike the 45th president as it’s possible to imagine.
Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local. It’s no longer true. Local politics aren’t even local in the age of Trump. House elections are now overwhelmed by the disputes of Washington, D.C. Partly this is the result of the federal government’s arrogation of state power; there just aren’t as many local issues to argue about anymore. But even more it’s the decline in the power of incumbency and the rise of the primary wars. Republican Eric Cantor, the powerful House majority leader, wasn’t upset by a Democratic opponent in 2014; he lost the GOP primary to an unknown Virginian economist, David Brat. The latter’s support came initially from national media with knives sharpened for Cantor as a GOP establishment favorite. Incumbents are under assault from both left and right and so the question of whether they “stand with the president” or are willing to “stand up to the president” is the only one.
Rather than talking to the voters themselves and figuring out the three or four things that concern them most immediately, candidates listen mainly to their consultants and decide whether their campaigns will venerate the president or denounce him. For the press, arguing about the presidency and the future of the country is more interesting than arguing about the continued funding of a military base or the local effects of a federal environmental regulation. And so every election becomes a referendum on the the man in the White House and his policies—which today means that everything becomes more about Trump than it already was.
One’s attitude toward the president is important, but it’s hardly the only relevant thing to know about a candidate for high office. There’s no reason a principled congressional candidate can’t say Trump’s right sometimes and wrong sometimes—say, disagree with him on trade policy but praise him for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal—and, with that out of the way, move on to discussions of greater local and regional concern. Yet we’re hard-pressed to think of any candidate doing so in 2018.
The 2018 midterms are about Trump and only Trump. In the wake of the Helsinki summit, former FBI director James Comey tweeted, “All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall. Policy differences don’t matter right now. History has its eyes on us.” But there will be a referendum on Donald Trump in 2020. No one can predict if the GOP’s loss of the House or Senate would help or hurt the president’s re-election prospects. It’s demonstrably unwise, however, to plump for candidates simply because they say they love or loathe the president. Character still matters; Americans still care about local controversies; and Donald Trump, despite what he and many others may think, isn’t the only thing worth talking about.
