Trump’s Electoral Strategy is Incompatible With Winning Back the House

Running up the score in red areas is how Trump hopes to win in 2020, but won’t help the GOP win back the House.

Rep. Will Hurd of Texas was supposed to be the future of the GOP. Writing in Politico in 2017, Tim Alberta called him “a phenom,” who possesses “a rare combination of competence as a policymaker, responsiveness as a representative and ferocity as a campaigner.” It turned out that the GOP has no room for a 6’4″ black man who worked undercover in the Middle East as a CIA case officer.

By mid-July 2019, Hurd was voting to condemn the president for making racist remarks against some of his congressional colleagues. On August 1st, he announced that he will not seek reelection. His south Texas district, which spans 820 miles of U.S.-Mexico border and is 71 percent Latino, will be hard for the Republicans to defend.

As the president gleefully celebrates that fact that Rep. Elijah Cummings’ West Baltimore home was burglarized on Saturday, it’s not hard to understand Hurd’s decision to call it quits. It’s hard for a black Republican to stand by while Trump makes more and more brazen attacks on politicians of color.

The announced retirements of Martha Roby of Alabama and Susan Brooks of Indiana may indicate that it’s also tough for many women to stand by or with the president as he does his insult-comedy routine.

Even in more normal times, a party that finds itself suddenly in the House minority will suffer a wave of retirements. The Republicans makes things harder for themselves by limiting how long members can serve as committee chairmen. For example, Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas walked away in large part because he’s not permitted to continue on as the top-ranking Republican on the House Agriculture Committee in the next Congress.  In his case, at least, the GOP doesn’t have to worry about holding the seat. Containing George W. Bush’s home base of Odessa/Midland, it might be the most right-leaning district in the country.

But that’s part of the problem. If Texas colleague Pete Olson retired to avoid a possible defeat in the Houston suburbs, Conaway (and his colleague Rob Bishop of Utah) retired because of party rules and the misery of serving in the minority. This may not have much impact on who controls the chamber, but it does eliminate some of the more serious legislators in the Republican Party. And, let’s face it, the Republicans are short on serious legislators.

At First Read, Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann write:

The non-Trump wing of the Republican Party wants out.

Think about the other GOP retirements we’ve seen — Reps. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., Martha Roby, R-Ala., and now Hurd.

And these Republicans parachuting out of the Republican Party underscore how vulnerable Trump really is, despite the growing economy.

The fewer Will Hurd-like members running in 2020 reduces the number of moderate/non-Trump Republicans who would eagerly go to the polls for those representatives – and then still hold their nose and vote for the president.

The Republican Party is getting smaller and smaller, and that isn’t good news for an incumbent Republican president.

I don’t think they characterize the problem in the most astute way. Few people show up to vote for a U.S. representative and then decide who to support for president. Ordinarily, it works the other way around. These retirements are signals about things that are already happening, rather than warning signs. Republicans who are in Washington DC to legislate are leaving because minority members of the House have little influence. Other members are leaving because their own party is stripping them of power. Still more members are quitting to avoid the risk of humiliating defeat, as their districts move away from Trumpism. They don’t make that kind of decision without looking at detailed polling of their constituents. Finally, some are leaving out of disgust with the moral tenor and direction of a party led by Donald Trump.

The president continues to reshape the electorate and to reconfigure his party. As his party gets smaller in some areas, he hopes to grow it in others. This isn’t a good strategy for the House, because the growth, where it exists, is coming in districts that are already safely in Republican hands. But running up the score in red areas is how Trump won in 2016 and he’s bent on repeating the effort in 2020. Control of the House of Representatives may just be a casualty of that strategy.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

9 thoughts on “Trump’s Electoral Strategy is Incompatible With Winning Back the House”

  1. It’s way too early to say, but there’s a *chance* Trump’s strategy could hurt Republicans in the Senate, too. Collins-ME, Gardner-CO, and Tillis-NC are among the most vulnerable incumbents, and they’re all running in blue/purple states. If Trump’s campaign strategy drives up white/suburban/professional turnout more than it does his white/rural/small town/working class base, those incumbent Republicans may lose votes, too—either because voter anger at Trump spills over, or because the senatorial balancing act of being a party loyalist but not too loyal became impossible. (Observers of ME politics see some of this happening with Collins’ plummeting popularity in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings.)

    Democrats have their own vulnerabilities (e.g., Jones-AL, Peters-MI); and they’ll need to win additional races to flip the Senate, but especially with the slow, but inexorable demographic changes in the electorate, Trump’s “Flight 93” strategy has less and less margin for error.

    1. The media has been so obsessed with Trump voters and his racism they may be missing an even bigger story, that anti-Trump sentiment is a lot deeper and more widespread than reported.

      If 2018 is any indication, 2020 will see even more voters coming out, eager to vote against Trump, including many who pulled the lever for him in 2016. Trump has done a lot to rile up his base, but nothing to expand beyond it. He won’t have the surprise element in 2020 as well.

      The wild card will be Russian interference and GOP voter fraud schemes. If dems don’t get enough of a handle on that, then Trump could “win.”

  2. One of the comical paradoxes of the “conservative” movement’s strategy in the 21st Century is its successfully utilizing ever more sophisticated gerrymandering strategies to game the House, and then having a “conservative” House that could do nothing but pass ruinous tax cuts and generate Obaman/Hillarian spittle-flecked hysteria.

    This makes sense, as the GOoP has been a Congress-hating, presidentalist party for decades, one that couldn’t legislate a National Apple Pie Day, which has now (quite naturally) morphed into a fascist dictatorship party, with white supremacist overtones. The perversion of the Constitution into a government by executive (with occasional nuclear bombs thrown in by a rightwing extremist Supreme Court) means that everything is expendable except the WH—which can be held indefinitely by a minority faction as a result of the failed constitution. Since Der Trumper doesn’t make the slightest pretext of building majority support for anything at all (partly because of manifest incompetence), and indeed gleefully and openly operates as a minority factionalist prez, the House turns out to be totally useless to the National Trumpalist movement. It is already largely ignored by Der Trumper and his Crackpot Cabinet and will likely will go the way of the Reichstag, especially when the democratically illegitimate 5 man “conservative” Court majority effectively shears it of its oversight functions in the coming months.

    The only recourse of the People’s House is to shut the monarch/dictator’s money down, which is the one power a modern legislature continues to posses, but is unfortunately the one thing it cannot bring itself to do. Pelosi needs to read some history on the English Civil War and the Parliament’s battle(s) with King Charles. An excellent ending, as well!

  3. If the R’s still control the Senate and WH come January 2021, it doesn’t matter how big a majority we have in the House. Even if we have control of House and WH, we still won’t get much accomplished that can’t be overturned in 2024 if another R (rather, a smarter, more cunning and competent fascist branded as a R) wins the WH.

    1. Heck, even if Dems win control of the House, Senate and White House next year, they “still won’t get much accomplished that can’t be overturned in 2024” if Republicans win control then. That’s the nature of political power in a democracy.

      That’s why it’s important to contest, and try to win, every available election. That’s also why it’s important to have some people organizing and fighting in non-electoral arenas. Labor organizing, civil rights organizing, environmental organizing, etc.—many campaigns require more than a 2 or 4 year window to fight, and to win.

      Whatever campaign you’re involved in, fight to the best of your abilities, try to win in such a way that leaves open the possibility of future wins, and try to learn from your mistakes. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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