Trump's Toxicity Will Continue To Cost The GOP Dearly

Last summer, as part of a discussion of some election themes, I suggested to this year's top political cartoonist in the country, Nancy Ohanian, to consider a graphic that depicts Trump as an albatross around the neck of the GOP. Above are a couple of her interpretations. About a week after the election, Ron Brownstein, writing for The Atlantic, claimed that voters had just sent the GOP a message: namely that as long as they remain loyal to the vile Trump, their "prospects on the electoral map will be sharply restricted."

Yesterday, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz voiced much the same sentiment: "House results underscore that what’s good for Trump isn’t so good for the GOP," noting that Trump got the GOP nomination by hijacking the party. "Now, after what happened in the midterm elections, it’s clearer than ever that the president’s fortunes and his party’s future are at odds... If the enthusiasm for Trump in rural and small-town America constituted the story after 2016, the revolt against him in the suburbs, led by female voters, has become the story of the 2018 elections. The more you analyze the House results, the more the GOP’s suburban problem stands out." It could also be about-- to put it gently-- rural naïveté vs suburban sophistication. I mean, it's unfathomable-- at least to me-- that anyone can possibly believe a word he says. My skin crawls when he tries his low-grade, 100% transparent, manipulative routine. But a third of the country falls for it. Too much Hate Talk Radio and Fox brainwashing? Opioids? Low IQs. Racism? Damn...

Brownstein wrote that congressional Republicans, led down the garden path by hapless sophisticates Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, lost their bet and in dozens of cases, their jobs. They locked arms around Señor Trumpanzee and voters disapproved... BIGLY. Not returning to Congress after January will be Trump enablers in the Senate, Bob Corker (TN), Jeff Flake (AZ) and Dean Heller (NV) and House members like Paul Ryan (WI), Mimi Walters (CA), Darrell Issa (CA), Jeff Denham (CA), Dana Rohrabacher (CA), Steve Knight (CA), Ed Royce (CA), Carlos Curbelo (FL), Dennis Ross (FL), Tom Rooney (FL), Steve Russell (OK), Pete Sessions (TX), John Culberson (TX), Jeb Hensarling (TX), Lamar Smith (TX), Joe Barton (TX), Ted Poe (TX), Karen Handel (GA),Peter Roskam (IL), Randy Hultgren (IL), Mark Sanford (SC), Trey Gowdy (SC), Mia Love (UT), Erik Paulsen (MN), Jason Lewis (MN), Luke Messer (IN), Todd Rokita (IN), Mike Bishop (MI), Evan Jenkins (WV), Dave Trott (MI), Ryan Costello (PA), Charlie Dent (PA), Lou Barletta (PA), Pat Meehan (PA), Keith Rothfus (PA), Tom MacArthur (NJ), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Dave Reichert (WA), Diane Black (TN), Jimmy Duncan (TN), John Faso (NY), Dan Donovan (NY), Claudia Tenney (NY), Barbara Comstock (VA), Dave Brat (VA), Tom Garrett (VA), Bob Goodlatte (VA), Scott Taylor (VA), Bruce Poliquin (ME), Kevin Yoder (KS), Mike Coffman (CO), Rod Blum (IA), David Young (IA), Jim Renacci (OH) and... maybe David Valadao (CA). I guess these folks don't need Brownstein to tell them the decision to resolutely reject any meaningful oversight of the Trumpist regime; to excuse and actively defend his most incendiary remarks; to bury legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller; and to work in harness with him to pass an agenda aimed almost entirely at the preferences and priorities for wealthy GOP donors was a tragic mistake. "Even as Trump’s presidency careened through daily storms," wrote Brownstein, "many of his own making, they lashed themselves to its mast."

In the election, the consequences of that decision became clear. The general trend in midterm elections is that voters’ decisions, for both the House and the Senate, increasingly correspond with their attitudes about the president. But the 2018 results raised that long-term trajectory to a new peak.

In the midterms of 2006, 2010, and 2014, between 84 and 87 percent of voters who approved of the president’s job performance voted for his party’s candidate in their local House race, according to exit polls. Last week, 88 percent of Trump approvers said they backed Republicans for the House...

Likewise, in those previous three midterm exit polls, between 82 and 84 percent of voters who disapproved of the president voted against his party’s candidates for the House. But on Tuesday, that number soared: Fully 90 percent of Trump disapprovers said they voted for Democrats for the lower chamber. That was the worst performance for the president’s party among disapproving voters since Ronald Reagan in 1982.

...The power of these relationships shaped the outcome in both chambers. In total, the tightened connection between votes for Congress and attitudes about Trump was a negative for Republicans because significantly more voters disapproved of him (54 percent) than approved (45 percent) in the national House exit poll.

Those topline numbers contained a stark divergence that drove the pattern of congressional results. This year’s exit poll found that just over three-fifths of whites without a college degree approved of Trump’s performance. That helps explain why Democrats made only very modest gains in rural or heavily blue-collar House districts. (Northeast Iowa and two upstate New York seats were among the few exceptions.)

...On the other side of the ledger, almost exactly three-fifths of whites with a four-year-college degree or more disapproved of Trump, as did just over 70 percent of nonwhites. That gale-force rejection powered the sweeping Democratic gains in white-collar and diverse metropolitan House districts across the country. Democrats swept away Republicans clinging to House seats in otherwise blue metropolitan areas in and around New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Tucson, Seattle, and the northern exurbs of Los Angeles.

The recoil from Trump extended even to many of the metro areas where the GOP had maintained an advantage in recent years. Republicans lost House seats in Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, California’s Orange County, and possiblySalt Lake City. For Republican members in both varieties of suburbs, occasional votes against party positions or tepid and intermittent public quibbles with Trump’s behavior could not mollify voters dismayed by the GOP’s overall subservience to his leadership.

...Trump in 2016 carried only 13 of the nation’s 100 largest counties, according to data compiled for me by the Pew Research Center. But last week, about half of that already modest group shifted toward Democrats in statewide races. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs in Arizona, was the largest county that Trump won. But as of Tuesday night, it provided the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema a decisive margin of about 40,000 votes in her Senate victory over the Republican Martha McSally.

Tarrant County in Texas, which includes Fort Worth, was the second-largest county that Trump carried. But last week, it narrowly backed the Democrat Beto O’Rourke over the Republican Ted Cruz. Among the other large counties that Trump took in 2016, Suffolk (New York), Pinellas and Duval (Florida), Macomb (Michigan), and Oklahoma (in Oklahoma) all broke for Democrats in governor and/or Senate races.

Texas offered perhaps the most dramatic example of the undertow Trump has created for Republicans in metropolitan areas. In addition to his slim win in Tarrant County, O’Rourke carried Harris County (including Houston) by about 200,000 votes, Dallas and Travis Counties (including Austin) by around 240,000 votes each, and Bexar County (including San Antonio) by roughly 110,000 votes. As recently as 2012, Barack Obama’s combined margin across those four counties had been only about 175,000 votes. (He lost Tarrant by 94,000 votes, whereas O’Rourke won it by about 6,000.)

The surge toward Democrats in Harris County was so strong that the party elected a slate of candidates to posts across the government, including 17 African American women to county judgeships and a 27-year-old Latina who had never held public office to the job of the county’s chief executive. Democrats also won a majority on the county commission.

And O’Rourke extended his gains beyond core urban counties to win surrounding suburban areas, including the counties of Fort Bend (near Houston) and Williamson and Hayes (outside Austin). Obama lost all three in 2012 and Hillary Clinton lost the latter two in 2016; she carried Fort Bend only narrowly. Democrats still face an uphill climb in Texas, but by consolidating their advantages in its largest urban centers in the O’Rourke race, they have established a foundation from which to plausibly contest the state for the first time since the early 1990s.

...In this election, Democrats demonstrated renewed strength by winning Senate and governor’s races in the three Rust Belt states that keyed Trump’s victory: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And they sent a clear message that Republicans in 2020 can’t entirely count on the emerging Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. North Carolina, where Republicans lead by about 80,000 ballots in the total House popular vote, also remains highly competitive, if leaning slightly toward the GOP.

But Trump is likely to be a much stronger competitor in the big three midwestern states than the Republicans who were on the ballot last week. And while Democrats don’t necessarily need to win Ohio or Florida in 2020, last week’s results offered them more reason for concern than optimism in those states, which have been the past quarter century’s most fiercely contested swing states. Ohio, at least, is unlikely to again draw the huge investment of time and money from Democrats that it has in the past.

Whatever it augurs for Trump’s own chances, though, the 2018 results underscored how he has truncated the opportunities for congressional Republicans. So long as the party is defined by his racially infused nationalism, it will be a strong competitor in states and House districts dominated by older, blue-collar, and evangelical white voters. But at the same time, the party seems guaranteed to struggle in suburban areas. It will also face growing challenges in Sun Belt states from Democrats who can mobilize an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites. This year, those voters elected to the Senate Sinema in Arizona and Jacky Rosen in Nevada. And they allowed O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race to run more competitively than any Democrat had in those states for decades. That same formula in 2020 could threaten Republican Senate seats in Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona, and possibly Texas.

Over the past two years, Republicans up and down the ballot could have tried to establish an identity divorced from Trump. Instead, led by Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they sent voters an unmistakable signal that they would not act in any meaningful way to restrain, or even to oversee, him. In 2018, voters in turn sent Republicans an equally unmistakable signal: that their fate is now inextricably bound to the volatile president they have embraced as their leader.