SPECIAL JOINT STATEMENT FROM BULLMOOSE AND NEWDONKEYThe Moose and the Donkey are pleased to join hands–or more precisely, hooves–and express gratification that Ralph Reed is not going to become Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. Nor will Brother Reed, whose eyes were on much higher aspirations, hear the strains of “Hail to the Chief” unless he ponies up a few grand to attend some GOP fundraiser where the president is present.Verily, verily, Ralph Reed has discovered that the Proverb was prescient: pride goeth before the fall. Once among the highest and the mightiest in Republican councils, Reed could not win a low-turnout Republican primary in his adopted home state; indeed, state senator Casey Cagle wound up routing him by double digits.Allow the Donkey and the Moose to enjoy a little schadenfreude.The Moose does not fault brother Ralph for having been a leader in the religious right. There are many good and decent folks in the religious conservative movement. What the Moose faults Ralph for is his hypocrisy and crass cynicism as he reportedly exploited the good will of religious folks. Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff truly deserve each other. Ralph would have had us believe that he didn’t know what old Jack was up to. He was merely the piano player in the bordello of corruption. This claim gives a new meaning to the word chutzpah. Ralph is many things, but he is not stupid. And Abramoff was one of Ralph’s closest friends.The Donkey is from Georgia, and is relieved that even Republican primary voters could not bring themselves to ignore Reed’s distinctive history of combining money-grubbing, self-righteousness, and vicious political tactics. Sure, some Georgia Democrats liked the idea of running against Ralph right down to November. But even a temporary victory for Reed would have reinforced the cynical belief in GOP circles that no one will pay an electoral price for the scandals and corruption of the Bush Era–that voters really are dumb sheep waiting for the next opportunity to be shorn.As both the Moose and the Donkey acknowledge, Ralph Reed is an excellent salesman. But he couldn’t he sell himself with all his baggage to the voters of Georgia. He’s had his “accountability movement,” as the president might put it, and lost. Maybe this setback will begin Ralph’s road to redemption. But it’s good to know he won’t be driving down that road in a publicly owned vehicle.
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TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 10: Nope, Republicans Can’t Rerun 2024 in 2026
Hard as it can be to define the best strategies for one’s party, it’s also imporant–and fun–to mock the other party’s strategic thinking. I had a chance to do that this week at New York:
Hanging over all the audacious steps taken so far this year by Donald Trump and his Republican Party has been the fact that voters will get a chance to respond in 2026. The midterm elections could deny the GOP its governing trifecta and thus many of its tools for imposing Trump’s will on the country. Indeed, one reason congressional Republicans ultimately united around Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was the sense that they needed to get all the policy victories they could in one fell swoop before the tough uphill slog to a likely midterm defeat began. No one had to be reminded that midterm House losses by the president’s party are a rule with rare exceptions. With Republicans holding a bare two-seat majority (temporarily three due to vacancies created by deaths), the gavel of Speaker Mike Johnson must feel mighty slippery in his hands.
But if only to keep their own spirits high, and to encourage fundraising, Republican voices have been talking about how they might pull off a midterm miracle and hang on to the trifecta. A particularly high-profile example is from former RNC political director Curt Anderson, writing at the Washington Post. Anderson notes the unhappy precedents and professes to have a new idea in order to “defy history.” First, however, he builds a big straw man:
“[I]t’s always the same story. And the same conventional campaign wisdom prevails: Every candidate in the president’s party is encouraged by Washington pundits and campaign consultants to run away from the national narrative. They are urged to follow instead House Speaker Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill Jr.’s famous axiom that ‘all politics is local’ and to think small and focus on homegrown issues.”
Actually, nobody who was really paying attention has said that since ol’ Tip’s retirement and death. As Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution has explained, presidential and congressional electoral trends made a decisive turn toward convergence in 1994, mostly because the ideological sorting out of both parties was beginning to reduce reasons for ticket splitting. And so, returning to a pattern that was also common in the 19th century, 21st-century congressional elections typically follow national trends even in midterms with no presidential candidates offering “coattails.” So in making the following prescription, Anderson is pushing on a wide-open door:
“[T]o maintain or build on its current narrow margin in the House, the Republican Party will have to defy historical gravity.
“The way to do that is not to shun Trump and concentrate on bills passed and pork delivered to the locals, but to think counterintuitively. Republicans should nationalize the midterms and run as if they were a general election in a presidential year. They should run it back, attempting to make 2026 a repeat of 2024, with high turnout.”
Aside from the fact that they have no choice but to do exactly that (until the day he leaves the White House and perhaps beyond, no one and nothing will define the GOP other than Donald Trump), there are some significant obstacles to “rerunning” 2024 in 2026.
There’s a lazy tendency to treat variations in presidential and midterm turnout as attributable to the strength or weakness of presidential candidates. Thus we often hear that a sizable number of MAGA folk “won’t bother” to vote if their hero isn’t on the ballot. Truth is, there is always a falloff in midterm turnout, and it isn’t small. The 2018 midterms (during Trump’s first term) saw the highest turnout percentages (50.1 percent) since 1914. But that was still far below the 60.1 percent of eligible voters who turned out in 2016, much less the 66.4 percent who voted in 2020. Reminding voters of the identity of the president’s name and party ID isn’t necessary and won’t make much difference.
What Anderson seems focused on is the fact that in 2024, for the first time in living memory, it was the Republican ticket that benefited from participation by marginal voters. So it’s understandable he thinks the higher the turnout, the better the odds for the GOP in 2026; that may even be true, though a single election does not constitute a long-term trend, and there’s some evidence Trump is losing support from these same low-propensity voters at a pretty good clip. At any rate, the message Anderson urges on Republicans puts a good spin on a dubious proposition:
“The GOP should define the 2026 campaign as a great national battle between Trump’s bright America First future and its continuing promise of secure borders and prosperity, versus the left-wing radicalism — open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests and biological men competing in women’s sports — that Democrats still champion. Make it a referendum on the perceived new leaders of the Democratic Party, such as far-left Reps. Jasmine Crockett (Texas) or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York).”
Without admitting it, Anderson points to the single biggest problem for Republicans: They don’t have a Democratic incumbent president or a Democratic Congress to run against. Jasmine Crockett is not, in fact, running in Pennsylvania, where she is likely unknown, and even AOC is a distant figure in Arizona. Democrats aren’t going to be running on “open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests or biological men competing in women’s sports” at all. And Republicans aren’t going to be running on “Trump’s bright America First future” either; they’ll be running on the currently unpopular Trump megabill and on economic and global conditions as they exist in 2026. Democrats could benefit from a final surge of Trump fatigue in the electorate and will almost certainly do well with wrong-track voters (including the notoriously unhappy Gen-Z cohort) who will oppose any incumbent party.
Whatever happens, it won’t be a 2024 rerun, and the best bet is that the precedents will bear out and Republicans will lose the House. A relatively small group of competitive races may hold down Democratic gains a bit, but unless an unlikely massive wave of prosperity breaks out, Hakeem Jeffries is your next Speaker and Republicans can worry about what they’ll do when Trump is gone for good.