In thinking about the wild thematics coming out of the Republican Party right now, I offered some thoughts at New York about possible explanations:

The conventional wisdom on how to run a midterm campaign if your opponent controls the White House is pretty simple: ride the wave, stay focused on your most popular talking points, and don’t do anything to give the opposing party the chance to turn the election into something other than a referendum on the president, especially if said president is unpopular. The textbook target in a midterm election is the so-called median voter, typically a centrist who isn’t necessarily that focused on politics and definitely doesn’t belong to either party’s base. If there is any issue of great concern to said median voter that won’t lead to conflicted reactions, then talk about it again and again, emphatically.

Translated into the context of the 2022 midterms, Republicans have all the ingredients for a simple midterm message: an unpopular president, a discouraged Democratic base, and a simple economic issue that gives Democrats a lot of problems they cannot solve (inflation). History suggests they are on their way to victory, at least in terms of winning back the U.S. House (a really big deal since it kills a rare Democratic governing trifecta in Washington) and making gains at the state level as well. It’s kind of a no-brainer.

But are Republicans campaigning that way? So far, by and large, no. Instead, to a remarkable extent, Republican candidates and elected officials are going whole hog into culture-war topics. They’re pushing near-total bans on abortion, making law-and-order demands for a crackdown on crime, and railing against the alleged “woke indoctrination” of public-school students on matters of gender, sexuality, and race. This is happening more at the state level than in Washington. But anyone who watched the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson or pays attention to the antics of Marjorie Taylor Greene knows that congressional Republicans are as capable of wild culture-war gyrations as your average conservative occupying a safe state-legislative seat in the rural South.

What’s going on? Are Republicans incapable of message discipline or out of touch with an electorate that’s relatively progressive on cultural issues? Are they consumed with “base mobilization”? Or maybe they’re just mirroring Donald Trump’s self-destructive tendencies?

Here are some possible explanations for a midterm strategy gone wild.

The conservative Christian base is demanding culture war

The most obvious reason Republican politicians are serving up culture-war fare is that their party base is dominated by conservative Christians who are more concerned about the supposed deterioration of traditional values than just about any other political topic. Indeed, there is some evidence that such voters are in a counterrevolutionary state of mind, anxious to use a Republican resurgence to roll back recent progressive gains on a wide range of issues, and free of any inhibitions about displaying their religious motivations. As the New York Times recently reported, there’s a new mood firing up the Christian right’s marriage of convenience with the Republican Party thanks to the MAGA movement’s radicalism:

“The infusion of explicitly religious fervor — much of it rooted in the charismatic tradition, which emphasizes the power of the Holy Spirit — into the right-wing movement is changing the atmosphere of events and rallies, many of which feature Christian symbols and rituals, especially praise music.

“With spiritual mission driving political ideals, the stakes of any conflict, whether over masks or school curriculums, can feel that much larger, and compromise can be even more difficult to achieve. Political ambitions come to be about defending God, pointing to a desire to build a nation that actively promotes a particular set of Christian beliefs.”

These are not people willing to accept LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage as just part of the contemporary landscape. Emboldened by a right-wing trend in judicial circles that may end or sharply curtail abortion rights in a matter of weeks, and finding new allies among parents and wage earners infuriated by COVID-19 restrictions, key elements of the GOP base are not inclined to hide their light under a bushel at present, even if conventional political thinkers in their party wish they’d keep a lower profile. And because of the importance of turnout in non-presidential elections, Republicans by and large don’t want to do anything to dampen base enthusiasm, even if it flows from theocratic yearnings that will be difficult to satisfy down the road.

New and more popular culture-war issues are emerging

Even if the central motivation of many conservative-base voters is still traditional Evangelical or Catholic religious views and a rejection of progressive cultural accomplishments, there are new wrinkles in the old fabric of right-wing cultural politics. The emergence of transgender rights as the new frontier of gender and sexual inclusiveness is discomfiting to a lot of people who typically consider themselves enlightened and accepting of others. And an ancient, religion-based hostility to public education (a.k.a. “government schools”) has found new energy in concerns about COVID-19 lockdowns and the power of teachers unions, which bleeds over into “parental rights” agendas long set by homeschoolers and others wanting public subsidies for private education.

For that matter, “wokeness” itself as a political curse word has given new impetus to old-school racist and sexist impulses, beyond the ranks of conservative ideologues. And recent crime trends — or, arguably, a crime panic based on the inevitable reversal of decades-long reductions in most crimes — have made quasi-authoritarian attitudes toward urban areas as dystopian sinkholes of disorder and social pathology more common, even among swing-voter elements of the electorate.

In other words, a variety of circumstances have made right-wing culture-war politics something of a flavor of the month beyond the fever swamps in which it typically festers.

Conservatives want to change the culture now

It’s important to understand that a lot of the current culture-war energy on the right is emanating from places where conservatives already enjoy power, notably state legislatures in both red and purple jurisdictions. For many of these people, the 2022 midterms are not an opportunity to deny Democrats power or even seize more power for themselves; they’re an opportunity to aggressively govern in a culturally conservative manner without much fear of voter backlash. With the wind at their backs, Republicans are doing what they and their voters want, which is to redirect a culture perceived as godless and disordered back into its customary channels. Perhaps Republicans would be more careful about cultural counterrevolution in a less favorable political environment. But for now the historic pattern of midterm losses for the White House party, intensified by the first serious inflation scare since the 1970s, and an unpopular presidency makes it possible for conservatives to let their non-freak flag fly.

Is this just an unusual, dangerous moment that will fade if Republicans fail to meet their sky-high expectations in November? Perhaps. But keep in mind that the enduring popularity of Donald Trump in today’s conservative politics owes a lot to the 45th president’s habit of always remaining on the offensive and using divisive polarization to build a coalition of the radically aggrieved and just enough swing voters to win elections. Trumpism means never having to moderate and never retreating. Worse yet for the country, when Republicans fail electorally, Trumpism tells them they should double down on base-exciting extremism. It won’t get better.

As a long-time resident of Georgia, I still follow politics there closely, and was amused at some of what I was seeing in the Peach State this year; I wrote it up at New York:

When Donald Trump got former U.S. senator David Perdue to launch a primary challenge to Georgia governor Brian Kemp last December, it initially looked like a master-stroke for the ex-president’s campaign of vengeance against those who opposed his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

Perdue, after all, had broad support in his party throughout his one-term Senate career. He would have probably beaten Jon Ossoff, winning a second term in a January 2021 general election runoff, had Trump himself not spoiled it all with wild claims of a rigged Georgia election system, convincing many of his core supporters to stay home. That Perdue might not only forgive Trump but serve as his cat’s-paw against Kemp was surprising, and it saved Team MAGA from having to rely on a damaged-goods challenger like former Democrat Vernon Jones to take on the incumbent governor.

A snap poll from Fox5–Insider Advantage right after Perdue’s announcement showed him running even with Kemp among likely primary voters. But it’s been a long, slow downhill ride for Perdue ever since. He’s now regularly trailing the incumbent in polls (most recently, a March Fox News survey showing Kemp up 50-39), and despite his own wealth and financial connections, he’s trailing Kemp badly in fundraising as well.

Having intervened so conspicuously in Georgia (he’s endorsed nine candidates so far), Trump decided to give his candidates, and particularly Perdue, a boost with one of his patented rallies last week. But it may have shown his fecklessness instead. Aside from reports of poor attendance (and you know how that bugs Trump!), the event made it painfully obvious that “his” ticket of candidates weren’t all on the same page. In particular, most of them are giving their supposed headliner, David Perdue, a wide berth, as CNN reports:

“None of Trump’s preferred candidates in three of the highest-profile statewide races in Georgia – Herschel Walker for US Senate, Burt Jones for lieutenant governor and Jody Hice for secretary of state – have endorsed Perdue. And in their remarks at a Trump rally in Georgia on Saturday, none of them mentioned the gubernatorial primary.”

Walker has said for a while that he will be neutral in the gubernatorial race, complaining that he’s “mad” at both candidates for spoiling party unity. Hice’s position is more curious: Like Perdue, he is Trump’s handpicked instrument of vengeance; he abandoned a safe congressional seat to purge Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in Trump’s eyes even more culpable than Kemp in frustrating his 2020 plans. The only Trump endorsee eager to support Perdue over Kemp appears to be Vernon Jones, who at the former president’s urging dropped out of the governor’s race and is running for Hice’s open House seat.

Originally Perdue was campaigning on a “unity” message, claiming an ability to bring together both Trump and Kemp loyalists in order to parry the existential threat posed by Stacey Abrams, who is running again with a united state and national Democratic Party behind her. Now it looks more like Republicans are regarding Perdue’s campaign as a distraction getting in the way of Kemp’s long-anticipated rematch with Abrams. That’s how Kemp is regarding it.

You have to figure there’s a bit of an anticipatory smell of death around Perdue’s campaign mixed with a scent of fear about displeasing Kemp. Incumbent governors in Georgia and elsewhere have a lot of power and a lot of favors to call in. Kemp certainly showed he was willing to play hardball back in 2018 when he aggressively used his powers as secretary of State to do everything possible to mess with Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams and her supporters’ ability to cast votes. In Greg Bluestein’s authoritative new account of the 2020 elections in Georgia, Kemp comes across as intensely self-disciplined, resisting every temptation to respond publicly to Trump’s constant insults, while Perdue was temperamental, thin-skinned, and sometimes checked out in his race against Ossoff. In retrospect, deploying Perdue to take down Kemp may have been like (to borrow a phrase from the late Hunter Thompson) “sending out a three-toed sloth to seize turf from a wolverine.” The former senator himself could be having second thoughts.

Perdue still has time to turn things around before the May 24 primary (there’s a minor candidate still in the field, so it’s theoretically possible Perdue and Kemp will face off again in a June 21 runoff if neither wins a majority). But the distance fellow MAGA candidates are keeping from him is not a good sign. At this point, Georgia is looking like a major stumbling block to the 45th president’s plans to show his clout in the primaries, demonstrate his continued grip on the GOP, and perhaps lay the foundation for a 2024 presidential comeback. He’s already abandoned “his” candidate for the U.S. Senate, Mo Brooks, in next-door Alabama. He probably can’t do that in Georgia. But he may be regretting his strategy.

Like a lot of political and legal observers, I will be watching the U.S. Supreme Court closely in June or early July when it is expected to hand down a landmark decision on abortion. I wrote about how hard it is to anticipate the political fallout at New York:

As we await the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, generally regarded as the most serious threat to reproductive rights in 30 years, one big question is how the public will react to an outcome that significantly changes the legal status of abortion. With the two major political parties almost completely polarized on this issue, the reaction could have an immediate effect on the November midterm elections. Many Democrats think a decision overturning or significantly eroding Roe v. Wade might mobilize otherwise unenthusiastic pro-choice voters to show up at the polls (particularly the younger voters who often skip non-presidential elections). But many Republicans believe their own anti-abortion base might become eager to implement such a decision at the state level, boosting their midterm turnout as well.

A lot, of course, will depend on exactly what the Court majority does; a sweeping reversal of Roe would produce a different reaction than a more modest decision that makes it easier for states to enact abortion restrictions without completely eliminating a constitutional right to choose. But since the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, the Wall Street Journal has done some fresh polling on that kind of across-the-board restriction. It found that by a 48-43 margin, voters support a “15-week ban with exceptions for the health of the mother.”

So what exactly does this tell us? “Exceptions for the health of the mother” are extremely controversial among anti-abortion activists. They argue that doctors will exploit such a “loophole” to write a “permission slip” for virtually anyone seeking an abortion on “mental health” grounds, if nothing else. The distinctions between exceptions for the health of the mother versus exceptions only to save the mother’s life got a lot of attention during a 2008 presidential-candidate debate between Barack Obama and John McCain:

“McCain, in response to Obama’s stated support for health exceptions [to a late-term abortion ban], said that such exceptions have ‘been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything’ and made air quotes in reference to the ‘health’ of the woman when describing Obama’s ‘extreme pro-abortion position.’”

But health exceptions are very popular. According to Gallup, in 2011, 82 percent of poll respondents favored “physical health” exceptions to hypothetical abortion bans, and 61 percent favored specific “mental health” exceptions. That’s relevant since neither the Mississippi nor the Texas laws have “health of the mother,” or for that matter, “rape and incest” exceptions (those have strong popular support as well; an AP-NORC poll in June of 2021 found that 84 percent of adults, and even 74 percent of Republicans, favored rape-incest exceptions to any abortion ban). If the Supreme Court upholds the Mississippi law (much less the wildly more restrictive Texas law), you can assume opponents will emphasize the lack of exceptions while happy supporters will downplay them.

If the Court find a way to validate Mississippi’s law (or other 15-week bans) without going further, it’s unlikely that activists on either side of the abortion debate will draw much attention to the fact that 93 percent of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy by the CDC’s estimate. For reproductive-rights activists, that statistic might induce a bit of complacency about the immediate impact of a change in constitutional law. For anti-abortion activists, it would dramatize how far they have to go to reach their goal of eliminating all abortions.

It’s commonly said that Americans are “conflicted” or “confused” about their opinions on laws affecting legal abortion. One public-opinion expert, FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, recently concluded that “many Americans just don’t like talking or thinking about abortion … They also don’t know a lot about the procedure or restrictions around it.” That may be the case for some people, but it’s also true, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff noted a number of years ago, that many people have deeply nuanced views that “[take] in all sorts of personal and circumstantial factors.” It’s not uncommon for people to oppose abortions on grounds of individual motivation (e.g., “convenience” or “recklessness about sex” that laws aren’t very good at addressing). At the same time, as public-opinion researcher Tresa Undem has reported, some abortion opponents want people seeking an abortion be treated with respect and given safe and affordable care:

“When it comes to ‘real life’ views on the issue — how people actually experience abortion — the numbers get even more intriguing. Among people who said abortion should only be legal in rare cases, 71 percent said they would give support to a close friend or family member who had an abortion, 69 percent said they want the experience of having an abortion to be nonjudgmental, 66 percent said they want the experience to be supportive, 64 percent want the experience to be affordable, and 59 percent want the experience to be without added burdens.”

“Yes, but —” could be a surprisingly common feeling about new abortion restrictions even among people who identify as “pro-life.”

The bottom line is that it is hard to predict how the public will react to the Dobbs decision. It will obviously depend on what exactly the Court does, along with what the majority signals could be coming in future decisions and the degree of alarm expressed in the inevitable dissents. But what may matter even more is how non-activists process the new landscape of abortion law and practice. They could surprise us all.

 

Ron Brownstein and others have offered important thoughts on potential 2022 turnout patterns, so I wrote about one of them at New York.

The 2008 presidential election introduced the idea of an “Obama Coalition” of young and non-white voters that would allegedly make Democrats increasingly unbeatable as demographics shifted in the U.S. It has not, of course, worked out that way. While Democrats have indeed won the popular vote in every subsequent presidential election since 2008, they haven’t approached Obama’s 7.2 percent popular-vote margin, and they came close to losing the Electoral College in 2012 and 2020, along with actually losing it in 2016. Meanwhile, Democrats have lost two of the three midterms since 2008. And things aren’t exactly looking sunny for 2022.

There are several reasons why predictions about Democrats’ increasing demographic invincibility haven’t panned out. One key problem, which became clear after the Democrats’ catastrophic 2010 midterms loss, is that they’ve aligned themselves with elements of the electorate least likely to turn out to vote in non-presidential elections. This “midterm falloff” problem with respect to young and non-white voters abated significantly in 2018, which helped to make it the rare good midterm for Democrats.

Then in 2020, a different problem for Democrats began to emerge: flagging performance among non-white voters, particularly the fast-growing Latino category. This trend has made Democrats more dependent than ever on young voters, who also are disproportionately people of color and/or multiracial.

Millennials and Gen-Zers together went for Biden by about 20 points in 2020 and were carried by Democrats about two-to-one in 2018. Though they aren’t identical, the two younger generational groups are more like each other than any of the older cohorts, as Ron Brownstein notes at CNN:

“Nearly half of Generation Z (currently defined as young people born between 1997 and 2012) are kids of color, more than one-third identify as secular without affiliation to any organized religion and a striking one-fifth in a recent Gallup survey identified as LGBTQ. Millennials (generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) don’t tilt quite so far toward change but are still far more diverse on each metric than older generations.”

Both groups are also much more likely than their predecessors to believe in a strong problem-solving government and in the urgency of challenges like climate change. They seem poised to eventually come to the rescue of Democrats as they replace the older, whiter, and more conservative cohorts that are literally beginning to die out, as Brownstein explains:

“The nonpartisan States of Change project … calculated that in 2016, millennials and their younger Generation Z counterparts accounted for a little less than one-third of eligible voters, far less than the nearly 45% represented by the baby boomers and older generations. By 2024, those numbers will more than flip: The group projects that millennials and Generation Z will account for nearly 45% of eligible voters, while baby boomers and older generations will shrink to about one-fourth. (Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, stay constant at about one-fourth of the electorate throughout that period.)”

But these younger people will only save Democrats if they turn out to vote. And that seems unlikely in 2022, for two reasons. First, the strong across-the-board voter turnout in the 2018 midterm election appears to be an outlier; the election was basically a referendum on Donald Trump, whom younger voters really disliked. Second, while under-30 voters are not a ripe target for the Trump-era GOP, they aren’t very fond of Joe Biden, either. The president’s approval rating among 18- to 34-year-old voters according to CNN is currently 40 percent, quite low for such a pro-Democratic group. This makes robust youth turnout even more unlikely than it would have already been.

As Brownstein reports, under-30 turnout leapt from 13 percent in 2014 to 28 percent in 2018. And a study from Tufts University found that under-30 turnout also rose from 39 percent in 2016 to 50 percent in 2020. Without these surges, accompanied by a steady increase in the under-30 portion of the electorate, Republicans would almost certainly control Congress and Donald Trump would still be president.

Something closer to 2014 than to 2018 turnout among young voters is more likely in 2022, particularly given the restrictions on “convenience voting” (e.g., early voting by mail or in person) so many Republican-controlled state governments are enacting, which probably affect inexperienced voters more than others.

There are, however, some rays of midterm hope for Democrats. High levels of youth voting in 2018 and 2020 could help ensure that 2022 turnout won’t drop all the way back to 2014 levels, since past voting is correlated somewhat to future voting even in midterms. And one factor that boosted all sorts of Democratic turnout in 2018 — the bad policies, unsavory racism and sexism, and authoritarian contempt for democracy represented by Trump — isn’t entirely absent in 2022. This is one thing that the ex-president and his bitterest partisan opponents entirely agree on: the enormous desirability of a Trump-o-centric midterm election. Many Republicans, even those who love the man, privately wish he’d take a long vacation until mid-November. But he is almost biologically incapable of keeping a low profile.

Generational change in the electorate is more likely than ever to help Democrats, but not until 2024. What happens in the 2022 midterms is much iffier. Biden’s party needs some good real-world news between now and November, and if at all possible, an ever more reckless Trump restlessly preparing for 2024 with his usual mix of threats and self-aggrandizing lies.

The escalating use of the term “Republicans In Name Only” epithet and its evolving meaning has struck me for a while, so I wrote about it at New York.

Political party members accusing each other of insufficient fidelity to party goals or creeds is a very old tradition. But amid the ideological sorting out of the two major U.S. parties during the 20th century, the accusations of party heresy sharpened considerably.

This has been true for both parties. During the debates over the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s policies, you often heard progressive Democrats complain about “DINOs” (Democrats in Name Only), “Vichy Democrats,” or “ConservaDems.” While ideological tensions remain in the Donkey Party, it’s now rare to see the kind of desire for excommunication that “DINO” implies. Yet it’s strong as ever in the Republican Party, where “RINO” has become an extraordinarily common epithet on conservative media and in GOP primaries.

But something very different seems to be happening right now: Instead of being a slur aimed at ideologically heterodox Republicans (who have already been hunted to near extinction), RINO increasingly means “disloyal to Donald Trump,” as Politico notes.

“While the RINO term has been employed in some form for more than 100 years, its meaning has shifted over time. In previous decades, a Republican risked getting tagged as a RINO for supporting tax increases, gun control or abortion rights. Today, in a reflection of the GOP’s murkier ideological grounding in the Trump era, it’s a term reserved almost exclusively for lack of fealty to Trump.”

The ideology of the GOP has quickly migrated from traditional Goldwater-Reagan-Bush conservatism to the peculiar right-wing populism of the MAGA cause, in which Trump’s cult of personality is a crucial ingredient. And Trump himself is perhaps the most promiscuous purveyor of the RINO smear: He generally deploys it toward Republicans who have rejected or even failed to adopt his 2020 “stolen election” mythology. Sometimes the term is deployed against people with stronger conservative credentials than the 45th president himself.

Consider Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom Trump referred to just last week as “a horrendous RINO who has betrayed the people of Georgia, and betrayed Republican voters [while] repeatedly [surrendering] to Stacey Abrams and the Radical Left.” In fact, the only substantive issue on which Kemp has differed from Trump was on the preferred speed of his state’s emergence from COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when Kemp wanted to move faster than the federal government. As for election laws, Kemp was once known as a master vote suppressor, so his RINO-dom is solely a matter of refusing to follow Trump’s orders to purloin the 2020 election in Georgia.

Many members of Congress who have been labeled RINOs by Trump and his surrogates have also supported him on non-election-heist matters. According to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of congressional support for Trump, the alleged queen of RINOs herself, Liz Cheney, voted with her tormentor 92.9 percent of the time during his presidency. Tom Rice of South Carolina, whom Trump called an “atrocious RINO” at a rally on March 12, voted with Trump 94.1 percent of the time. That hardly makes them latter-day Nelson Rockefellers. What Cheney and Rice have in common, of course, is a vote for Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6 insurrection.

Even Trump’s friends and close advisers haven’t been able to avoid the label. Last month, the former president called Senator Lindsey Graham, his on-again, off-again golfing buddy, a RINO for mildly criticizing Trump’s expressed willingness to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if he regains the White House in 2024. Trump has even dismissed his former attorney general Bill Barr — one of the most thoroughgoing reactionaries around — as a RINO. Again, it’s due to Barr’s refusal to credit his 2020 conspiracy theories.

A new batch of suspected RINOs is identified every time a Republican primary candidate secures Trump’s endorsement against an intraparty opponent. What this really means is that being a “true Republican” now means being a Trump Republican, particularly on tough issues like the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president. And “conservative” increasingly just means conserving Trump’s control over the GOP and restoring him to power. It’s been a startling change in perspective that I can’t imagine the movement conservatives of the not-so-distant past would accept.