Watch for ticket splitting in November, as Republicans try to save party, Congress
Washington Post columnist George Will welcomed summer with a scorching assessment of our 45th president and a plea for Republicans to help oust him in November. He also wrote this: “Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.”
Even in a state friendly to Trump’s policies and known for breeding Trumpapoodles, there’s a clear political case for repudiating the president as emphatically as possible. Nationalist populism has poisoned the Republican brand for young adults, college-educated women and ethnic minorities. With the party’s base of middle-aged and older whites shrinking as a share of the electorate every year, Trump has done worse than nothing to attract new voters.
A rebranding project based on a single disappearing face probably won’t work as well for a political party as it might for a problematic pancake syrup. How hard is it to imagine another populist demagogue coming along to pick up Trump’s torch?
It can help if the torch lies amid smoldering ruins. The 1972 election demonstrated the educational value of abject defeat. After Richard Nixon carried 49 states against George McGovern, Democrats concluded they couldn’t win national races with left-wing candidates. Four years later, a Georgia peanut farmer took them to the White House.
No one wins or loses 49 states these days. But a lopsided popular vote and a drubbing in the Senate (along with an Electoral College loss) might deliver a similar shock to Republicans in 2020, inducing the rock bottom feeling that often precedes needed change.
At least that’s the theory. George Will is joined in the phoenix-from-the-ashes faction by anti-Trump conservatives Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin and Bill Kristol, as well as lesser known figures from the pre-2016 party establishment. The Lincoln Project, a political action committee of former and current GOP luminaries, has also come out in favor of purging the Senate of every Republican except Mitt Romney.
Other Trump critics wouldn’t go after congressional Republicans, at least not indiscriminately. Former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman believes that moderates like Maine’s Susan Collins can and should form the foundation of a post-Trump GOP. Their muted criticisms of the president can be forgiven, considering the backlash they would have prompted by being more vocal. David Kochel, a consultant for Sen. Joni Ernst, compared purging such moderates to shooting hostages.
The “Never Trump but maybe your senator” folks want to revive the lost art of split ticket voting. Back in the days of Scoop Jackson Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans, Americans often crossed party lines to support candidates they liked. The practice has nearly disappeared: in 2016 all 34 states that had Senate races matched their Senate vote to their presidential choices.
Joe Biden may not need a tiny band of Republican rebels for his assault on the Trumpian Death Star. But their support bolsters his contention that he will bring people together and lower the temperature of a polarized nation. Plus, the Lincoln Project is airing the summer’s best attack ads against the president.
Biden would love to take office with the Senate majority that some Never Trumpers aspire to give him. Unfortunately his embrace of Bernie Sanders and the social democratic left will chase off more crossover votes than any outside group could offset. It won’t matter if we’re headed for a wave election.
Realistically, most rank and file Republicans will stand by the senators and congressmen they like regardless of how the presidential race is going. Asking them to volunteer for slaughter in hopes of a shorter exile in the political wilderness is a stretch. The bet here is that ticket splitting makes a mild comeback this year, and the McGovern-to-Carter swing executed by Democrats in the 1970s remains unmatched among modern political course corrections.
Michael Smith is a freelance opinion writer in Georgetown.