Op-Ed: After a bad showing in the midterms, what story are Republicans telling themselves now?
The results were bad. Republican House losses helped the Democrats retake the House. The Senate also lost two of its own. But the Republicans are doing better than they’ve ever done before, having captured or retained every single seat in the country except for Minnesota and Texas. Not a bad start for the first midterm election cycle of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the first time in which the Republican Party is actually functioning well.
This is, of course, not the first time that the Republican Party has had a rough start to the decade. They were able to hang on to the House and Senate in 1994, but with a reduced House caucus. The 1998 midterms gave them the Senate, with a smaller caucus than before. The 2010 midterms gave them the Senate, but only with about a quarter of the members. The 2016 elections gave them another Senate seat, with fewer members than they had previously had, but a seat that they will now be defending again when the 2020 elections are finally come.
In each of these cases, the “bounce” voters from one cycle to the next that the Republicans have now captured or retained in 2016 were not the same as the “bounce” voters they had in 1994 or 1998 or 2010. In each case, the bounce voters from one cycle to the next were younger, and less educated voters, and voters who tended to live in rural and more conservative areas. The Republican Party has long been on this track, but it’s also one of the reasons why they lost the 2008 elections: those voters who the Republican Party had been capturing and retaining in the previous cycle did not come back in 2008, and they switched to the Democrat Party.
Now, the GOP is doing much better in every demographic category. But, as the GOP has seen time and again, as long as Republican policy elites are able to keep their voters and supporters happy, they will not be
