The victories of Trump's political allies in Indiana, Louisiana and, this week, in Kentucky and Georgia put an even more indelible MAGA stamp on the Republican Party.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Donald Trump is winning attention, and massing at least short-term power, from his surrogates’ successes in an astonishing string of springtime political battles that may have the ancillary effect of endangering the Republican Party’s efforts to prevail in the more vital political struggles in the fall.
In an eerie analogue to his conundrum in the Middle East, where the American assault has convincingly triumphed over Iranian forces but where Mr. Trump has failed to seal a final victory, the President’s triumphs in a series of Republican primary contests this month does not necessarily shore up his party as it seeks to retain its slender majorities on Capitol Hill.
The victories of his political allies in Indiana, Louisiana and, this week, in Kentucky and Georgia put an even more indelible MAGA stamp on the Republican Party and reinforces the movement’s status as an intimidating and influential historical force, at the very least in the short term and perhaps in the years and decades to come.
These developments – in the most dramatic attempt of an ideological purge of an American political party in 88 years – are an indisputable demonstration of Mr. Trump’s power within the GOP and his success in transforming a party with roots that precede the Civil War into a formidable political force that reflects his views, personality, passions and resentments. Even under Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan – arguably the three most influential GOP presidents of the past – the party was not the incarnation of a single political figure in the way it has become under Mr. Trump.
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But while purging his enemies, many of them independent-minded or moderate Republicans, and installing Trump loyalists in high-profile races, he may be putting the GOP in a dangerous position by transforming a series of separate, unrelated contests in the fall midterm congressional elections into one overarching referendum on the President himself.
This would be a risk in ordinary circumstances, where the party holding the White House customarily loses seats in the first congressional elections after the presidential inauguration. It is especially perilous when the occupant of the White House is as unpopular as Mr. Trump is.
Though the Republicans gained seats in both chambers of Congress in the 2002 midterm congressional elections, held two years after Republican former president George W. Bush ascended to the White House and 14 months after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, that set of contests remains an outlier. On average, parties controlling the White House have lost a net 24 seats in the House of Representatives and a net four seats in the Senate since the Second World War.
Those results, if replicated six months from now, would thrust the Democrats into control of both legislative bodies and, aside from the President’s ability to govern through executive orders, significantly blunt Mr. Trump’s power in Washington.
That is the danger facing a party increasingly identified with Mr. Trump at a time when the President increasingly is viewed askance by voters.
The latest New York Times/Siena poll puts Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 37 per cent, very dangerous territory.
But in what may be a more important predictor, the Times/Siena generic congressional ballot – a measure of how voters would decide an anodyne congressional contest –puts the Republicans 11 percentage points underwater. (The RealClearPolitics polling average is a more modest seven points.)
Before the unusual mid-decade spate of redistricting this year, many political professionals estimated that the Democrats needed a margin of four percentage points in the generic polls to seize control of Congress. That figure may have advanced to five points after recalibrations of districts in many Republican states, a process intensified by a Supreme Court ruling on April 29 against legislative ridings stacked with minority voters.
Mr. Trump can claim credit for ending the careers of five Republican state legislators who had balked at redistricting efforts in Indiana and then, on Tuesday, successfully targeting for political defeat Louisiana’s Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to impeach him in 2021, and Kentucky’s Representative Thomas Massie, who has been a leading Trump resistor in the House.
The precursor to the Trump purge is the spectacularly unsuccessful one undertaken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938, who sought to transform the Democratic Party from a broad coalition that included Southern conservatives into a liberal vanguard.
In that election, conducted in an economic downturn with at least surface resemblance to the current economic distress, the 32nd President called for the defeat of nearly a dozen conservative Democratic senators, especially Millard Tydings of Maryland, Walter George of Georgia, and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, all of whom prevailed easily.
FDR’s failures in Midwestern and Southern primary contests came in the same year as the Democrats’ net loss of six Senate and 71 House seats, resulting in the irony that he lost political momentum as Congress took on a more conservative tint.
“He wanted a vast party reassignment to get rid of the Southern conservatives who opposed his New Deal,” Williams College historian Susan Dunn, the author of the 2010 book Roosevelt’s Purge, said in an interview. “Those Southern conservatives turned out to be his most loyal supporters as World War II approached and during the war.”
And while the White House and many MAGA activists are pleased with this week’s defeat of an incumbent senator and the Trump endorsement of Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton over incumbent Senator John Cornyn, a popular member of the GOP Senate caucus, many Senate Republicans feel aggrieved, especially since the party’s nominee will face an attractive Democrat in November.
Republican senators have not been particularly independent minded but a sense of cloakroom comity prevails in the chamber, where lawmakers customarily support each others’ re-election battles. Moreover, there’s nothing like self-preservation to stir legislators’ passions.