The G.O.P.'s Race to Out-Trump the Trumpists

[Zorro]

The midterm elections are approaching, and the Republican Party is heading into them with the former President as its leader.

Anyone in need of a warning about what the 2022 midterm elections could bring might consider what took place last month at a candidates’ forum sponsored by the Republican Women of Coffee County, Alabama. Katie Britt, a contender for the Republican nomination to replace Senator Richard Shelby, who is retiring, was asked if she had supported Roy Moore in the 2017 special Senate election. Moore is the Constitution-defying judge who was accused of sexually pursuing teen-age girls; he denied the allegations, but lost to the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones. “I have never supported or voted for a Democrat in my life,” Britt said, but added, “I also think it’s important to stand with women.” That hedged response appeared to provoke the next candidate to speak, Representative Mo Brooks, who accused her of lacking party loyalty. “We are a team,” he said. “We have a belief system.”

What was most notable in this exchange was Britt’s reply: she accused Brooks of being the disloyal one. “Every single time, I voted for Donald Trump, and stood with him,” she said. “That wasn’t the step you took.” During the 2016 Presidential primaries, Brooks initially supported Senator Ted Cruz. But the congressman is now best known for the speech he gave at Trump’s January 6th Save America rally, in which he told the crowd that the time had come for “kicking ass.” At a more recent Trump rally, he warned of “godless, evil, amoral socialist Democrats.” Trump has enthusiastically endorsed Brooks, and has derided Britt, who once served as Shelby’s chief of staff, as an unqualified “assistant” to a “rino.” Britt has the backing of Alabama’s business establishment, yet she apparently thought that her best move was to try to out-Trump an unapologetic insurrectionist.

She’s not the only one. Earlier this month, Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, a purported establishment figure who, at eighty-eight, is running for an eighth term, came onstage at a Trump rally in Des Moines. “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got ninety-one per cent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart,” Grassley said, grinning. The number he cited came from a Des Moines Register poll, which also found that Trump’s favorability rating was forty-eight per cent among Iowa independents. A CNN poll last month indicated that, nationally, seventy-eight per cent of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected President. Increasingly, they seem to expect their party’s candidates to agree.

With the Senate divided fifty-fifty, just to maintain a status quo in which Biden’s agenda depends on the whims of Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, Democrats need to concentrate on holding on to Mark Kelly’s seat, in Arizona, and to Raphael Warnock’s, in Georgia. (Both men won in special elections, and are seen as vulnerable.) Or they need to pick up seats, perhaps in North Carolina or Pennsylvania, where the incumbents are retiring, or in Florida, where Representative Val Demings is challenging Marco Rubio. In the House, the Democrats’ margin is just eight seats, and midterm voters tend to turn against the party of the incumbent President. At the moment, Biden’s approval rating has dropped to forty-three per cent. The task for Democrats could hardly be more crucial: so much depends on so few seats—including, possibly, another Supreme Court appointment.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/25/the-gops-race-to-out-trump-the-trumpists