By Robert Russel | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Having won an impressive yet precarious electoral majority in the 2024 election, MAGA Republicans are faced with a conundrum — whether to follow several previous Republican majorities down the path of tired old policies that voters repeatedly reject, or embrace specific issues on which they campaigned to deliver what the voters asked.
In 2023, the new House majority outfought and outmaneuvered Biden into accepting a budget deal with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts while avoiding further drastic cuts to an underfunded military or cuts to social security. They had gotten major concessions, and given Biden nothing that the Democrats did not already have.
In the bargain, they even got Biden blamed for the confrontation, an almost unheard-of thing in a spending fight between a Republican House and Democratic President.
And all the more impressive considering Democrats held the Senate, and the Republican House majority was not 25 or 15 (as in 2011 or 1995) but a mere five!
Did Republicans take a victory lap? Bask in the glow of a badly needed triumph, and move on to another round of legislative progress under their surprisingly effective leadership team?
No, after months of infighting, eight of 223 Republicans joined all 212 Democrats to oust Kevin McCarthy, throw the entire House into three weeks of embarrassing chaos (depressing Republican turnout in the middle of important local elections), and then settle on the compromise candidate: Mike Johnson.
Republicans lost 15 points of public approval in the process.
They then gifted Democrats a free House seat, balked at one confrontation with Biden after another, settled on just one more spending deal no better than the last one under McCarthy, and failed to get badly needed items like border funding, voter ID or banning illegal aliens voting.
After picking up 22 seats (despite fraud, Dobbs and botched redistricting) in two difficult elections, House Republicans have now crawled over the finish line in 2024 on their hands and knees with only 220 seats, despite a national popular vote victory that saw a four-point shift against an unpopular Democratic ticket.
Why the underwhelming performance, versus 2022 and even 2020? Did Republicans think embracing deeply unpopular things like threatening to shut down the government for the sake of a few billion dollars to help Ukraine was a good idea? A commission to examine cutting social security? That failing to even put out a platform helped Republicans to define their opponents? That talking about repealing Obamacare and the Chips Act would not help Democrats in very tight races?
If not for Donald Trump, who put out a very populist-minded platform and outran his party by 1-2 points, House Republicans would have undoubtedly lost. Moreover, with Trump not on the ballot in two years, unless they stick to what Trump promised the voters, they will assuredly lose the midterms.
This is not 1995 or even 2011. Few of the new voters Trump brought into the GOP came into this party salivating over things like a balanced-budget amendment, tax cuts for rich woke corporations, 10th Amendment lectures on states’ rights, or going beyond modest (but still significant!) trimming of the bloated social safety net.
No, they were sick of woke insanity, rampant inflation, Democrat lawfare, open borders, national decline, falling wages, skyrocketing prices, and Democrat gaslighting. By contrast Trump offered a populist, fresh, right-of-center way forward out of this mess. Republicans lagged behind, but limped to victory along with him.
If Republicans do things like job creation, cleaning house at government agencies, fixing the border, lowering gas prices, re-funding Biden defense cuts, de-woking the government and education, and expanding primary care and charter/home schooling, they will deliver major results for their voters.
And if they properly fund and expand early vote efforts like Scott Pressler’s, Charlie Kirk’s and Ralph Reed’s with tens of millions of dollars to boost midterm turnout by an additional 5-10 million (60 million being likely sufficient to blunt and repulse a Blue wave), they can win an upset midterm victory to pick up more seats.
When commencing his Florida governorship in 2019, Ron DeSantis was apparently reminded that he had won only 51% of the vote, and he replied that he might have won 51% of the vote but had won 100% of power. That was true, and his smashing of the Left in his now Red state is one of the greatest Republican success stories of the last decade. But perhaps one of the reasons for that success is that Ron DeSantis didn’t view 100% of power gained by 51% of the vote as a mandate for doing foolish things with zero consequences. He charted a largely populist course, and kept faith with the MAGA populist base without insulting and embarrassing moderates he had won to their cause.
The same can be true of the new Republican majority in Washington.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.