Being the party of white identity politics may cost the GOP the suburbs and cede them the Upper Midwest, but as long as he’s in power, Trump will never let the GOP be the party of anything else. It cannot be the only message Republicans run on nationally to win a durable American majority.īut the other thing this election has made apparent is the limits to Trump’s political imagination. The limits of Trump’s political playbook are apparent now: It can entrench Republican dominance but not expand it. Those outcomes cast doubt, at best, on the theory that Trump was leading the way to a new Republican map - that his occasional populism and consistent appeals to whiteness would help swing the Rust Belt and upper Midwest to the GOP for good while staving off changing demographics in the South. The 2018 election results defied pat conclusions, but there was one significant pattern: Republicans who won their elections (especially in the Senate) will be more indebted to Trump than their predecessors, but Republicans who lost elections (especially in the House) can just as easily blame Trump for refusing to brag about the economy and instead fear-mongering about immigration and crime. And the 2018 midterm results show that the white identity politics that Trump has made the core of Republican appeals, to the exclusion of everything else, aren’t actually sufficient to sustain a majority party. The Republican Party will need to win elections around him, and after him. When Axios’s Jonathan Swan asked if members of Trump’s inner circle had asked him to tone down the rhetoric, Trump shrugged and smirked: “It got me here.”īut Donald Trump himself will only be on the ballot in one more general election, in 2020. Shortly before the election, he gave the game away. Trump is going to run this playbook every time. Never mind that he lost the popular vote in the 2016 general election (and won narrowly in the Electoral College) never mind that he’s far less popular than a president presiding over 3.7 percent unemployment would normally be never mind, now, that polls and analysts correctly predicted Democrats would take the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. But if you take out the specific reference to the “caravan” that provided Trump with a convenient October news hook, it’s identical to the playbook he uses every other time he feels he’s losing ground, ever since he won the 2016 Republican primary. This was Trump’s closing argument in the 2018 midterm elections. Say that Democrats want to open the borders, letting in caravan after caravan in a migrant “invasion.” Warn about widespread “voter fraud” and illegitimate victories. Tell the American people that immigrants are criminals who want to kill them. President Donald Trump’s theory of politics is dead simple: If he and his Republican Party keep doing the things that won him his first victories, he and they will keep winning.
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