If There's a "Republican Civil War", Trump Has Easily Won It

It never fails that every four years in the aftermath of a Presidential election, the media and the professional political class fill up their vast expanse of roundtable speculation hours discussing the "civil war" between various factions of the party that just lost.  Last month's insurrection and the ensuing second-round impeachment hearings of Donald Trump have really lent themselves to a narrative of a schism in the Republican Party, but as yesterday's Senate acquittal vote confirmed, there is no civil war.  Fourteen percent of Senate Republicans voted to convict Trump while 86% voted to acquit, and that doesn't constitute anything resembling a symmetrical split.  Before January 6th, during January 6th, and after January 6th, the Republican Party is Donald Trump's kingdom and it will almost certainly remain that way for the foreseeable future.

If anything, the split is even more clearly defined among rank-and-file Republican voters than the representatives they elected, which is why the Senators and House members who did vote to impeach/convict Trump are often met with swift censure by their state's Republican Party.  And particularly for the Republicans who cast impeachment votes and are up for re-election next year, I have to salute them for being profiles in courage.  Even two years ago, Liz Cheney cut the profile of the worst kind of chickenhawk neoconservative in American politics and while I will undoubtedly continue to disagree with her on most major issues of our time, she really put it on the line last month being the third-ranking Republican in the House who was just re-elected as a representative of Trump's strongest state in both 2016 and 2020, still voting to impeach Trump and giving a strong statement explaining why.  I suspect she's a long shot for re-election because of it, and I suspect she knows she's a long shot for re-election.

Ditto for Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, the most outspoken Republican critic of Trump's who is embarking on an official "Country First" initiative attempting to divorce the Republican Party from Trumpism.  Kinzinger said he initially had GOP colleagues ready to co-sign onto his initiative, but they ultimately all backed out leaving Kinzinger to take this on himself.  Is he doing this to raise his national profile and pursue higher political ambitions?  That's probably in the back of his mind as the best-case scenario result, but I also suspect he recognizes that failure is a far more likely result than success and that, like Cheney, losing a tough primary next year followed by unofficial excommunication from his party thereafter is a more realistic consequence.

The bottom line is that there just isn't any appetite in the electorate for "Republican Classic" and, frankly, it's surprising that the GOP establishment held on as long as they did given the shifting demographics of campaign coalitions going back more than a generation.  When the center of gravity in Republican politics became places like Missouri and West Virginia, the writing was on the wall that the Jeb Bushes and Paul Ryans of American politics were not long for positions of leadership.  And now that places like Iowa and Ohio have been co-opted into the GOP fold as well, it was inevitable that voter priorities would change and take on a more ethno-nationalist flavor.  This would have happened to some capacity without Trump, and we saw teasers of it in the more-successful-than-expected right-populist Presidential campaigns of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.  But when Trump came along with a more direct ethno-nationalist pitch and a devil-may-care swagger to accompany it, the GOP's transformation to a European-style alt-right party sped up, so much so that the not-so-old old guard of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have become reviled personalities who no longer have any sense of belonging in a party they commandeered only a few years ago.

So then the question becomes whether Trump's footprint on the Republican Party fades in the near future, particularly with his megaphone silenced due to social media deplatforming.  As it pertains to Trump personally, I think the answer is mixed.  Among the cohort of "persuadable voters" out there, which continues to be larger than what the experts would like us to believe as was proven by the thorough electoral realignment of the Trump era, expect Trump's memory to fade pretty quickly.  By the time next year's Congressional midterms come along, most of these voters will have moved on from the January 6th insurrection in the Capitol entirely and will base their vote on more clear and present matters.  But when it comes to the MAGA die-hards that constitute at least a quarter of the electorate and far more of the Republican base, Trump will not be forgotten and time will not diminish their affinity for him.  Every trip to the ballot box in the foreseeable future will be a binary proxy vote for or against Trump.

Most Republican elected officials seem to realize this dynamic, and they don't want to miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of the lopsided reward structure of Trump loyalty that will likely benefit them in the next couple of election cycles.  One GOP player who I figured understood it as well as anybody was former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who was better positioned than most for rising to the top of her party in the years ahead until she fumbled last week.  She told Politico "We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn't have, and we shouldn't have followed him, and we shouldn't have listened to him. And we can't let that ever happen again."  But I think she's misreading her audience badly as most of the voters she'll need to win a future Republican primary, in South Carolina or nationally, don't believe Trump let them down.  They love him--far more than they love Nikki Haley or anyone else on the GOP bench--and I don't foresee a situation where that reverses.  The person who wins the 2024 GOP nomination is likely to be the person who convinces Republican voters that he or she is most likely to carry on Trump's ideological legacy, not someone who thinks Trump let them down.

It's too early to lay down any serious predictions of the political climate 18 months from now ahead of the next Congressional elections, or certainly for the 2024 Presidential race, but Democrats face an extremely high bar to retaining either the House or Senate in November 2022 even if they're seen as successfully commandeering a return to post-COVID normalcy.  I believe the Republicans only need to pick up five seats to retake the House majority....and they stand poised to pick up at least a dozen just because of their state-level advantage in redistricting.  There's almost no precedent for a party that controls the White House to get the kind of Congressional popular vote majority that the Dems will need to retain the Speaker's gavel next year.  Retaining the Senate is equally a long shot even in a neutral political environment simply because of the GOP's geography advantage.  Any Republican elected official looking at these numbers with any degree of personal or tribal self-preservation instinct is gonna recognize their path back to a majority involves keeping the Trump base energized and picking off the persuadables, a feat they largely already accomplished last November given the double-digit number of seats they picked up with House candidates who outran Trump at the top of the ticket.

Furthermore, governing to curry favor with the ideological base on the Democratic side will probably make the Republicans' job that much easier in winning over the same persuadable voters who helped them pick up 15 House seats in 2020.   America has absolutely had it with wokeness but there's no indication of it slowing down on the left or of there being any real pushback against it by Democrats now in charge of the country who are heavily influenced by the campaign donations sent their way by the emissaries of wokeness.  If Democrats are defending explosively unpopular excesses of critical race theory, cancel culture, and open borders at this time next year, they will discover the hard way just how quickly and how thoroughly a critical mass of persuadable voters is able to forget about whatever they didn't like about Donald Trump.  

There's a very real possibility that at this time two years from now or certainly four years from now that the media storyline will be the "Democratic civil war" and how quickly the Dems became a rump party of campus administrators, upscale tech industry workers, and social justice warriors completely divorced from the priorities of an electoral majority that again elevated populist firebrands of Trump's pedigree to run every level of elected government.  The Republican elected officials maintaining their loyalty to Donald Trump are making that gamble, and I suspect there's a very good chance they'll be proven right.