[It’s hard to overstate how radicalized and anarchic the base of
the Republican Party remains. ]
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THE GOP IS MORE MAGA THAN EVER  
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Peter Wehner
November 10, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ It’s hard to overstate how radicalized and anarchic the base of
the Republican Party remains. _

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Heading into Tuesday, the conditions that traditionally shape midterm
elections strongly favored Republicans. The party of the incumbent
president usually does poorly, especially in the incumbent
president’s first term. Republicans picked up 54 seats in the House
of Representatives midway through Bill Clinton’s first term, and 63
seats two years into Barack Obama’s.

This year Republicans had the added advantage of President
Biden’s 42 percent
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rating. Voters also expressed profound unhappiness with the direction
of the country. Their views on the economy were overwhelmingly
negative, reflecting inflation at the highest level in four decades
and real wages declining. People were worried about crime and the
failure to secure the southern border. As John McCormick of _The Wall
Street Journal_ put it
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“Voters on Tuesday cast ballots with overwhelming angst about the
economy and little faith in President Biden’s abilities to fix the
nation’s ills.”

Yet Democrats did far better than many political experts predicted and
than most Democrats expected. As of this writing, control of the
Senate is undetermined but leaning Democratic. Republicans are likely
to take control of the House by a razor-thin margin
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the result of picking up a dozen or so seats. And Democrats appear to
have made gains among governorships and in state legislatures.

Derek Thompson: Democrats might have pulled off the biggest midterm
shock in decades
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“This may prove the best midterm performance by the sitting
president’s party since 2002,” my colleague David A. Graham wrote
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Part of the reason was the _Dobbs_ decision, which elevated abortion
as an issue and energized abortion-rights voters. _The New York
Times_’ Ezra Klein speculated that “negative polarization”
helped Democrats; the fear of Republicans prevented the governing
party’s normal turnout decline from happening. Preliminary data
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correct. The Democratic base showed up, and its coalition held
together quite well. Democrats did better among independents than did
Republicans. Because of gerrymandering, fewer seats were in play than
in the past. And politically, America is fiercely divided. Neither
party can dominate the other.

But the main reason Democrats did well is Donald Trump.

Many of Trump’s handpicked choices—in New Hampshire, in Georgia,
in Arizona, in Pennsylvania, in Maryland—were unimaginably bad
candidates. Trump kept enough attention on himself to prevent the
election from being a clear-cut referendum on the unpopular incumbent.
(As unpopular as Biden is, Trump is even more unpopular.) And
Trump’s main imprint on the GOP—crazed conspiracy theories,
dehumanizing policies, lawlessness and chaos—freaked out a lot of
Americans who would otherwise have voted Republican.

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans will finally break with
Trump, perhaps rallying around an alternative like Florida Governor
Ron DeSantis, who won a decisive reelection victory. And they might.
DeSantis is a skilled culture warrior, aware of what appeals to MAGA
world.

But bear in mind that since the summer of 2015, Republicans have had
countless opportunities to move on from Trump, most conspicuously
after the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, part of
Trump’s unprecedented effort to overthrow a presidential election.
Republicans have always passed. In fact, the party is more MAGA
friendly _after_ his defeat in 2020 than it was during his
presidency. A bad midterm election is unlikely to break Trump’s grip
on the party.

Why? Because it’s hard to overstate how radicalized and anarchic the
base of the Republican Party remains. Donald Trump may have endorsed
candidates such as Herschel Walker, Doug Mastriano, Kari Lake, and
Mehmet Oz, _but it was primary voters who chose them_. The lesson
primary voters usually learn after several disappointing elections,
which is to make changes so their party wins more races, isn’t
likely to gain much purchase within MAGA world. And the fact that
Trump’s endorsements don’t translate into election victories
isn’t news.

Those who inhabit MAGA world are deeply alienated from institutions,
including political ones, and therefore a good deal less loyal to the
Republican Party than they are to Donald Trump. They view themselves
as “anti-establishment” and “anti-elitist”; they have contempt
for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. I’m not sure right-wing
pundits declaring that the Republican Party needs to move on from
Trump will sway those voters, any more than it did in 2015 and 2016,
when virtually the entire GOP establishment opposed Trump.

To complicate matters further, the Republican Party today has more,
not fewer, MAGA figures in it than in the past. Marjorie Taylor Greene
won reelection; Liz Cheney did not. J. D. Vance is entering the
Senate; Ben Sasse is leaving it. Meanwhile, more than 200 election
deniers
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take office at the national and state level in January.

Trump is hardly invincible, nor does he have a lock on the 2024
nomination. Polls
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that younger Republicans and those with college degrees are becoming
disenchanted with him. Trump’s descent into an ever darker, ever
more deranged world is creating unease even among some who voted for
him. Events can intervene, including health and indictments. And
DeSantis has, at this early stage, shown the ability to excite MAGA
world.

Helen Lewis: DeSantis’s COVID gamble paid off
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Nevertheless, Trump is still the dominant figure in the Republican
Party. His imprint is all over it. And DeSantis is untested in a
presidential campaign. My hunch is that many people who are excited by
the idea of his candidacy haven’t actually seen all that much of
him. If DeSantis runs, we’ll see just how talented (or not) he is.
Running for governor and running for president are two very different
things.

This also needs to be said: If the Republican Party does break with
Trump now, it will be for only one reason, which is that he’s
costing it power. Everything else he did—the relentless assault on
truth, the unlimited corruption, the cruelty and incitements to
violence, the lawlessness, his sheer depravity—was tolerable and
even celebrated, so long as he was in power and viewed by Republicans
as the path to more power.

The Republican Party remains diseased. There are a few exceptions,
such as Senator Mitt Romney, but Americans should consider the GOP a
threat to liberal democracy until we see evidence of dramatic changes.
The most encouraging news from the midterms was that just enough
Americans understood this; an election that should have been a
Republican tsunami produced barely a trickle. As Lisa Lerer of _The
New York Times_ put it
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voters “showed a limited appetite for the burn-down-the-house
approach that Mr. Trump has spread throughout the Republican Party.”

The past half-dozen years have not been easy ones for American
democracy. The stress test is hardly over, and the struggle will
intensify. But Tuesday was a good day. Voters seemed to understand the
nature of the threat; they stepped up rather than succumb to apathy or
despair. Americans still have a republic, and most of them still want
to keep it.

_Peter Wehner [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Death of
Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump
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