Republicans Keep Trying to Change the Subject
After throwing its weight behind unpopular ideas, the GOP scrambles for a midterm message.
The midterms are only six weeks away, and Republicans keep trying to find a midterm issue to run on. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in June, anti-abortion messaging has become an election liability; South Carolina’s Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, tried to regain control of the narrative by introducing a 15-week abortion ban, but few of his Republican colleagues would (or could) get on board. Same-sex marriage, which recently hit a new approval rating of 71 percent, is another culture-war talking point off the table. And then there’s the absolute third rail that Republican Senate candidates like (most recently) Blake Masters and Don Bolduc can’t stop talking about—privatizing Social Security and Medicare—even though that, too, is wildly unpopular. Republicans seem to be in disarray.
The platforms of this Republican Party aren’t just unpopular—often, they seem nonexistent. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Policy wasn’t a focus of Donald Trump’s presidency; tweeting was. In 2020, Republicans didn’t write a new policy platform at all. But now, two policy-less years later, Republicans find themselves in an unenviable position: They need to figure out how to win a midterm with little in the way of an agenda, and not much Trump. Can the party of Trump win without Trump?
What does the GOP stand for? Even Tucker Carlson can’t answer that. In a segment praising the newly elected, far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (or Girlbossolini), the Fox News juggernaut told his viewers on Monday, “House Republicans just spelled out what they’re running on—it’s a document called the ‘Commitment to America’ … Have you heard of it? No, you probably haven’t. You probably haven’t read it. Nobody really cares. Why? Because there is nothing real in it.” Congratulations House Republicans: You’ve lost Tucker Carlson.
Carlson is, of course, far from alone in noting the GOP’s big nothingburger of an agenda. The question is how exactly to engage with it. As the New York Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres told me in a text exchange earlier this week:
A generally self-confident Republican Party has lost confidence in its own message. The far right—that is, most of the modern right—is running away from its anti-abortion extremism, which is anathema even to most Republican voters (see Kansas). We in the Democratic Party [have] finally found our mojo [in] the messaging war, and instead of allowing Republicans (save Lindsey Graham) to change the subject, we must double down on taking the fight to MAGA Republicans on the issues of freedom and democracy.
The Michigan State Senator and rising Democratic star Mallory McMorrow echoes Torres’s position. In a recent correspondence, McMorrow told me her view that the GOP is in a tailspin over its now “wildly unpopular” positions on issues like abortion, voting, LGBTQ rights, and Social Security and Medicare. As she sees it, this is why the party is “hellbent on changing the conversation and manufacturing moral panic,” McMorrow said. She added, “We need to stay focused and make sure that every voter knows what [the party’s] real platform is before the November election.”
In the meantime, Republicans are trying to find a midterm message that lands. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s stunt of flying 50 migrants from Texas (where he is not governor) to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (where he is also not governor), dominated the news cycle earlier this month. All of a sudden, the public’s focus was back on the manufactured menace at the southern U.S. border. It may or may not have impressed voters, but DeSantis got the media to chase the squirrel.
GOP Senate candidates in competitive purple states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are making a similar bet on scare tactics and directing their efforts—and more than $21 million in campaign-ad spending—on painting crime as a major problem, and Democrats as the culprits. I can’t say whether it will work as an election strategy, but it’s not hard to imagine a world where Fox News and the rest of conservative media pull off the pivot—despite Republicans’ glaring lack of a crime-related policy vision. Fear-based messaging doesn’t need solutions. It does, however, incentivize candidates to convince Americans that their country is a burning hellscape.
During the Trump years, pundits and politics reporters would joke that the president was everyone’s assignment editor. The things Trump focused on, no matter how strange, became the media’s focus—and, eventually, the public’s focus. (Remember when Trump mused about buying Greenland and then the Republican Senator and sycophant Tom Cotton wrote an opinion piece about how America should buy Greenland? It turns out Trump got the idea from Ronald Lauder, an heir to cosmetics titan Estée Lauder.) But this time around, we should all know better. The stakes are too high to fall for his party’s distractions.