This article originally appeared in The Wahington Post on January 18, 2019.
Rep. Steve King of Iowa has never made a secret of his self-professed white nationalism. Until this week, that wasn’t a problem for his fellow Republicans in Congress. They, with a fine lack of irony, even made him chair of a House subcommittee on the Constitution and civil justice. Now they are lining up to denounce him, and party leaders have deprived him of all committee assignments. Why the change?
The standard Republican answer on Capitol Hill is that it’s only now that King, with his explicit defense of “white supremacy” in a New York Times interview, finally has gone too far and therefore must be condemned. Several commentators have suggested that King’s real crime, as far as the GOP is concerned, is that he failed to adhere to the “Southern strategy” playbook of stirring white resentments against minorities while piously disavowing open racism.
But the deeper significance of the turn against King lies in Republican worries about the damage that his fellow nationalist, President Trump, is doing to the party brand. As Michael Steel, an aide to former speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), told the Times, “Whatever we do on Steve King is on the margins compared to what the president says and does.” After the 2018 elections, in which Democrats won the popular vote in the House by the greatest margins since the Watergate scandal, the possibility grows that Trump will become an electoral liability for Republicans in 2020 and beyond. The stand against King may portend future GOP dissent against Trump, and even a direct challenge to his attempt to remake the party along nationalist lines.
Republicans in Congress shy away from the question of why they condemn King’s inflammatory statements but not the president’s. They may acknowledge this moral inconsistency in private, but the reality is that any GOP member of Congress who takes on Trump publicly will provoke severe backlash from the president’s populist base and most likely will face a primary challenge from the right. Few Republican incumbents want to suffer the fate of former South Carolina congressman Mark Sanford, whose supporters turned against him in a GOP primary last year largely (in the view of commentators as well as Sanford himself) because he had criticized Trump’s rhetoric and policies.
The 2018 midterm elections, however, pointed out that Republicans also face severe consequences from not standing up to Trump. The GOP may well have lost its House majority, as well as a number of key gubernatorial elections, because anger against Trump galvanized minority turnout in many states and spurred the defection of college-educated, white suburbanites (particularly women).
Republican strategists have long worried about the party’s failure to attract minorities. The Republican National Committee’s “autopsy report,” issued after the 2012 presidential election, pointed out that Mitt Romney lost despite having won by a landslide among white voters. The report recommended that the GOP diversify its national appeal beyond its shrinking core of older, rural and blue-collar whites by reaching out to the rising number of people from groups that typically did not vote Republican, particularly minorities and young people.
The Republican Party failed to follow this advice. The limited outreach efforts to minorities that the party made before 2016 were largely ineffective. There seemed to be no particular need to change the party’s image, given the substantial majorities the GOP enjoyed in both houses of Congress (and in many statehouses around the country) during President Barack Obama’s second term. Trump spurned virtually all of the autopsy report’s recommendations and still won the presidency, despite losing the popular vote.
Steve King says he was just defending ‘Western Civilization.’ That’s racist, too.
But for many Republicans, the 2018 elections had the feeling of a long-deferred bill finally coming due. A moderate Republican House member complained to NBC News before the election that Trump’s overheated rhetoric on immigration was “hard right fringe and loses us Hispanics and Cubans” in critical states such as California and Florida. The unnamed member predicted that Trump’s focus on immigration rather than the economy would boost minority turnout — which indeed surged by more than 150 percent for both Latino and African American voters, compared with the 2014 midterm elections. The spike in minority turnout cost the Republicans several close elections.
Even more concerning for the GOP, large numbers of college-educated, white suburbanites, who had reliably voted Republican, voted against Trump by proxy by pulling the lever for Democratic candidates. There are many reasons these voters were repelled by the president, but interviews consistently found that, as one reporter put it, “Trump’s racially tinged nationalism has alienated these voters who once made up a dependable constituency.”
In 1971, Pat Buchanan suggested to President Richard Nixon that stoking racial-cultural resentments could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half,” giving the Republicans “by far the larger half.” In a United States in which minorities are projected to become a majority of the population in just a few decades, an electoral strategy based on racial Kulturkampf is likely to backfire on the GOP.
Unfortunately for Republicans, that sort of bellicosity and division is Trump’s stock in trade, and he’s unlikely to abandon it. Suburban- and minority-district Republican candidates who rhetorically distanced themselves from Trump, instead attempting to campaign on their own brand, mostly lost in 2018. So how will self-preservation-minded congressional Republicans approach 2020?
So long as the president remains overwhelmingly popular among Republican voters, there’s almost no chance that Republican officeholders would take serious steps to curb Trump as they have curbed King. However, the example of President George W. Bush’s second term showed that congressional Republicans can desert their leader quite suddenly if he falls below a critical level of popular support.
Speculations about a GOP rebellion against Trump may always remain speculative. Nonetheless, there are indications that some Republicans are considering policies that would demonstrate actual interest and concern for nonwhites, partly as a way of pushing back against the perception that Trump has remade the GOP as a white nationalist party.
The criminal justice reform bill that passed Congress last year with bipartisan support was a sign that many Republicans would like their party to become more of a big tent. So was the Florida ballot initiative that restored voting rights to 1.5 million ex-felons. Politicians and institutions on the right had torpedoed such efforts in the past out of fear that many beneficiaries presumably would be African Americans who would go on to vote Democratic. But the Koch Brothers and organizations such as the Christian Coalition backed the initiative, appealing for Republican support by citing the economic benefits of reducing mass incarceration and religious beliefs in redemption.
The criminal justice reform bill that passed Congress last year with bipartisan support was a sign that many Republicans would like their party to become more of a big tent. So was the Florida ballot initiative that restored voting rights to 1.5 million ex-felons. Politicians and institutions on the right had torpedoed such efforts in the past out of fear that many beneficiaries presumably would be African Americans who would go on to vote Democratic. But the Koch Brothers and organizations such as the Christian Coalition backed the initiative, appealing for Republican support by citing the economic benefits of reducing mass incarceration and religious beliefs in redemption.
One critical indication of whether the Republican Party is seriously interested in moving away from Trump’s racial divisiveness will be if it throws significant support behind the bill that has been introduced repeatedly by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), which would restore key protections of the Voting Rights Act. A critical mass of co-sponsors and leadership backing would be a good indication that the party is no longer willing to indulge Trump’s fantasies about millions of illegal voters having cost him the popular vote in 2016. It might also signal a realization that whatever electoral advantages the GOP has gained by suppressing minority votes no longer outweigh the growing public disgust with this violation of bedrock constitutional rights. (The last time the Sensenbrenner bill was introduced, it died, unsurprisingly, in the subcommittee chaired by King.)
Another key indicator of a changing GOP racial climate would be the level of Republican support someone such as Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan would receive if he were to challenge Trump in 2020 — a prospect that has drawn the attention of the president’s reelection team. Hogan has given no direct indication that he has such a primary challenge in mind (despite considerable enthusiasm for such a candidacy from some quarters). But Republicans hoping to counter Trump’s white identity politics believe that a Hogan challenge could be a catalyst for the forces who want to move the GOP back toward racial inclusivity, given that the governor won reelection last year with considerable black support (despite running against an African American opponent) and garnered nearly half of Maryland’s Latino vote as well.
Those who think that a racially enlightened Republican Party is just a pipe dream should keep in mind the limitless opportunism of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). As a young politician, he supported pro-civil rights Republicans such as Sens. Marlow Cook and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky. As conservatism gained ground within the GOP, his zest for big-tent Republicanism fell by the wayside. But if King- and Trump-style nationalism becomes such a serious liability that it threatens the GOP’s political viability, prepare yourself for a Woke Mitch McConnell.
Geoffrey Kabaservice is director of political studies at the Niskanen Center and author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”