The Republican Party entered this year’s battle for House control with 22 seats to spare, a map gerrymandered in its favor to a historic (and arguably unconstitutional) degree, and the benefit of presiding over decades-low unemployment and robust economic growth.
It left with (at least) 40 fewer members in the lower chamber, a popular vote loss of more than 8 percent, and the ignominious achievement of having forfeited more House seats in a single midterm than it had at any point since 1974’s post-Watergate bloodbath.
The party has responded to this historic rebuke by rethinking … approximately nothing. Or so, the New York Times reports…
In truth, the Times’ assessment gives Republicans both too little credit, and too much. On the latter count, the paper gives undue credence to the party’s internal consensus that Donald Trump was the primary author of its electoral woes. The president’s garish rebranding of the GOP doubtlessly cost the party significant market share with college-educated whites. But then, so did Paul Ryan’s plutocratic agenda: The House Speaker forced many of his caucus’s most vulnerable members to vote for a historically unpopular health-care bill, and then, a giant tax-cut package that explicitly singled out the GOP’s blue-state base of affluent homeowners for tax hikes. (Exit polls, and the Republican Party’s own campaign messaging, suggest that the GOP’s botched Obamacare repeal effort was a major liability for the party in races all across the country, while its struggles in high-income suburbs indicate that rolling back the SALT deduction to finance windfall tax breaks for the superrich did not play well with the party’s merely rich constituents.)
A broader problem with laying all of the GOP’s troubles at the president’s feet is that the party’s popular support was in structural decline long before Trump came on the scene. In 2016, the Republican standard-bearer lost the national popular vote for the sixth time in seven elections. As of 2012, it was already clear that the GOP’s support among the fastest-growing segments of the electorate — nonwhite and millennial voters — was weak and getting weaker.
The GOP’s 2018 Autopsy: Democracy Is Our Enemy, Part 1
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Sebastion Cooper 