https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...wboy_Guns&utm_content=20210722152847The hard truth.
It's time for the Republican Party to begin disconnecting itself from former President Donald Trump.
This doesn’t mean the party should denounce the former president — that won’t happen. He’s too popular with Republican voters. But it does mean quietly removing the GOP from under Trump's thumb.
This conclusion is based on simple math, the kind with which one plus one equals two. Since 2016, the GOP has felt an obligation to Trump. After all, he beat Hillary Clinton. Republicans also felt indebted to him for championing their issues, appointing hundreds of conservative judges, and challenging the Left.
To pay that debt, Republican voters and elected officials showed fealty to Trump throughout four tumultuous years in office and his bumpy reelection campaign. They defended his most erratic behavior, even when it made them uncomfortable. They put their necks on the line to support his claims of a stolen election, even when there was no moderately substantial evidence to back them up. Here’s the bottom line: The Republican Party has paid its debt to Trump. It must now shift focus away from him and the 2020 election, an election they lost, and concentrate on 2022 and 2024, elections they can win.
There is no better proof than the two Senate runoffs in Georgia. Republican incumbents were positioned to win both but got tangled up in Trump’s personal politics and were defeated. The ramifications have been enormous: Senate control went to the Democrats. Sometimes, politics ain’t beanbag.
Republicans have a chance at regaining a U.S. House majority next year and a longer, but possible, shot at taking over the Senate. To do either, the party needs to strengthen its appeal beyond Trump’s base. Specifically, it needs to do better with independents, suburban women, and voters with college degrees. For example, Trump’s negative rating among college-educated white women is 62%, based on a recent YouGov poll. That’s heavy baggage to carry.
While it may be good politics for Republicans in pro-Trump states and districts to run as the "Trump candidate," that strategy is less likely to work in battleground states — from Pennsylvania to Arizona, North Carolina to Michigan, New Hampshire to Wisconsin — where independents can tip the balance.
Let’s not forget that Trump won the White House by beating Clinton among independents by a 4-point margin. Four years later, he lost the White House by losing independents to Joe Biden by 13 points.
If Democrats think they can hold Congress with only the votes of their party’s left-leaning base, that will prove to be as wrong as Republicans who think they can win back Congress with only votes from Trump’s populist-right base. Ultimately, cross-pressured voters who dislike Democrats and Republicans, Biden and Trump, will determine which side wins.
Republicans need to be mindful that some of the candidates Trump will be pushing in the 2022 primaries aren’t always the strongest possible contenders against Democrats in the general election.
To triumph in 2024, the Republican presidential nominee needs to offer new policies built on facts and well-thought-out reform ideas. Trump can’t do that. A new face can. A recent poll conducted by the Republican firm Fabrizio, Lee & Associates finds that 53% of GOP voters have some resistance to renominating Trump in 2024, even though most of them are strongly favorable toward him. Trump led the field of possible Republican candidates by a 47%-40% margin.
If the next elections are about relitigating Trump’s grievances, Republicans lose. Republicans win if the elections are about policies that work to their advantage. With Trump as candidate or kingmaker, he becomes the central issue. That denies conservatives a clean shot on issues important to them, such as border security, crime, spending, taxes, cancel culture, and possibly inflation and foreign policy.
That’s why Republicans, including Trump’s strongest supporters, need to remove their former standard-bearer as a distraction. Of course, it’s easier for me, a political independent with no stake in either party’s success, to make that case than it is for Republicans to actually do it. But if they want to win, they need to start disconnecting now before it’s too late.
And if they don’t? Perhaps these three words — President Kamala Harris — will ring a bell.
Ron Faucheux is a nonpartisan political analyst, pollster, and publisher of Lunchtime Politics, a newsletter on polls.
