Republicans are in too little disarray

Republicans are in too little disarray With Trump historically unpopular, why isn’t there more infighting? Democrats are, to put it mildly, not exactly enjoying intra-party peace, unity, and good vibes this summer. But that trend has attracted so much attention that I think we’re largely missing the other big politics story of this season: The Republican Party is in a bizarre level of array for a party whose leader is hideously unpopular. The current generic-ballot polling average for Republicans is bad, but Donald Trump’s approval rating is much worse. The gap between these two measures reflects Democrats’ own weaknesses, but it’s also a reminder of a fundamental upside opportunity for every Democrat in the country. And while the level of Democratic infighting is clearly not ideal, to an extent infighting is what you’d expect from a party that’s become unpopular. The status quo isn’t working, so people are arguing about what to do about it. On the G.O.P. side, the status quo also isn’t working — and there’s no argument at all. To be viable in any primary, a Republican candidate needs to be a staunch loyalist to the guy with the -21 approval rating. There are no moderate Republicans As an advocate for moderation on the Democratic side, I think a lot about this chart from Lakshya Jain that shows the moderately moderate New Democrat caucus running a little stronger than baseline Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus running somewhat weaker. The variation is important for illustrating the broad pattern, but the actual gap in vote share is trivial. What’s doing the work is the small Blue Dog caucus, which puts up significantly better results than baseline Democrats. When I talk about moderate Democrats, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about — not Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or Haley Stevens. The presence in the party of people like the Blue Dogs obviously further exacerbates the level of infighting and chaos generated by the insurgent left. But it’s also the reason a bunch of House members ran stronger than Kamala Harris and held their seats. There is no equivalent group among Republicans. Their only plan to win seats in the face of Trump’s unpopularity is to gerrymander. And the asymmetrical gerrymandering tactics have worked: The median House seat is now something like two or three percentage points to the right of the national average. But while that could be a huge deal in 2028 (unless Democrats in New York, Maryland, Colorado, and Virginia take countermeasures), it’s not going to save the House for Republicans in 2026. What they need is an equivalent of the Blue Dog caucus, and they don’t have one. By contrast, even as insurgent leftists are securing all the headlines, we have a bunch of new Blue Dog PAC recruits — Bobby Pulido, Johnny Garcia, Jamie Ager, Bob Brooks, Bale Dalton, and Rebecca Cooke — all of whom are aiming to not just ride the blue wave but overperform it. Their success will further exacerbate intra-party tensions, but that’s good! The only way for a party to win majorities in a big and diverse country is to include people who don’t agree with each other. Similarly, in the Senate, Mary Peltola and, to a lesser extent, James Talarico and Josh Turek are all running races that set them up to be a bit of a problem for leadership and the groups. But that’s exactly why betting markets have Peltola favored to win and the two men within striking distance. Roy Cooper is probably not going to get along very well with the Senate’s growing “Fight Club,”1 but he’s winning a Trump state in a walk. By contrast, Republicans are so determined to walk in lockstep with Trump that it’s hard for them to take advantage of Democratic weaknesses. Republicans are probably fucked in Michigan Take Michigan, for example. Abdul El-Sayed seems like a distinctly bad candidate to me, and I think he’ll underperform the fundamentals.2 That said, the whole point here is that given the current political environment in Michigan (D+6.5 generic ballot), he’s likely to win the race even while performing quite poorly. Ideology matters, but there are limits. Politicians in the El-Sayed Zone do well enough to win in Michigan in national political climates like the current one all the time. Using the Split Ticket Wins Above Replacement (WAR) method, we can see that most of the leftist House members run weaker than a baseline Democrat but still strong enough to win Michigan this cycle. It would take something like an R+6.5 underperformance to lose. Checking the database: Jamal Bowman had an R+5.9 WAR in 2022, for example, which is really bad but good enough to win Michigan this cycle. In Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s worst cycle (2020), she was R+5.2 — a result good enough to win her district. Ayanna Pressley was R+3.6 in her one contested election. Rashida Tlaib was R+4.1 in 2022, her worst cycle. What’s more, both Tlaib3 and Ocasio-Cortez have had better cycles than that. They were also all running in incredibly safe seats and, ideology aside, weren’t necessarily dedicating 100 percent of their effort to their re-election bids relative to legislative work. I’d expect any of them to do at least a bit better if they were in swing seats. If El-Sayed runs an idiotic general-election campaign, he could put up sub-Bowman numbers and lose. But I assume he won’t do that, and the bar for success here is genuinely low. I saw a Mike Rogers A.I. slop ad where he has El-Sayed in a Trojan horse with Bernie and A.O.C. smuggling communism into Michigan. But if El-Sayed puts up an A.O.C.-scale electoral underperformance, Rogers will lose. To be clear, this race is not a done deal. Elizabeth Warren was R+9.4 in 2018 and R+10.8 in 2024. Ilhan Omar is an almost comically bad politician4 and in all four of her races has put up sub-Warren numbers. My point, though, is that the baseline expectation should be that El-Sayed puts up a performance that’s somewhere in the Pressley-Bowman range and wins. In a less favorable cycle that wouldn’t work. But it is a favorable cycle. And Rogers is doing absolutely nothing to distance himself from the unpopular governing regime. Michigan against a left-wing Democrat is clearly a winnable race for Republicans even in a bad cycle, but his team needs to do something to try to make Rogers seem appealing to voters who hate Trump but have doubts about El-Sayed, and they’re doing absolutely nothing. The entire Republican strategy for this state has been to boost what they regard as a weak Democrat and then hope a guy who lost two years ago under much friendlier conditions can win because El-Sayed just spontaneously combusts. This might work, but I wouldn’t bet on it. This is the kind of complacency you get from an excessively unified political party. The Orange Man is bad To state a few obvious but under-considered points: Voters are very mad about the cost of living. Tariffs push the cost of living up. The war with Iran has pushed the cost of living up even further. If you look at tariffs and the Iran war, neither of these things speaks to the conservative movement’s main ideological critiques of the Democratic Party. Having some factional infighting about the wisdom of totally blowing off the electorate’s top concern in pursuit of idiosyncratic Trump goals would, in fact, be productive toward the goal of beating Democrats. Similarly, while re-embracing the goal of national restrictions on abortion rights would make it harder for Republicans to win, surely someone in the pro-life movement is privately wondering why the G.O.P. is spending political capital on gilding random stuff and Trump’s search for personal financial gain rather than a real ideological objective. I don’t want to pretend that conservatives are all brain-dead zombies who are incapable of arguing about this stuff when that’s clearly not the case. The situation, instead, is that party leaders have successfully achieved what Democrats can only dream of: They’ve suppressed internal dissent from official caucus politics, they’re avoiding bitter primaries, and they don’t have angry donors. But the optimal amount of infighting is not zero. Democrats are suffering from weak leadership that has no command over ambitious elected officials and from a grassroots that has unrealistic expectations. But, again, the optimal level of infighting is not zero. I understand that it’s hard to write stories about things not happening. But for a party that loses an election and sticks with the same leadership cadres, falling into disarray is a fairly normal turn of events compared with continuing to follow a historically unpopular leader with almost no dissent. Have these guys actually seen the movie? His whole political operation and cheerleading caucus also strike me as unscrupulous people who will claim that underperforming the fundamentals by four points and winning the state shows he’s actually a brilliant politician. If I were a leftist, I would talk more about Tlaib’s 2024 electoral performance when she had a positive WAR and try to learn from it. I once saw her alienate a room of journalists who’d been hand-picked to agree with her! What are readers' biggest takeaways from last night's results? I think this fits in here: Talk to a certain sort of right of center type and when you bring up Platner as an example of "doing better" they'll tell you that it's just because they thought it would lose the election for the Democrats. For them it's a moral argument. There's another way to look at it (because politics isn't a moral game): instead of sticking by a guy whose negatives looked insurmountable they ditched him when it was practical to do so. As messy as the various Dem and entryist factions are a critical mass of political operators are capable of acting tactically. The Republicans went ride or die with a known loser and underperformer and it worked often enough that they stuck to the formula rather than, y'know, moving on and doing better. The regional power of the country let's them do that often enough, but if they ran better candidates they'd be absolutely dominant.