For Republicans, the 2016 election is like a train wreck in slow motion. They can see it coming, but they can’t do much to stop it. However, they are trying desperately to mitigate the damage. The Koch Brothers and George W. Bush are focusing on the US Senate to keep it in Republican hands.
It won’t be easy. People turn out to vote for president in far greater numbers than they turn out to vote in non-presidential races. It’s the presidential campaigns that capture their imagination, not the down ballot races that also happen to be on the ballot.
In North Carolina, for instance, 2 million more voters participated in the 2012 presidential election than in the 2014 mid-term election. Most of those 2 million will show up again this year and they aren’t coming to vote for Deborah Ross or Richard Burr. They’re coming to vote for (or against) Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
In the minds of many of those voters, the presidential candidates define the parties. If they don’t want the party’s standard-bearer, they probably don’t want the candidates down-ballot, either. These intermittent voters are not nuanced people. Independent voters, especially women, who are going to the polls to vote against Trump or for Clinton aren’t likely to be convinced to vote for Richard Burr.
Turnout will also be a problem for Republicans. With party stalwarts like the Bush family and Mitt Romney abandoning Trump, a lot of conservative-leaning voters may stay home, especially ones who only tend to vote in presidential years. If they didn’t come out to vote for a Senate race in 2014, why would they come out to vote for one in 2016?
The Republicans’ biggest asset is time. They have four and a half months to figure out how to lessen the damage Trump has done to their party. There are few good answers, though. The people they most need to convince are people who have lost faith in the Republican Party because they nominated Trump or people who don’t pay much attention to politics below the presidential level.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
How telling is it that when Republicans nominate someone so utterly unqualified and ill-suited to be president that it should be a gift from Heaven for the Democrats, that that candidate is only marginally more disliked and disapproved of by American voters than is Hillary Clinton!
The GOP has treated George W. Bush like the crazy aunt they kept up in the attic. No one talks about bringing back the Bush years. It is a measure of how desperate the Republicans have become that they would trot out one of the worst presidents in history to mitigate the damage being done by Donald Trump.
Disastrously failed economic policy, catastrophic foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, launching pad for trillions in government debt, millions unemployed, millions of foreclosures, continuing leaks of revelations of CIA torture programs, and attacks on the Bill of Rights by the Bush Administration were the hallmarks of George Bush’s tenure in the White House. The damage will continue to take decades to repair, but the GOP must have experienced a collective amnesia looking backward.
Those were not the good old days. Instead of George Bush, they should bring back Dick Cheney so he can shoot Trump in the face.
Our country and our state need a healthy and constructive two-party system to make the government function as it was designed and to keep the political system balanced and on track. Unfortunately, at this point in the Republican Party’s history, it no longer deserves a place at the table. It has shown over the last eight years that it has no vision for the future except obstructionism. If the GOP cannot right their ship and show some integrity and courage, another new party needs to step up to fill the void.