Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) addresses an election night party at the Westin Washington hotel in Washington, November 8, 2022.
Do Republicans even have a legislative agenda? As I write on Thursday afternoon, it seems increasingly plausible that they’ll narrowly control the House, and increasingly implausible that they’ll control the Senate. But if they’re in control anywhere, what is it that they propose to do—other than conduct hearings into the “scandals” of the Biden regime, adhering closely to the venerable evidentiary criteria established at the Salem witchcraft trials? (If that analogy seems overblown, see: Republican Benghazi Hearings, 2013–2015, in which six (6!) separate Republican-led committees held “investigations.”)
But legislatively? Will the incoming Republicans pursue a ban on abortion? Their all-but-official new position on that is “Who? Us?” Raise taxes on the poor and middle class, as Florida Sen. Rick Scott suggested earlier this year? Whereupon Mitch McConnell almost immediately told Scott to shut up.
What does that leave? The only domestic policy proposal they’ve recently floated is to use what leverage they have over the renewal of the debt ceiling to cut into spending programs. Cuts they’ve suggested include some to the clean-energy portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, and some to Medicare and Social Security, possibly by raising the age of eligibility (which amounts to an across-the-board benefit cut in the latter case).
But the ashes from the immolation of former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss’s short-lived Reaganomics agenda are still wafting in the wind. And closer to home, a look into the exit poll of this week’s election makes clear that Americans are no more hankering to return to Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem” days than our British cousins were to return to Margaret Thatcher’s.
As the Associated Press’s VoteCast exit poll makes clear, the midterm electorate was, like most midterm electorates, older, whiter, and more Republican than the electorates that turned out for recent presidential contests. Republicans and Republican leaners outnumbered Democrats and Democratic leaners by a 48 percent to 44 percent margin. Despite that, as has been widely reported, this week’s winnowed electorate favored abortion rights by roughly a 60-40 margin, and on a host of other social issues, such as the serious threat posed by climate change (which 60 percent affirmed), clearly parted company from Republican orthodoxy. (For that matter, despite the widespread concerns about crime, 71 percent of respondents said that racism is a serious problem in policing.)
As has not been widely reported, however, the electorate’s economics also parted company from Republican orthodoxy. Asked if they preferred a government that did more to solve social problems, or one that did less by deferring more to businesses and individuals, 53 percent said more, leaving 47 percent to say less. Keeping in mind that only 44 percent of respondents were Democrats or Democratic leaners, that means that independents and even a few Republicans were no fans of bedrock Republican economics, either.
In general opinion polls, the “less government” faction often outnumbers the “more government” on this question, which confirms the adage that Americans are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. It’s remarkable that such an ideological question got such a pro-government response in such a Republican-leaning electorate. If you asked a more operational question—like, should the age for Social Security and Medicare eligibility be raised—the withdrawal of state responsibility would doubtless be overwhelmingly opposed.
The party, after all, did not even produce a platform at its 2020 national convention.
In fact, one question in the poll did go to the operational side of government’s role. Asked if it should be the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that all Americans have adequate health care coverage, 64 percent answered yes.
The affirmations of the state’s responsibility to do what the market won’t were also apparent in the results of several states’ midterm ballot measures. In Republican South Dakota, voters passed an initiative expanding Medicaid coverage. In Republican Nebraska, they passed an initiative raising the minimum wage to $15 and indexing it thenceforth to the cost of living. Couple these election results with voters in largely Republican Montana and very Republican Kentucky passing pro-choice measures in this week’s elections, and we’re right back to my initial question: What’s the Republicans’ legislative agenda? What parts of it can pass muster with the electorates of even the reddest states?
It might be that keeping gender identity stuff off of elementary school curricula—that is, thinly disguised anti-LGBT bigotry—will end up being the sum total of their platform.
I don’t mean to trivialize by mockery the absence of a plausible Republican agenda. The party, after all, did not even produce a platform at its 2020 national convention; McConnell answered questions about what the Republicans would do if they took the Senate by saying he’d get around to that once they took it; Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to present an updated “Contract with America” lacked any particulars, and I’m not aware of a single Republican who campaigned on it.
Traditional Republican policy is dead; most GOP politicos have effectively been saying: Long live Republican resentments, which is all they’ve really campaigned on, not just in the age of Trump, but increasingly in the course of the past several decades. Virtually all the messaging that comes out of Republican media, going back to the rise of Limbaugh, is about resentment, not policy, and those resentments—over the feared loss of white/male/religious/hetero/native-born hegemony—are now the core of MAGA Republicanism, which is overwhelmingly the party’s dominant strain. The exit poll asked the 48 percent of Americans who identified as Republicans or Republican leaders if they were MAGA or Not MAGA Republicans, and the MAGAs outnumbered the Nots by an almost 2-to-1 margin.
But McConnell isn’t a MAGA, and McCarthy is one only out of fear that he couldn’t claim party leadership in the House if he said he wasn’t. The deeper problem affecting the Republicans is that none of their core positions resonate with a majority of their compatriots. That’s why they’ve lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
Now, however, the party’s self-marginalization has reached the point where the sober heads among them actually fear articulating what they stand for. That’s why McConnell and McCarthy made no pretense of presenting any policies to the midterm electorate. Only by the Constitution’s aversion to majority rule do they still govern, and as the gap between party positions and majority sentiment continues to widen, as it has on abortion, electoral backlashes like the one we saw this week will become a fixture of American politics.
