Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) talks to reporters, November 15, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Votes are still being counted in several states, but it appears that Republicans will very likely win a majority of House seats, while falling short in the Senate. The midterms will come down to several outstanding House races in California and Colorado where the GOP candidates are currently ahead, plus the Senate runoff in Georgia. Should present trends hold, Republicans will have something like 220 House seats and 49 Senate seats.
While this would mean Democrats have lost their national trifecta, it’s not great for Republicans either. They were eagerly expecting a massive electoral sweep, with a comfortable 20- to 40-seat margin that would give them firm control of the House. Instead it’s going to be a razor-thin margin with a notably unruly caucus.
Meanwhile, conservative elites have widely attempted to blame Trump for the poor result, but he is not going away quietly. On the contrary, he announced his presidential campaign on Tuesday night, and is already launching savage attacks on expected challengers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—or “Ron DeSanctimonious,” as Trump recently called him. The next two years of internal GOP politics are going to be a reality TV catfight for the ages.
It’s expected that if and when a GOP majority is seated, current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will be elected Speaker of the House. Any sensible party with such a razor-thin margin would naturally prioritize party unity above all, so outlier caucuses would not demand too much lest they risk putting the opposition into power. After all, the House is almost never completely full—there are usually several seats empty thanks to deaths or retirements. A few surprise heart attacks or lost special elections and Democrats could end up with the majority.
Moreover, several House seats that Republicans picked up are exceptionally vulnerable. In New York, they won several districts that went comfortably for Biden in 2020. Facing likely political extinction, some of those members might be induced to vote for a compromise nonpartisan Speaker, or even switch parties.
But the Freedom Caucus—about 50 of the craziest Republican House members, which is to say, about 50 of the craziest people in the entire country—is already making outlandish demands and plotting against McCarthy. They have presented “requests” that he essentially surrender his formal powers to the committee chairs, and are pondering running someone against him for Speaker. Reportedly, they haven’t settled on anyone yet, but one possibility is Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), last seen joking about Nancy Pelosi’s husband being assaulted with a hammer by a deranged conservative extremist.
McCarthy has categorically ruled out their initial demands, but he will need almost every single Freedom Caucus vote to be elected. He will probably end up granting the crazies considerable concessions. This dynamic is nothing new; it’s what has made the GOP burn through House party leaders every few years even when they had huge majorities. John Boehner cruised to power in 2010 by pandering to right-wing lunacy; then the lunatics he enabled caused one pointless crisis after another, and so he gave up in 2015 to become a lobbyist. Paul Ryan replaced him, passed some tax cuts for the rich in 2017, but whiffed on his key concern—repealing Obamacare, which went down in the Senate—lost the 2018 midterms, and so gave up and cashed out.
McCarthy will probably end up granting the crazies considerable concessions.
Now it’s McCarthy’s turn, except his party is much, much crazier than it was in 2015, and he will have almost no margin for error.
On the presidential side, Trump announced his 2024 presidential candidacy Tuesday evening. He clearly wants to reassert control over the party, and is also apparently hoping that doing so will prevent Attorney General Merrick Garland from prosecuting him for any of about 10,000 crimes.
But the 2022 loss leaves him weaker than he has been since he first took the lead in the 2016 presidential primary. His handpicked freakazoid candidates lost in critical swing seats, and the GOP association with such an unpopular figure clearly dragged it down nationally.
But it’s not as if Trump compelled Republicans to go where they didn’t want to go. In fact, a big reason why Trump is so bad for Republicans is that he gave them permission to indulge their own worst instincts. On abortion, for instance, Trump’s Supreme Court nominees did strike down Roe v. Wade, but he’d simply gone along with whomever the Federalist Society dredged up out of its bog of ideological zealots. It also wasn’t Trump who made conservative elites spend tens of millions of dollars whipping up a hate frenzy against transgender people and “critical race theory” that failed to produce the hoped-for backlash vote.
Trump won the nomination in 2016 by pandering to the lunatic beliefs Republican elites and conservative media had carefully cultivated in their base voters. That base then turned into something of a personality cult. After Trump won the presidency, Republican politicos either became abject Trump toadies, or shied away from criticism out of cowardice and an aimless hope that he might somehow disappear on his own.
DeSantis—hitherto one of the groveling toadies—has so far refused to attack Trump. Even Mike Pence, in a recent interview in which he explained how Trump’s mob almost got him lynched during the January 6th putsch, refused to say whether he thought Trump should be president again. Others, like Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who ranks third in the House Republican leadership, have already endorsed Trump for 2024, clearly calculating that he will prevail and that sucking up remains the smart play.
Yet DeSantis at least is clearly going to run for president, as, probably, will several others. Trump has too much baggage and is too unpopular to be a good candidate in 2024, and in any case ambitious politicians don’t want to wait four more years. The stage is ready for a blowout fight between the MAGA cult and the GOP’s most successful rising star, set against the background of incomprehensible chaos in Congress. Keep your popcorn handy.
