On Tuesday, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia sent shockwaves through the Republican Party by handing large victories to the Democrats. In Ohio, a state that former President Trump easily won twice and where only one non-judicial Democrat has won a statewide election in nearly two decades, voters soundly rejected Republican arguments against abortion and recreational marijuana. Republican turnout was down 6 percent from 2022. 18 percent of Republicans and 13 percent of self identified conservatives supported the abortion amendment.
In Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, a top-notch recruit endorsed by both Trump and Mitch McConnell, lost to a Democratic incumbent. And in Virginia, instead of delivering what many expected to be a trifecta to Governor Glenn Youngkin, Republicans lost both houses.
What is going on? In an era of an incredibly unpopular Democratic president, why do Republicans keep losing off year elections?
Some say that it's all Trump's fault. But it's less about Trump and more about his voters and the failure of the Republican Party to translate voter support for the former president into support for other Republicans.
Republicans have been failing to convert Trump voters into regular GOP voters because the GOP fundamentally doesn't understand the nature of the Trump voter. Many of them are not traditional Republicans. In fact, some of them are not Republicans at all.
As many as 15 percent of supporters of Trump in 2016 also voted for former President Obama four years prior. In 2020, Trump won an even larger share of traditional Democratic voters. This group largely comprises of minorities and the white working class. Many of them still harbor the same distrust of the Republican Party as an institution that they've always had. Philosophically, they are more John F. Kennedy than William F. Buckley: They view Trump's brand as separate from the Republican brand. They do not respond to traditional Republican messaging on issues or candidates.
The GOP does not know how to properly communicate with these voters, so these voters are not motivated by the party's arguments.
We have seen Republican candidates who cling to Trump lose while candidates who distance themselves from him also suffer the same fate. The reason is simple: Both have taken the wrong lessons from Trump's 2016 victory. They try to appeal to Trump voters by adopting his personality without adopting his policies. That fails because it's the policies that these voters agree on, not the personality. Some like Trump's acerbic and bombastic nature, but many don't. Even some of his own supporters are not fans of his personality, but they overlook it because they want the results of his policies.
Some candidates try to fake it. They turn up the bombast to camouflage the fact that they have the same general policies as a traditional pre-Trump Republican. And the voters aren't stupid. Working class white, minority, and rural voters largely didn't vote for Trump because he insulted people. They voted for him because he campaigned on ending NAFTA, protecting Social Security, ending illegal immigration, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America—all things that resonate with these voters.
They're also things that Democrats used to say. It's easy for those voters to support Trump because the truth is that ideologically, he's essentially a 1980s Democrat. And in states like Ohio and Kentucky, where many old school Democrats still run for office (particularly at the local level), Trump voters have no problem supporting those candidates. Democrats lose those voters when they go far Left, but when they campaign as a traditional Democrat, it becomes much harder for Republicans to win those voters.
One reason it becomes harder is because Republicans don't even act as if they want those voters. White suburbanites were the base of the GOP before Trump. In this era, Republicans are losing those voters. They blame it all on Trump, and while he does have something to do with it, that is not the only reason these voters are leaving. Many of them are leaving because they have embraced social liberalism. They are not just rejecting Trump; they are embracing a Left-leaning ideology.
It is much harder to win votes from people who reject you ideologically.
One way for Republicans to counter that is to go all in on recruiting working class whites and minorities into their coalition to make up the difference. But they refuse to do that, so they lose.
Some Republicans prefer to go in the direction of alienating the working class to get their old voters back. But when they do that, they still lose. Why? Because they don't win enough of these new social liberals to counter the working class voters who won't support a Mitt Romney GOP. The working class views those Republicans as the people who closed their plants, killed their jobs, and took the companies overseas. They still don't respect or trust them. When given a choice between a sane Democrat and a Romney Republican, many of them will choose to either stay home or vote for the Democrat.
The GOP is having an identity crisis. They are stuck between trying to decide whether to cobble together their old coalition or embrace their new one. Both paths have risks. Embracing the working class means moderating on economic issues and adjusting your messaging on social ones. Going after your old coalition likely means abandoning social conservatism altogether (which could doom the party for a generation with Evangelical Christians).
But it should be clear that the schizophrenic nature of today's Republican Party is leading to failure. If the party wants to win again, they have to pick a direction and stick with it.
Darvio Morrow is the CEO of the FCB Radio Network and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
