Republicans and Trump learning all the wrong lessons from 2016

Republicans should be riding high. Facing a still unpopular president, a fractious Democratic Party and a weak economy, the GOP should be cruising toward majorities in the House and Senate. But that is not the case at all.

Trump and the GOP won in 2016 by learning and applying three key lessons: Winning is what counts; focus on winning issues; and grow your coalition.

Be a winner not a loser

Plenty of people in politics like losing. Losing relieves you of responsibility. It’s easier to sit around and complain rather than go through the effort of legislating and governing. Passing legislation and making policy is difficult, not only does it require negotiation and compromise, but the end result is always at least a bit disappointing. Many ideologues like losing. For them, it’s a badge of honor to never compromise. They do not really want to be elected to office; they want to be martyrs.

Donald Trump cast all that aside in 2016; he was laser-focused on winning, both in the primary and the general election. For all his faults with respect to political strategy, Trump understood that winning is everything in politics and losing is abhorrent.

Trump leaned hard on his persona as a winner and was willing to buck all the standard conventions of presidential politics. His team took a hard look at where Trump needed votes to win and focused their efforts and his message on those key counties in key states. They did not care a whit about the popular vote as compared to gaining electoral votes — in other words, they played by the rules and won.

But in the aftermath of losing in 2020, Republicans in general — and Trump specifically — seemingly have decided to put winning in the back seat. Trump made personal loyalty number one for his candidate endorsements, with little pushback from the GOP leadership, such as it is. For the most part, Trump has been successful sneaking through his favored candidates in crowded primaries. Yet, in critical Senate races, Republicans are struggling.

Trump’s hand-picked loyalist candidates are performing poorly when compared to their ticket-mates on the governor’s line. According to the RealClearPolitics average (as of Sept. 21), Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s point spread advantage over his democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race is greater than J.D. Vance’s advantage in the Senate race by nearly 14 points; likewise, in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp outpolls Senate candidate Herschel Walker by nearly 7 points, and Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Kari Lake, is outperforming Senate candidate Blake Masters by more than 4 points. Only Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania is performing better than the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano — both are behind their Democratic opponents, but Oz is under water a bit less than Mastriano. It’s also worth noting that Walker in Georgia and Masters in Arizona are both losing in the polls to Democrats.

The problems are not limited to the Senate. Trump’s entirely predictable endorsement of de facto carpetbagger Sarah Palin managed to split the Republican vote in the Alaska at-large congressional contest, allowing the Democrats to gain a seat held by Republicans since 1973.

Do Republicans actually read the polls?

Making matters worse, Republicans are stumbling on the issue front. In 2016 Trump ran on issues that mattered. While he conceded to the moralist wing of the GOP whatever they wanted, he didn’t run as a puritan. Trump focused on economic issues and showed that illegal immigration could work as an issue and did not mean losing Hispanic votes.

Yet Republicans are failing to apply those lessons today; in particular, they are allowing abortion and Trump’s claims of a “stolen election” to interfere with their best issue: the economy.

Abortion is a loser issue for Republicans. According to the Sept. 14 Morning Consult poll, 60 percent favor a federal law mandating abortion access and 75 percent favor the same for birth control access. Additionally, abortion is better for Democratic turnout than for the GOP’s, with 64 percent of Democrats considering the issue “very important” but only 37 percent of Republicans thinking so in the YouGov benchmark.

Republicans do not help themselves at all by proposing federal legislation or opposing birth control access.

Trump’s legal troubles, the Jan. 6 hearings and his continued obsession with his “stolen election” allegations don’t help either.

According to YouGov, Americans remain very negative toward the Jan. 6 rioters, with 73 percent disapproving of their actions and 60 percent opposing pardons (just 23 percent in favor), including 58 percent of independents. What’s more, 62 percent think Trump mishandled classified documents, and 69 percent think it was a serious violation (66 percent and 69 percent of independents, respectively).

Meanwhile, 66 percent of poll respondents think the country is on the wrong track (YouGov); 58 percent think the nation is in a recession; 75 percent call inflation a “very important” issue, and 59 percent don’t want Biden to run for reelection, including 64 percent of independents.

In such a negative environment, Republicans should be cruising to an overwhelming victory, but their obsession with lower-priority issues and, even worse, loudly staking out positions on the wrong side of public opinion is giving the Democrats a real tailwind.

Winning politics is about addition        

After decades of trying, the GOP finally broke through with working-class voters in 2016. Trump’s unabashed populism created a huge opportunity for the Republican Party. It did come at the cost of suburban women and college-educated voters, although that might have as much to do with Trump himself. (It’s not such a bad trade, as people without a college degree made up 59 percent of the 2020 electorate.) At the 2016 convention, Trump had Peter Thiel speak — the first openly gay GOP convention speaker. By 2020, Trump made serious inroads with Hispanics and even received 19 percent of the Black male vote — the highest for a Republican in decades.

Trump and his team understood a basic axiom in politics: You win by adding to your coalition, not subtracting. Issue purity tests were reserved for a short list of issues. Without that outreach, Trump would not have won, nor come close in 2020.

In 2022 there is little evidence that the Republican Party is trying to build on the nascent Trump coalition — nor is Trump. For example, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), oblivious to the new GOP coalition, mixed into his “Rescue America” manifesto an implication he would raise taxes on lower-income households. More extreme candidates are edging into nominations (sometimes with Democratic help). The RINO epithet is back, with a vengeance.

All this adds up to a political blunder of colossal proportions.

If Republicans could solidify their standing with working-class voters, back away from the suffocating moralism that is turning off suburban voters (particularly women) and add just a bit to their minority vote, the party could bank on a 2022 landslide and be the favorite to regain the White House in 2024. Even a small improvement in two out of three of those groups could do the trick.

As it stands now, Republicans are throwing away their opportunities and could end up fully in the minority after Election Day. But on the bright side, as losers, they will have so much more to rage about.

Keith Naughton, Ph.D., is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm. Naughton is a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant. Follow him on Twitter @KNaughton711.