Fentanyl crisis, uncontrolled borders, violent crime, children subject to gender-reassignment surgery without any real standards, integrity of the FBI and IRS — there are myriad issues a Republican House could investigate and shine a light on.
So, assuming the Republicans take control of the House as expected, what will be the top priority of incoming Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.)?
Hunter Biden.
There is no indication the public has Hunter Biden’s escapades as a priority, not with all the serious problems facing the country. Hunter Biden was not an issue in the midterms and — outside of a smattering of obsessives — is hardly of any interest to the public whatsoever.
Make no mistake: Hunter Biden certainly appears to be a sleazy operator, and he may very well be guilty of criminal acts beyond his past hard drug use. But there are much bigger issues and a limited public agenda. Perhaps Comer and his motley crew of snoopers think they will blow open some kind of new Watergate scandal to bring down the president, but — after years of reporters and conservative activists looking into Hunter — that seems a fantasy, at best.
The Hunter Biden obsession highlights a fundamental problem for Republicans: Critical segments of the Party leadership are ignorant about real politics, uninterested in governing, determined to remain losers.
Does any Republican leader know how to read a poll?
With Republicans holding an issue advantage on inflation, immigration and crime — and a president with a negative approval rating — they really had to work to screw up. And boy, did they. For the GOP, 2022 was not so much death by a thousand cuts as humiliation by a dozen idiot blunders. For example, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), whose chairmanship of the Republican Senate campaign committee apparently means nobody else wanted the job, decided to tout entitlement reform — changing Social Security — for no discernible reason.
Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with American political history knows that Democrats pounded Republicans for years on Social Security — and the issue is still looming in the background. According to the August Morning Consult benchmark poll, voters trust Democrats over Republicans on Social Security and Medicare by a margin of 49 percent to 34 percent. Senior Citizens — the Republicans’ best demographic voting bloc — trust Democrats 46 percent to 42 percent on the issue. Not surprisingly (except apparently for Scott), Social Security is an important issue for them, with nearly one-third naming it their top issue.
President Reagan understood the danger of this issue. He presided over the last major change in Social Security — but Reagan did not do it on his own: He set up a bipartisan commission. In effect, he told Democrats that the Republicans were not about to take a bullet on the issue and let Democrats off the hook.
Scott wasn’t half so savvy.
While Scott’s epic blunder on its own may not have cost the GOP its hoped-for majorities, it certainly didn’t help. It added another layer of buffoonery to the GOP brand.
Not content to cede title of “Most Clueless Washington Republican” to Sen. Scott, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) got into the act with his unnecessary declaration about aid to Ukraine, implying that it would be curtailed under Republicans. Again, a quick glance at polling — any polling — would have shown McCarthy this was a bad idea. According to YouGov, 52 percent of Americans favor keeping aid the same or increasing it; only 24 percent are opposed. Republicans support aid to Ukraine 44 percent to 36 percent; independents support it 43 percent to 24 percent.
There is plenty of room for criticism of Biden’s herky-jerky, incoherent, nonstrategic Ukraine policy — but McCarthy failed utterly in his framing. If he had declared that a Republican House would expect the Europeans, whose security is most at stake, to do more — if he had criticized the Europeans for failing to adequately support Ukraine and leaving the job up to America — he would have had a winning message. Instead, McCarthy decided to cater to a fringe element within the GOP.
2022 was unquestionably a debacle for Republicans
Let’s be absolutely clear: Republicans, given the circumstances, performed worse in the 2022 midterms than any opposition party in modern American political history.
The opposition party has elected at least 230 House members in every first midterm where the president had negative approval ratings — until 2022.
In the Senate, only twice since 1934 has the opposition party (in both cases the Democrats) failed to gain seats (1970 and 2018). In 1970, President Nixon had an approval rating near 60 percent, and in 2018, Republicans simply won seats in states Trump had won.
The minimum expectation for Republicans should have been at the very least 230 House seats and 52 Senate seats — maybe, you drop the Senate expectations down one seat due to local factors. But there is no question the GOP should have come out of 2022 with majorities in both chambers. The election was a failure.
Consider the fact that, as I write this, a vote switch of just 1 percent from Democratic to Republican candidates would mean Republican victories in the Nevada Senate seat and five House seats. The GOP candidates would be leading in three additional uncalled House seats and have a large enough margin in several more to have the majority without doubt.
Republicans threw away an easy opportunity.
It was one blunder after another — to an extent never before seen in modern American politics. The GOP literally did nothing right from a campaign, issue-focus or leadership perspective. And yet, party leaders have clearly learned nothing — and are gearing up to indulge the grievances of the loudest sliver of the howling fringe.
Joe Biden was elected by doing as little as possible and letting Trump sink himself. If Republicans continue to let the inmates run the party asylum, Biden may well get another four years.
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.