GOP House Speaker boondoggle: A decade in the making

This week, the Republican Party is reckoning with an existential crisis that began with the loss of a winnable presidential election in 2012. Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) inability to unite his party and win the House Speakership has been a decade in the making.

Ten years ago, Mitt Romney’s defeat to President Barack Obama came only two years after the GOP gained six governorships, six Senate seats, and 63 House seats, marking one of the biggest wave elections in a century.

After languishing below 50 percent in approval polls for most of the intervening two years, Obama’s popularity ticked upward as the 2012 presidential race hit the home stretch, beginning Labor Day Weekend. A winnable election transformed into a glaring defeat.

As any responsible party might do, Republicans then set to work on determining what went wrong, and how to fix it. Their “Growth & Opportunity Project” report, released four months later, outlined seven areas where the GOP needed to improve, including enlarging the party’s tent by appealing more to women, young people, and non-white Americans.

The report’s authors were carefully selected with an eye toward 2016. Henry Barbour was a conservative operative and nephew of former Republican National Committee Chair Haley Barbour. Sally Bradshaw was a longtime political advisor to Florida Governor Jeb Bush — the presumed early frontrunner for the party’s 2016 nomination for president. Ari Fleischer was President George W. Bush’s first press secretary.

The final two authors were GOP national committeeman Glenn McCall and GOP national committeewoman Zori Fonalledas. A U.S. citizen, Fonalledas was shockingly (though perhaps not at all shockingly) jeered only a few months earlier on national television by hundreds of Republican delegates, with chants for her to “get out” of their country.

These five Republican leaders — under the direction of RNC Chairman Reince Preibus — were charged with presenting a unified path forward. Yet what happened to them symbolizes what’s happened to their party.

McCall was a delegate for Donald Trump in the 2016 election and currently serves as chair of the RNC Budget Committee, where most recently he’s tried to defend his Committee’s alleged financial mismanagement as largely Trump’s fault.

Fonalledas backed Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) presidential run in 2016, and now is adamantly lobbying for Puerto Rico statehood. Of course, Republicans will never support such a move, because it would assuredly give Democrats two more U.S. senators.

Bradshaw left the Republican Party in 2016, vowing to vote for Hillary Clinton instead if the election appeared close. Fleischer stood up for Bradshaw, lamenting that “Trump has moved in exactly the opposite direction from our recommendations on how to make the party more inclusive.” Still, these words seemed empty, as Fleischer fervently backed Trump in 2016 and in 2020.

Finally, Barbour has attempted to split the atom, marrying Trump’s greatness with his limitations while urging his party to improve its principles, messaging, inclusivity, and other facets born from 2012’s faded Growth & Opportunity Project report.

Now, the RNC is moving forward with another audit — but unlike a decade ago, Trump’s shadow looms ominously over the proceedings. His diehard support among tens of millions of Americans won’t easily fade. He recently appeared to threaten a third-party run if the GOP doesn’t give him the nomination again.

Would we expect anything less from a man who refused to admit he lost in 2020, who blames everyone — including his wife — for his shortcomings?

Wasn’t this always the end game of a party that abandoned a thoughtful, innovative, forward-looking action plan for a man who in the end reportedly supported hanging his vice president for not stealing the 2020 election?

This is why Kevin McCarthy’s problems are not his alone. They’re not House Republicans’ alone. They’re not the RNC’s alone.

This is about a broken party that for more than seven years has, to varying extreme degrees, put its future in the hands of a broken man.

Republicans would have picked their House Speaker by now . . . would have controlled the U.S. Senate . . . and possibly would have controlled the White House, if only they’d abandoned Trump after he admitted to sexually assaulting women on the Access Hollywood tape. Or if they’d abandoned him after he sided with Vladimir Putin against the United States in Helsinki. Or if they’d abandoned him after Jan 6, 2021. Instead, they are somehow worse off than they were 10 years ago. Until they realize it, they will remain broken.

B.J. Rudell is a longtime political strategist, former associate director for Duke University’s Center for Politics, and recent North Carolina Democratic Party operative. In a career encompassing stints on Capitol Hill, on presidential campaigns, in a newsroom, in classrooms, and for a consulting firm, he has authored three books and has shared political insights across all media platforms, including for CNN and Fox News.