WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
A WEEK AFTER THE MIDTERM ELEC-tions, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri offered a cold—but probably correct—diagnosis of the wreckage facing his party. Workingclass, independent voters who had previously cast ballots for Barack Obama and Donald Trump had stayed home, thwarting the GOP’s hopes of a broad House majority and a narrow one in the Senate.
“Clearly, this party is going to have to actually be different or we are not going to be a majority party in this country,” Hawley said.
It was a bold statement considering the slim majority Republicans had secured in the House. But it went unheeded. Instead of correcting course, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have been pushing an agenda that serves the party’s loudest voices cheering for conflict, but not its pursuit of a stable, predictable governing majority.
While the fundamentals should suggest Republican success just on the horizon, GOP leaders are presenting themselves to voters at every turn in the least palatable way.
Just consider the messages coming from House Republicans of late. McCarthy traveled to the beating heart of the global economy—Wall Street—to demand deep cuts in government spending in exchange for a vote that would let the government pay bills already accrued. Meanwhile, his fellow House Republicans gathered nearby in lower Manhattan, employing dodgy crime stats at a show-trial-esque hearing aimed at discrediting Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is prosecuting a felony fraud case against former President Donald Trump.
Not to be too blunt, but neither of these headlines seem geared toward a Hawleyan reboot of the Republican Party. Spite can be fun, but it isn’t a policy, and the polling backs up that skepticism.
The tone-deaf messaging is not exclusive to the House. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—perhaps the most serious potential challenger to Trump’s renomination—signed a ban on abortions after six weeks during a private ceremony, and followed that days later by threatening to build a prison next to the spot many families regard as the happiest place on earth. Florida’s abortion ban comes in the wake of stunning upsets in Wisconsin and Kansas, where voters rejected tighter abortion limits. The culture wars in general have left parents exhausted, and the coordinated anti-tran
