“MAGA is ascendant,” crowed Representative Matt Gaetz on Oct. 25. He had reason to be happy. After weeks of chaos, House Republicans had settled on Mike Johnson as Speaker. Johnson is thoroughly in line with nationalist-populist Republicans who engineered Kevin McCarthy’s fall, and the episode was another sign that the GOP is no longer Ronald Reagan’s party. It is Donald Trump’s.
BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI
POLITICS
Since Reagan left office nearly 35 years ago, the GOP has defined itself negatively. The coalition comes together based not on an affirmative program but in protest over someone else’s. The party’s greatest moments have been acts of rebuke.
First came the election of 1994. Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years in a rejection of Bill Clinton’s health care plan, tax hikes, and liberal social views. George W. Bush ran in 2000 to “restore integrity to the White House,” a subtle dig at the character of his otherwise popular predecessor.
Things became more difficult for Republicans as affluent voters and voters with advanced degrees, along with millennial and eventually Gen Z voters, turned away from social conservatism. The failures of the Bush Administration didn’t help. Nor did the lackluster presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney.
The election of Barack Obama inadvertently reassembled the Reagan coalition of white, college-educated married couples in the suburbs. These upwardly mobile professionals, many of whom were religiously observant, combined with traditional GOP constituencies in the Great Plains, evangelical Protestant communities in the South, and white noncollege voters in the Rust Belt. In 2010 and 2014, these voters helped Republican candidates defy Obama. By the time he departed the White House, Republicans held the House, the Senate, most governor’s mansions, and two-thirds of state legislative chambers. This was not because voters loved the GOP. It was because voters saw the GOP as the way to block Democratic overreach. Obama was a gift to the Republican Party: a limitless source of conservative outrage.
Obama believed that the right mix of progressive policies would win back voters. “My hope is that if the American people send a message” to Republicans, Obama told Rolling Stonein 2012, and “they suffer some losses in this next election, that there’s going to be some self-reflection going
