A Sign of Weakness

One of the more repetitive pieces of political analysis that has taken hold over last year is that the Republican Party is now the “Party of Trump.” Donald Trump’s approval rating among Republican identifiers – which throughout his campaign and into the early stages of his Presidency trailed past Republican Presidents – has crept up into what could be described as a historically normal range in the mid- to high-80s. By comparison, George W. Bush’s second year as President saw intraparty approval well into the 90s, his father spent most of his in similar territory to Trump, and Ronald Reagan actually trailed all three with second-year approval of merely 4/5s of his party’s supporters.

However, the phrase “Party of Trump,” lacking a greater context, is effectively meaningless. The President of the United States is almost certainly the most powerful person of the world. When your party occupies the most important office in the world, its voters tend to gravitate toward support for that leader, whether he is Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump. In this vein, widespread but not universal GOP support for Trump is the expected outcome of his role as both President and de facto leader of the Republican Party.

While Trump’s standing within the GOP falls within the normal historical range, his depiction in Republican primaries – where many candidates this year have sought to tie themselves directly with “The Donald” – is quite abnormal. From contested Congressional races in Texas (where “female Trump” Kathaleen Wall lost despite $6M in primary spending) and Ohio (where several Trump-embracing females also suffered defeats) to the GOP Senate primary in Indiana (where three candidates worked to “out-Trump” one another), support for Donald Trump the person has become a cornerstone of quite a few Republican primary campaigns. In fact, the closing ad for a candidate in an extremely expensive and hotly-contested state senate primary in the Dallas metropolitan area focused upon a direct comparison between that (ultimately losing) candidate and Trump, despite the unlikelihood that the Texas state senate will ever be asked to vote on the Trump agenda.

This Trumpification of the GOP is repeatedly cited as anecdotal evidence of Trump’s hold over the GOP. In their quest for electoral success, numerous candidates have determined that the path to their own victory is an expression of fealty to Donald Trump. Rather than a sign of Trump’s strength, however, such campaigns actually embody Trump’s weakness across the entirety of his party. Looking back to recent Presidents, Democratic candidates did not work to out-Obama or out-Bill Clinton one another, and Republicans did not extoll how they could out-Bush their opposition. This is because it was broadly accepted within the Democratic and Republican Parties that Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and both George Bushes constituted standard leaders within their parties generally acceptable to most members. There was simply no need to tie oneself to these Presidents, as voters would innately understand that a Democrat or Republican candidate was supportive of a President from his or her side.

Tying oneself to Trump, on the other hand, sends a message to Trump-invested Republican voters that you the candidate are one of them. Not only are you anti-left, but you reject the perceived forces on the right lurking in the shadows who may not actually approve of Trump. Needing only 50% + 1 (or, in crowded primary fields, often far less), a direct appeal to the Trump-loving portion of the party may be a winning strategy. In this context, Trump himself is up for debate among the primary voters (in a way that past Presidents virtually never are), no different than trade or immigration policy.

Removing Donald Trump from the equation shows how these sorts of campaigns depict some residual weakness of Trump rather than a complete GOP conversion into the “Party of Trump.” Imagine a GOP candidate running a primary campaign in which he draped himself in the “flag of George W. Bush” during the early 2000s. The likely response of the voters would have been something along the lines of “why is he running that campaign, we all support President Bush,” and would hardly have offered Republican primary voters a tangible reason to support that particular campaign. Running a similar pro-Trump primary campaign does not generate the same response, as there is a nagging belief among many on the Republican side that certain segments of its voters are insufficiently invested in Trump or even outright oppose his status as the party’s principal leader. Here, Trump is revealed as a political issue, rather than the party leader.

While Trumpification may constitute a viable strategy for winning contested primaries, it does not demonstrate an across-the-board Trumpian takeover of the GOP and in fact reveals the insecurities among pro-Trump Republicans about the party’s complete commitment to the New York businessman who shocked the political world in 2016. The GOP’s true conversion to the “Party of Trump” will only have occurred when Trump is simply and naturally accepted as the leader of the Party, and he no longer constitutes a wedge political issue in its primaries.