| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Republicans who oppose former President Donald Trump have been startlingly ineffective for several years now. Here comes another try: Anti-Trump Republican Miles Taylor has organized some 100 other anti-Trump Republicans into a proto-party, threatening to become a genuine separate party if Republicans continue on their present course. No one is expecting much out of this effort. The "prominent" (as Taylor calls them) Republicans in his camp include a lot of names that people who pay a lot of attention to politics may remember, but apparently no current elected officials. With the full rollout scheduled for Thursday, the biggest names that have leaked out are Tom Ridge, who was governor of Pennsylvania in the 1990s and then Homeland Security secretary until January 2003, and Christine Todd Whitman, New Jersey's governor in the 1990s who left her George W. Bush administration job — Environmental Protection Agency administrator — in the summer of 2003. These are not exactly major active players in the Republican Party or leaders with large constituencies. Perhaps we'll hear a more impressive group on Thursday. The impulse to form a third party isn't an entirely bad one for those who can't tolerate the Republican turn against the rule of law but also feel uncomfortable joining the Democrats. But to work, it needs a couple of things. First, it needs resources. The best resource would be viable candidates in lots of districts. Next best? Thousands of other party actors — particularly activists, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, and party-aligned interest groups — fed up with the current Trumpy party and willing to make the jump and bring their skills and contacts with them. I suspect that Taylor's group, however, mostly just has money or the capacity to raise money, which isn't nothing but isn't nearly as valuable. The other thing that a third party in these circumstances needs? Absolute commitment to their attack on the Trump Republican Party. Which means they need to be prepared for their actions, in the short run and perhaps for longer than that, to help Democrats win offices and enact their policy agenda. That's because their main leverage is the threat of preventing regular Republicans from winning by running as spoilers in lean-Republican or toss-up states and districts. It's possible that in a very Republican district, an anti-Trump Republican might have a chance to beat a regular Republican by winning Democratic support, but unless a much more prominent group of politicians are willing to run on the new party's line, that's not likely — and at any rate, it's not clear that Democrats would abandon their own candidate for a much more conservative anti-Trumper. But in more balanced districts that Republicans could normally expect to win narrowly, the third-party candidate might only need to take a small fraction of the vote to doom the Republican. To do so, they would have to target Republican voters and avoid targeting Democrats. A never-Trump party that focused on winning back college-educated voters in suburban areas that have recently flipped to the Democrats would be a gift to the Trump Republicans; if those are the voters they want to represent, they're probably better off becoming a moderate-to-conservative faction of the Democratic Party and attempting to influence it from the inside. No, an anti-Trump third party only makes sense if it is willing to fight for those who vote Republican despite their misgivings about Trump personally and, perhaps, about Trump's attacks on the integrity of elections and the rule of law. The same point about willingness to help Democrats would be true if a new party actually recruited from current Republicans in Congress — or somehow managed to elect a few members of the Senate and House of Representatives in 2022. The big threat any such party could make would be that it would give the majority to the Democrats if they were the margin of difference. It wouldn't require any kind of fancy deal; they would simply vote against Democrats on most policy issues, but support them on things such as restoring the Voting Rights Act and other items on a democracy agenda. But allowing Democrats to organize one or both chambers would still be a severe blow to the Trump Republican Party. The medium or long-term goal of such an anti-Trump party would probably be to harm the Republicans enough that, perhaps after Trump himself passes from the political scene, the party would sue for peace. (Yes, they would dream of actually replacing the Republicans, but that's an even more uphill battle). Whether it's a realistic goal depends on exactly what resources the party can bring to the table. If it's moderate Republican politicians who retired decades ago, a handful of political consultants, and some foreign policy specialists who are more hawkish than their party or most voters … well, that's not much. If it included Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a couple of governors and many of the other current elected officials who supported impeaching and convicting Trump? That's a group with a realistic, if still difficult, chance of making it hard for Republicans to win congressional majorities and the presidency. And it would still be unlikely to achieve the goal of changing the Republican Party. On the other hand, it's not as if there are any better options for this group. 1. Matthew Green talks with Rachel Blum about her book about Tea Party Republicans, and about Trump and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Important. 2. Dan Drezner on why Rahm Emanuel as Ambassador to Japan works. 3. Yaoyao Dai and Luwei Rose Luqiu at the Monkey Cage on China's diplomats. 4. E.J. Dionne on the Republican history behind Trump's voter-fraud lies. 5. PRRI has polling results on Republicans and the 2020 election. 6. And Niels Lesniewski on Republican efforts to ignore what actually happened on Jan. 6. I'm impressed, by the way, with Capitol Hill beat writers who manage to report on this falsification of history fairly, given that many of them were there and endangered by the mob that some Republicans are pretending never existed. Kudos to their professionalism. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
Post a Comment