Why has there not been such a reckoning among conservatives and Republicans? This is a hard question to answer precisely because the Republican Party isn’t one thing, and the incentives of right-wing media outlets such as Fox News or Newsmax are different from those of elected officials such as Sen. Mitch McConnell. But based on my own reporting and interviews with people who are studying the Republican Party closely, I’d offer five (overlapping) theories.
1. The party’s core activists don’t want to shift gears.
This is the simplest and most obvious explanation: The GOP isn’t changing directions because the people driving the car don’t want to.
When we think of “Republicans,” we tend to think of either rank-and-file GOP voters or the party’s highest-profile elected officials, particularly its leaders in Congress. But in many ways, the party’s direction is driven by a group between those two: conservative organizations like Club for Growth and the Heritage Foundation, GOP officials at the local and state level and right-wing media outlets. That segment of the party has been especially resistant to the GOP abandoning its current mix of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, opposition to expansions of programs that benefit the poor and an identity politics that centers white Americans and conservative Christians.
You could see the power and preferences of this group in the response to the Capitol insurrection.
2. Trump is still a force in the party.
After the 2012 elections, prominent Republicans sharply criticized Mitt Romney and his campaign. Democrats did the same to Hillary Clinton after 2016 — and sometimes included former President Barack Obama in their criticisms, too. For a political party to change direction, it nearly always has to distance itself from past leaders.
Or put another way: For there to be an autopsy, there has to be a dead body.
3. Republicans almost won in 2020.
To torture this “autopsy” metaphor even more: There’s a good argument that the party is still very much alive.
Historically, parties have done more self-reflection and been more likely to change course when they’ve hit electoral low points. In the 1988 presidential race, Democrats carried only 10 states and Washington, D.C., and that loss was their third consecutive failed bid for the White House. In 2008, Obama won the popular vote by 7 percentage points — Republicans didn’t even carry Indiana. So of course the parties were ready to rethink things after those defeats.
4. Republican voters aren’t clamoring for changes.
It might seem odd that we’re only now turning our attention to Republican voters, who may seem like the most important factor in keeping the party from shifting gears. I’m not so sure. We have a lot of evidence that voters tend to follow the cues of political elites (as opposed to elites following voters). In other words, I suspect that if GOP elites, from national elected leaders to Fox News to local activists, had collectively broken with Trump and Trumpism after the Capitol riot, the percentage of rank-and-file Republican voters ready for the party to go in a new direction would have grown.
5. There aren’t real forces within the GOP leading change.
There is some appetite for change within the GOP. In those 2024 polls, at least a third of Republicans either were supporting a GOP presidential candidate other than Trump or were undecided.
In YouGov Blue’s polling, only about 40 percent of Republicans identified themselves as “Trump Republicans.” A recent survey from Fabrizio, Lee and Associates, a GOP-leaning firm that worked on Trump’s presidential campaigns, found that about 40 percent of Republican voters didn’t want Trump to continue to be a leader in the party. Those numbers don’t necessarily mean that those voters want the GOP to change drastically. But there is a substantial number of Trump-skeptical/ready-to-move-on-from-Trump Republican voters. But that sentiment isn’t really showing up in the Republican Party’s actions during the last three months — basically everything GOP officials in states and in Washington are doing lines up with the Trumpian approach. So what gives?
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