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  • Trump Repeats Obama’s Mistake

    Trump Repeats Obama’s Mistake

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    Donald Trump has long detested Barack Obama and sought to present himself as the opposite of his presidential predecessor in every way. But in his takeover of the Republican National Committee, he risks echoing one of Obama’s biggest political mistakes.

    Last night, Trump’s handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime, led by the new chair, Michael Whatley; the vice chair, Lara Trump; and the chief of staff, Chris LaCivita, fired about 60 employees—about a quarter of the staff—as part of “streamlining.” The “bloodbath” includes members of the communications, data, and political departments. Insiders told Politico they anticipate that existing contracts with vendors will be voided.

    When the new leaders were announced last month, I suggested that the GOP was ceasing to function as a political party, and becoming another subsidiary of Trump Inc. But there is another way to view it. For years now, the RNC has struggled. Republicans might have lost the 2016 presidential election if not for the emergence of Trump, who shook up the party’s longtime platform and forged a new coalition, turning out voters no other recent candidate had. Since then, however, Republicans have continued to lag, even with Trump juicing turnout. Republicans got slammed in the 2018 midterms, lost the 2020 presidential race, and missed expectations in 2022. Special elections have been a Democratic playground. The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves.

    From this perspective, it’s about time that Trump took charge and cleared out the deadwood. Allies such as Charlie Kirk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene were jubilant at the overhaul. Although Trump’s appointments of his daughter-in-law and a top campaign aide are unusual, nominees typically take over the campaign apparatus ahead of a presidential election, the better to align aims.

    David A. Graham: Republicans are no longer a political party

    Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly rejected a proposal by an old-line member to prevent that.

    Let’s take the best-case scenario for Republicans, though. In the past, the RNC seemed like the professionals compared with the chaotic, amateurish Trump campaigns of 2016 and 2020. (There’s a reason Trump resorted to appointing RNC Chair Reince Priebus as his first White House chief of staff, despite Priebus representing the establishment Trump hated.) This year, however, the Trump campaign has seemed organized and disciplined, and LaCivita is reportedly a big part of that. National committees tend to be bloated and old-fashioned. A more focused, streamlined operation could fix what ails the GOP.

    The problem is that Trump sees his own success and the success of the Republican Party as bound up together. But some things that are good for Trump are not good for the Republican Party over the long run. This is where Obama offers a cautionary tale.

    When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.

    The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that some Democrats blamed on the national party. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.

    The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).

    Read: What happens to the Democratic Party after Obama?

    Democrats, including Obama, suffered for their missteps. As the Obamacare experience shows, it’s harder to push a policy agenda when you lose elections. Losing control of the Senate makes it difficult to confirm judges, especially to crucial spots such as the Supreme Court—just ask Justice Merrick Garland. And implementing policy is challenging if governors and state Houses are working against you.

    An excessive focus on presidential races is also the danger of Trump’s RNC takeover. He and his aides have announced that, like Obama, they see the party committee as basically an instrument for the presidential election. “Our mission is straightforward: maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected,” LaCivita told The New York Times last month. Echoing Obama’s Chicago move, the RNC is reportedly already moving most of its operations to Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters. All of this makes sense. Trump is a narcissist who can’t and won’t separate his self-interest from the party’s or the nation’s.

    Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently ousted amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates mostly ran ahead of Trump.

    And even if Trump’s theory of the RNC works out in 2024, what happens next? Trump will not always be the president or the nominee. Someday, Republicans will need to choose a new leader, and they may be left with only a shell of a party committee, gutted and stretched to be part of Trump’s personal election apparatus. It’s a hard and long road to rebuilding from there. Just ask a Democrat.

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    David A. Graham

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  • What Tom Suozzi’s Win Means for Democrats

    What Tom Suozzi’s Win Means for Democrats

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    Tom Suozzi’s victory in yesterday’s special House election on Long Island brings Democrats one seat closer to recapturing the majority they lost two years ago. But in the run-up to Election Day, party leaders were leery about making too much of the closely watched contest—win or lose.

    “This is a local race,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me when I asked what a Suozzi win would say about the Democrats’ chances in November. Jeffries had just finished rallying a crowd of a few hundred health-care workers on the first day of early voting. The Brooklyn Democrat stands to become House speaker if the party can pick up another four seats later this year. His very presence in Suozzi’s district belied his attempt to downplay its significance.

    This was as national as a contest for a single House seat gets. Democrats poured millions of dollars into the compressed campaign brought about by the expulsion in December of Representative George Santos, the Republican who’d won this swing seat after selling voters on an invented life story. The election became a test case for the political salience of the GOP’s attacks on President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration and the influx of migrants over the southern border. Suozzi’s opponent, Mazi Pilip, used nearly all her campaign ads to tie him to Biden’s border policies. Suozzi, meanwhile, took a firmer stance on the border than many Democrats and assailed Mazi for opposing the bipartisan deal that Senate Republicans killed last week.

    Suozzi’s message prevailed, and his victory could offer Democrats, including the beleaguered president, a road map for rebutting Republicans on immigration in battleground states and suburban districts this fall. Notably, Suozzi broke with Democrats who have waved off voter concerns about the border as a GOP-manufactured crisis; he called for higher spending to fortify the border and urged the deportation of migrants accused of assaulting New York City police officers.

    Read: The special election that could give Democrats hope for November

    Yesterday’s election drew outsize attention not only because it involved Santos’s old seat, but also because New York’s Third District is one Democrats will need if they want any hope of regaining the House majority. Biden carried the district by eight points in the 2020 election, but Santos won it by seven two years later. With about 93 percent of the votes counted last night, Suozzi was winning by nearly eight points.

    His win narrows a Republican majority in the House, which has already been nearly impossible for Speaker Mike Johnson to govern. In a signal of just how vital the contest was, the House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas by a single vote hours before the New York polls closed. Had Republicans waited even a day longer, Suozzi’s vote might have saved Mayorkas the indignity. (His job is almost certainly safe; the Democratic-led Senate is expected to acquit him.)

    Political prognosticators frequently warn against reading too much into special elections, which usually attract low turnout and have a mixed track record of predicting future contests. And this race was even more special than most: A snowstorm that dampened turnout made drawing national conclusions more difficult. As usual, Democratic voters were more likely than Republicans to vote early or by mail, leaving the GOP reliant on voters braving the weather on Election Day.

    The election pitted two competing dynamics against each other. Democrats have recently overperformed in off-year and special elections across the country, benefiting from a political base of higher-educated, higher-income suburban voters who are more likely to turn out for lower-profile campaigns. But Republicans have bucked that trend on Long Island, capturing virtually all of the area’s congressional seats and local offices since 2020. Central to that comeback has been the resurgence of the Nassau County GOP, which for decades was known as one of the nation’s most formidable political machines. “We took the wind out of their sails for years,” Suozzi told me when I interviewed him recently, “but they’re back to being the strongest Republican machine in New York State.”

    Suozzi has been a fixture in the district for the past three decades. A former Nassau county executive, he held the House seat for three terms before giving it up to mount an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2022. Then came Santos. In Pilip, Republicans picked as their nominee a little-known county legislator who ran a cautious campaign aimed at minimizing mistakes that could cost her votes. She agreed to just one debate a few days before the election, and when the Nassau County Republicans held their biggest rally of the campaign in late January, they scheduled it for a Saturday, when Pilip, who observes the Jewish Sabbath, could not attend.

    Suozzi made himself far more accessible both to reporters and to voters, and he tried to define Pilip from the outset of the race as an extremist who would vote for a national abortion ban. With help from national Democratic campaign committees, Suozzi ran a huge number of negative ads about Pilip. The bombardment demonstrated that he wasn’t taking the race for granted. But it also carried the risk of giving Pilip visibility she wasn’t earning for herself. “She was basically unknown outside of Great Neck, which is a small area,” former Representative Peter King, a Republican who backed Pilip, told me. “Yet he was putting her picture up all over, and her name, And it’s an unusual name, so you remember.”

    The strategy reflected Suozzi’s belief that regaining the seat would be tougher than most political observers assumed. Sure, Biden had carried the district easily in 2020 and voters likely regretted electing a GOP con artist two years later. But Democrats discovered last fall that Santos’s election did not seem to hurt other Republican candidates in local races on Long Island. And they knew that tying Pilip to Donald Trump, who remains popular in many parts of Long Island, would not be a sufficient tactic.

    In the final weeks Suozzi leaned into his record as a bipartisan dealmaker, distancing himself from Biden while touting his work in helping found the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House. Polls had given him a slim but not insurmountable lead. By the time the race was called last night, Suozzi’s initial reaction was simply relief. “Thank God,” he said with a long exhale as he addressed his supporters. Suozzi was speaking for himself after a campaign filled with bitter attacks, but he might as well have been speaking for his party, too.

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    Russell Berman

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