If you’re interested in how Republican politicians are talking about Donald Trump in the end phase of his first term and perhaps his Presidency, one good place to look is the campaigns of the ten Republican senators who are least likely to be reëlected—most of whom represent states that the President won comfortably four years ago. Judging from current polling in those politicians’ races, the Democrats may well gain control of the Senate: they need to pick up only two or three of the vulnerable Republican seats, in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Montana, Alaska, and Georgia (where two Republican seats are being tightly contested). In the past week, I watched eight of those senators’ debates, which had a throwback tinge to them: the television graphics were boxy and dated, the questions excellent, and the candidates nimbler than you might expect. Politicians are charming people who have been operating under a spell of charmlessness for a decade, roughly since Mitch McConnell made it obvious that he was on a mission to thwart the Obama Administration and a mood of wartime enmity suffused the capital. But the more consequential anachronism of those Senate debates came from the Republican senators themselves, who generally acted as if Donald Trump were not the President and his policies were not the bedrocks of their party—as if, once he leaves office, the dials could be turned back to their 2011 settings and the decade could begin again.
The 2020 drumbeat, for Republicans, has been to warn of an ascendent socialism. “You put Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden in charge of Washington, you’ll see a federal takeover of the health-care system,” Steve Daines, of Montana, said, in a recent debate against his Democratic opponent, Governor Steve Bullock. But you don’t hear much about immigration, or trade, or any of the other issues that have defined Trump’s Presidency. The longer I watched the Senate debates, the more I found myself rewinding the footage to scan through the Republican candidates’ responses. Surely they’d mentioned the President, and somehow I’d missed it? But often they just hadn’t. In late September, Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, made it through an hour-long debate with her Democratic challenger, a real-estate executive named Theresa Greenfield, without mentioning Trump by name. When asked directly about the Times revelations that the President, while living a billionaire’s life, had paid just seven hundred and fifty dollars to the federal government in annual income taxes, Ernst redirected. “Many years ago, I echoed the call for the President to release his tax returns,” she said. “But, bottom line, we would love to see lower taxes for everybody, including all of our hardworking Americans.”
I was watching on YouTube, and in the comments alongside the debate I could see the essentially erratic character of 2020 politics unfolding: viewers were talking about Hunter Biden or “Putin’s puppet” (Hillary Clinton’s most lasting epithet for the President), or exclaiming “TRUMP TRAIN!” On Twitter the Ernst-Greenfield debate didn’t register, which has fit the pattern; the Senate debates have been noticed only when someone declared them a rout. But what I saw in the sedate PBS studio where the Ernst-Greenfield debate was held, with Iowa’s veteran political columnist David Yepsen at the helm, was two capable candidates calmly advancing the basic positions of their parties: taxes should be higher, or lower; billionaires should get a smaller share of the spoils, or about the same amount; the Supreme Court was bound to dissolve Roe v. Wade, or it wasn’t. No one owned anyone. Beneath the madness of Presidential politics, the parties were moving at their usual rate, that of tectonic plates, and the only reasonable posture was to sit at your listening station like a geologist, headphones securely over your ears, waiting for the infinitesimal movement of a needle.
Now and then, there was some movement. I’d been particularly interested to watch John Cornyn, the three-term senator from Texas. A sixty-eight-year-old former judge with a long face and a formal manner, Cornyn is Mitch McConnell’s No. 2 and arguably the closest thing the Republican Party has to a tectonic plate. He had seemed to luck out when Beto O’Rourke declined to challenge him, leaving him with a little-known opponent, a former military-helicopter pilot named M. J. Hegar. But Hegar turned out to be effective. When, in an October 9th debate, Cornyn accused Hegar of “tacitly” endorsing police defunding, she spat out, “I never do anything tacitly—I’m not a tacit person,” and then kept muttering about it under her breath. She’s charming! Cornyn can be charming, too, in a courtly way, but he couldn’t quite get around to it because of all the time he had to spend furrowing his brow and reassuring Texans that things were not quite as bad as they appeared.
Midway through the debate, Cornyn got a simple, telling question from the moderator, the excellent Gromer Jeffers, of the Dallas Morning News: Could he name a single way in which he had positively affected the lives of ordinary Texans, in his eighteen years in the Senate? Cornyn nodded his long face, and told a story about the aftermath of a mass shooting, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, when an Air Force veteran, who should have been prohibited from owning firearms, because of a domestic-violence-related bad conduct discharge, entered a church and killed twenty-six people. Cornyn said, “It occurred because someone who should never have been able to get their hands on a firearm, a convicted felon, was able to bypass the background-check system because the Air Force had not uploaded those names.” Cornyn recounted that, four days after the shooting, he introduced a bill that passed with bipartisan majorities, which closed a loophole in gun background checks. Cornyn said that “the Attorney General has now made the point in just six months, six million more people’s names are on the background-check system,” to keep arms out of the hands of “dangerous criminals.A bell rang, signalling that Cornyn’s time had expired; it had the feeling of a record scratch. Wait, what? One of the half-dozen most powerful Republicans in the country, a staunch ally of the National Rifle Association, was being asked to describe how he had improved the lives of ordinary people in the most powerful conservative state in the country, and his best case was that he had strengthened background checks? What had he been doing all this time? Maybe that was the trouble. The Senate’s agenda, focussed on mollifying Trump and confirming judges and cutting taxes for the highest earners, didn’t offer much to, as Jeffers had put it, “ordinary Texans.”
For five years, Republicans have been wearily answering (or, more often, dodging) the question of whether they support President Trump. But in this election they are being asked a deeper question too, about what they have actually delivered during this decade of steady conservative ascendance. Across the debates, I could hear the backbeat of “Montana values” and “Arizona values” and the regular cymbal crash of “conservative judges,” but there was no melody. After watching Cornyn and Hegar’s debate, I clicked over to a recent Cornyn ad on YouTube. It features a middle-aged schoolteacher, with blond hair and caring eyes, passing out papers to students while praising the senator for having helped to deliver federal funds to public schools, so that they could reopen safely. Cornyn then appears, nodding thoughtfully, with a mask emblazoned with the Texas state flag covering the lower half of his face. Texas is changing, in ways that Cornyn is wise to genuflect toward, and this election has the look of a blue wave. But, at the end of four years of largely unchecked conservative political power, Cornyn has neither a Trumpian case to make for his own reëlection nor a more traditional conservative one. The background checks, the money for schools—he was simply arguing for the reliability of a longtime incumbent.
The most touted contest right now, and among the best funded, is taking place in South Carolina, where the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is in a close race with Jaime Harrison, a forty-four-year-old and the associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the last quarter, Harrison raised fifty-seven million dollars, mostly from liberals outside the state, with Kelly and Sara Gideon in Maine, he is one of three Democratic candidates this cycle to raise more money in a quarter than anyone running for the Senate ever had before. Like Graham, Harrison is an obviously talented politician—he is especially good at concisely telling the stories of ordinary South Carolinians, some from his own family, and using them to point out how little Republican representatives have done to help them. But the candidates’ lone debate, on October 3rd, was most interesting because Graham, unlike most other members of his party, did not run from the President. “I think President Trump has done a good job. He rebuilt our military, he’s cut our taxes, he’s getting trade deals, he’s securing our border,” Graham said, and then tacked on the Party line. “This race is about capitalism versus socialism, conservative judges versus liberal judges, law and order versus chaos.”
The trouble for Graham was that Harrison kept also making the debate about South Carolina, and about how little Republicans had done to help alleviate suffering there, from the disastrous response to the coronavirus to the ideological refusal to accept the Obama Administration’s offer to expand Medicaid in the state. Graham countered by insisting that he knew suffering: his relatives, he kept emphasizing, worked in the textile mills. “I get it. We’re all one car wreck away from needing help,” Graham said. Many Republican incumbents have expressed worry about lockdowns suppressing the economy; Graham mentioned other side effects of the pandemic, too: “Alcoholism is up. Domestic violence.” He did not win the debate, but he also sounded like he wasn’t pretending.
Graham is in many ways a signal figure of the Republican Party, because, rather than represent a single faction, he has, at different times, represented all of them. From shortly after his election to the Senate, in 2002, he was mainly known as John McCain’s plainspoken sidekick, and joined McCain as part of the Gang of Eight pushing for immigration reform in 2012, telling his party’s Convention that year that “we’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” But, after Trump’s election, Graham became a prominent backer of the President’s agenda, a transformation that culminated in a fiery partisan display during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Jess Bidgood put it recently in a sharp profile of Graham in the Boston Globe, “the story of Graham’s vulnerability in a state he has represented in Congress since 1995 begins not with the left but with his persistent problems on the right—which he attempted to tamp down once and for all through his alliance with Trump.”
Even if you could somehow exclude Trump, and the complications of making alliances with him, the Party’s future no longer looks much like its past. Those Republicans who seem most likely to run for President in 2024—among them, Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio—have all oriented themselves to a party that is now dominated by white voters without college degrees, and by what Hawley has described as anti-cosmopolitanism. If one of these politicians does end up leading the Party, then it will have something to do with how establishment conservatives used their power during the Trump era: to impose tax cuts that exacerbated inequality and weakened the economy, and to undermine a health-care policy that Americans increasingly support and rely on. That has left the Republicans—even the Party’s central politicians—without much to brag about after years in charge. Once again, Gromer Jeffers, the journalist who moderated the Texas debate, saw it clearly. He put up a graphic from a recent poll of the state, in which a strikingly large proportion of respondents had no opinion about Cornyn whatsoever. Jeffers asked the senator, “Why is it that nearly a quarter of Texans don’t know your name?”
