Tea Party movement

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMitch McConnell Would Like Trump to Fade AwayGood luck with that.Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.Feb. 24, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMitch McConnell is savvy enough to know that when he took the Senate floor to blame Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he was pouring gasoline on an intraparty feud.As accurate as McConnell’s statement may have been — “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — McConnell was attacking a man who had won an unprecedented level of devotion from a majority of the Republican electorate, devotion bordering on religious zeal.The escalating feud threatens to engulf the party in an internal struggle that will be fought out in the 2022 House and Senate primaries, pitting Trump-backed candidates against those who have offended the former president.When Trump viciously counterattacked on Feb. 16, Democrats were especially cheered by this passage in his remarks:Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.In effect, Trump is gearing up to run a slate of favored candidates in the 2022 primaries against incumbent Republicans, especially, but by no means limited to those who supported his impeachment.Politico reported on Feb. 20 that:Trump will soon begin vetting candidates at Mar-a-Lago who are eager to fulfill his promise to exact vengeance upon incumbent Republicans who’ve scorned him, and to ensure every open GOP seat in the 2022 midterms has a MAGA-approved contender vying for it.Twenty Republican-held Senate seats are at stake in 2022, and at least two of the incumbents up for re-election — John Thune of South Dakota and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — are certain to be on Trump’s hit list.Murkowski voted to convict the president. Thune voted against conviction, but before that he publicly dismissed efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump then tweeted on Dec. 13:RINO John Thune, ‘Mitch’s boy’, should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!McConnell will not be on Trump’s hit list for the simple reason that he just won re-election and does not have to face voters until 2026. But his name will be there in invisible ink.Another group Trump is very likely to target for political extinction is made up of the 10 Republican members of the House who voted to impeach the president.These incumbent Republicans only scratch the surface of the potential for intraparty conflict in the event Trump adopts a scorched earth strategy in an all-out attack on Republican candidates who voiced criticism of the former president.Trump’s venom is likely to encompass a host of state-level Republicans who disputed his claims of a stolen election, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, both up for re-election in ’22.Assuming that Trump versus McConnell becomes a major theme in the 2022 Republican primaries, the numbers, especially among white evangelical Christians, favor Trump.Robert Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted that his group’s polling has found that many Republicans have elevated Trump to near-deity status. In an email, Jones wrote:Just ahead of the election, a majority (55 percent) of white evangelicals and a plurality (47 percent) of Republicans said they saw Trump as “being called by God to lead at this critical time in our country.”Jones continued:If McConnell is counting on the impeachment for inciting insurrection to weaken Trump’s future within the party, he seems to have miscalculated: Three-quarters of Republicans and two-thirds of white evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Trump is a true patriot.”I asked Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, about the consequences of a Trump versus McConnell battle over the future of the Republican Party. He emailed in reply: “The deck is stacked against McConnell, at least for the next election cycle.”Jacobson sent a copy of a paper he is working on, “Donald Trump’s Big Lie and the Future of the Republican Party,” that provides strong evidence in support of his assessment.Among Republicans, over much of the Trump presidency, the favorability ratings of Trump, the party and McConnell generally rose and fell in tandem, Jacobson noted. That changed in December 2020:After the Electoral College voted in mid-December, the proportion holding favorable opinions of all three fell, but more for the Republican Party and much more for McConnell than for Trump. Trump’s average was 5.6 points lower for January-February 2021 than it had been for all of 2020, the party’s average was 11.3 points lower.According to Jacobson, the drop was disastrous for McConnell:In December, after McConnell congratulated Biden, his favorability ratings among Republicans dropped about 13 points from its postelection average (66 percent) and then fell another 17 points after he blamed Trump for the Capitol invasion, with the biggest drop occurring among the share of Republicans who held very favorable opinions of Trump (57 percent in this survey).The pattern is clear in the accompanying graphic:Trump on TopThe share of Republicans holding favorable views of Trump, McConnell and the party overall. More