‘Just the Trump Party:’ Liz Cheney demotion proves Donald Trump’s hold on Republican politics, experts say
Republicans showed Wednesday they will move forward as Donald Trump’s party, experts said, and Trump’s myth of the “stolen election” of 2020 might as well be a plank in the GOP campaign platform.
Cheney lost her position as the third-ranking House Republican after she continued to unapologetically argue the party should move past Trump and stop echoing his debunked claim that a “fraudulent” election cost him the presidency.
The decision to remove Cheney as House Republican Conference chair – little more than three months after Republicans voted to keep her in the job – sets up a future where GOP candidates will campaign as Trump acolytes and carry on his protests over his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.
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Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election will be punished, despite concerns that those evidence-free allegations helped trigger the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, analysts said. As the party looks now to reclaim control of Congress in 2022, the question remains: Can Republicans win with a message built around Trump?targeted Cheney and the nine other House Republicans who voted to impeach him over the Jan. 6 insurrection. They also plan to unseat Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, one of the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump of inciting the riot even as the full Senate acquitted him.
In a statement heralding the House Republican vote against Cheney, Trump said “almost everyone in the Republican Party, including 90% of Wyoming, looks forward to her ouster – and that includes me!”
In a floor speech Tuesday night, Cheney described Trump as “a threat America has never seen before.”
“A former president, who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election, has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him,” Cheney said.
“He risks inciting further violence,” she added. .
After the House vote to remove her, Cheney said “the party is in a place that we’ve got to bring it back from.” She also addressed the prospect of another Trump presidential bid in 2024: “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”
suburban voters who were decisive in Biden’s victory.
Some Republicans believe Trump’s false allegations about 2020 reduced turnout in Georgia in January, where the GOP lost two crucial Senate runoffs, handing control of the Senate to Democrats.
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Liz Mair, a Republican strategist, said Republican candidates may blur their message against Biden in the midterms “if they’re still doing the whole ‘No, Trump really won’ shtick” regarding 2020.
“My secondary concern is that it’s hard to ask voters to turn out and vote for you if they think the election is going to be stolen,” she said, adding: “What happened in Georgia.”
Sarah Longwell, executive director of an organization called The Republican Accountability Project, said deposing Cheney means the GOP won’t use their political opportunities “to reform or move on” from Trump.
Instead, “they’re committing to lies and conspiracy theories – the same ones that motivated the deadly attack on the Capitol – as their core ideology and political strategy,” Longwell said.
Trump’s false election claims and future elections
Still, Trump’s grip on the party seems to be tightening.
It was only early February that House Republicans voted overwhelmingly – 145 to 61 – to keep Cheney as conference chairwoman, despite demands from Trump and his supporters to remove her. Cheney’s ouster Wednesday came via voice vote, with no recorded balloting.
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“The message is: To be a member of the GOP in good standing you must be subservient to Trump and willing to go along with the election fraud lie he is perpetrating to protect his wounded ego,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist.
But other Republicans firmly believe Trump – and, more importantly, Trump voters – are essential to Republican electoral success.
“If we are to succeed in stopping the radical Democrat agenda from destroying our country, these internal conflicts need to be resolved so as to not detract from the efforts of our collective team,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., wrote to GOP members by way of endorsing Cheney’s removal.
Republicans have a good chance of winning control of the House in the 2022 midterms and a decent chance of re-claiming a Senate that is now divided 50-50.
Most notably, history favors Republicans: Voters often go against the party of the president in mid-term elections. And new Census data means Republican-controlled legislatures in certain states could re-draw favorable congressional districts.
Certainly Democrats are enjoying the division, noting the spectacle can’t help but be a distraction heading into 2022 and a burden in 2024.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres said of the Cheney dispute: “It gives the GOP’s critics a boatload of ammunition.”