The
political news this week is being dominated by reports of elephants
breaking away from the herd: Republicans who are not supporting Donald
Trump for president. They are most often being differentiated by exactly
what they are saying or not saying: Some are simply refraining from
opportunities to endorse their nominee; some are publicly refusing to
endorse their nominee; a few are going to vote for the Libertarian or a
last-minute conservative independent or write-in candidate; and a
steadily increasing number are going over the brink to support Hillary
Clinton, as one might expect with Election Day fast approaching.
There’s no telling when the exodus will end; the
latest Trump outrage, about “Second Amendment people” having some plans for
HRC, is creating a fresh bout of heartburn for exasperated Republicans, and could send a new batch toward the exit ramp.
But in understanding this phenomenon and weighing its importance (or the lack thereof), it’s helpful
to look
at the non-endorsees and their backgrounds and motives. To that end,
here’s a classification system of the five different kinds of
Republicans who have broken ranks over Trump:
1. Nominal Republicans who are out of synch with their party:
While they are not as plentiful as they were in the days when liberal
Republicans and conservative Democrats walked the Earth, there are
always some nominal partisans available, often long in the tooth, who
object to the general direction of “their” party and can be rounded up
to show their displeasure with a statement of dissent or a
cross-endorsement. This used to be a particular cross to bear for
Democrats, from the days of John Connally’s Democrats for Nixon in 1972
to Joe Lieberman’s active support for John McCain in 2008 — but
Republicans are catching up.
Former
South Dakota senator Larry Pressler is a good example of this breed of
errant pachyderm. He endorsed Barack Obama twice, attempted a Senate
comeback as an independent in 2014, and has now endorsed Hillary.
But
my favorite defector of the cycle has got to be former Michigan
governor William Milliken, who endorsed Clinton as a protest against
Trump’s candidacy. Like Pressler, he’s a serial defector; he endorsed
John Kerry in 2004, and de-endorsed John McCain late in the 2008 cycle.
But to grasp how out of touch the 94-year-old Milliken is with the
contemporary GOP, consider that he became governor of Michigan when George Romney resigned to join Richard Nixon’s cabinet. Enough said.
2. Lame ducks. As James Hohmann notes in the Washington
Post,
the willingness of current Republican elected officials to stray from
party discipline is more or less in inverse relationship to their
vulnerability to punishment by Republican leaders and/or angry “base”
voters. So, unsurprisingly, the two most prominent defectors in the
House Republican Conference —
Richard Hanna,
a New Yorker who has endorsed Clinton, and Scott Rigell, a Virginian
who will vote Libertarian — had already announced their retirements. A
Democratic precedent was Senator Zell Miller in 2004, who endorsed and
spoke for George W. Bush a few months before he left Washington for
good. Two years later Miller headed up something called Democrats for
Santorum on behalf of the soon-to-be-defeated Pennsylvania senator; it
seemed to be composed of Miller himself and his image in the mirror. But
I digress …
3. Political realists.
There are also Republican defectors who seem to be motivated by cold
political calculation. Most obviously, Illinois senator Mark Kirk’s
slim odds of reelection almost certainly depend on winning a lot of
votes from people who loathe Trump. But even his Senate colleague Susan
Collins, who is being treated today as a brave woman of principle for
refusing to get on the Trump Train, could be thinking about her
political future in Maine, where according to Hohmann she could be
contemplating a gubernatorial run as an independent.
More
famously, Ted Cruz is clearly calculating his “vote your conscience”
statement at the Republican convention will look infinitely better if
and when Trump goes down to a catastrophic defeat, leaving his own self
as the front-runner for 2020. John Kasich and Ben Sasse could be making
similar calculations about their political futures.
4. Redundants.
In many respects the most sympathetic group of Republican defectors are
former environmental, immigration, and trade-policy officials who
obviously have no place in a party led by Donald Trump. I mean, really:
Let’s say you are Robert Zoellick, once George W. Bush’s United States
Trade Representative. Trump is accusing you and people just like you of
deliberately selling American workers down the river and destroying the
country in close concert with the godless Clinton administration
globalists in the other party (on top of that, Zoellick ran the World
Bank and worked for Goldman Sachs!). Are you going to blandly endorse
him or fight to win “your” party back? It’s a pretty easy call. The same
is true of Republicans closely identified with comprehensive
immigration reform and strong environmental regulation (e.g., former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, who has indicated she will vote for Clinton).
5. Assorted elites. For most of the rest of the elite
defectors, the emphasis should be on the word “elite.” They are mostly former
appointed officials in Republican administrations who have since moved on to
life in that floating stratosphere of policy mavens, think tankers, lobbyists,
and Cabinets-in-waiting. They are
heavily found on that list of 50 Republican foreign-policy experts calling for
Trump’s defeat.
Some
are actually “redundants” associated with past Republican
policies Trump has denounced (you can add the Iraq War to the list
above).
Others know there is no way they will have a place in, or even access
to, a Trump administration. Still others simply have a reciprocal
assessment of
Trump as a loser. They are mostly sincerely angry about what is
happening to their party, and plan to have a future role in the GOP when the “fever” has broken. What they all have in common is that they will never, ever
have to deal with Republican primary voters, other than at a safe distance.
The
key question to ask with all five groups of Republican defectors is
whether they represent a significant group of rank-and-file Republican
voters, who have for the most part been more likely to stick with Trump
than elected officials and other elites have been. That’s not the only
measurement of the value of defectors; sometimes independent voters can
be swayed by these kind of negative testimonials for a major-party
candidate, and there are financial considerations as well, since wealthy
donors prefer some cover before abandoning a party nominee. But it will
be interesting to find out whether the party has truly left the
defectors behind, or if instead they are simply a party-in-exile that
will hold the reins long after Donald Trump has left politics like a bad
circus leaving town.
