Republicans’ purple problem
While Democrats wring their hands over their own electoral fortunes, Republicans seem to be whistling past the graveyard.
Just about any political conversation these days seems destined to turn to the serious problems facing the Democratic Party. Those challenges are very real, but finger-pointing among Democrats distracts from a different, but equally serious problem that Republicans seem to be avoiding—their struggles among independents and in purple states and districts. For both parties, as they say, denial is more than a river that flows into the Mediterranean.
Since Donald Trump was first elected, the Republican Party’s entire identity and brand has become consumed by or conflated with that of Trump and his Make America Great Again movement. Indeed, the GOP is no longer an entity beyond Trump and MAGA. Obviously, this will become a problem when the reality that he cannot seek a third term hits home and the GOP’s political universe loses its center of gravity. But another problem is more immediate.
Close association with Trump is not a handicap in red states and districts, for now at least. It is a benefit, keeping the band together. But outside red America, it is at best a strong headwind and in some cases, an anchor around the necks of GOP candidates. One way to look at red and blue America is to think about the states that are so red that a GOP candidate literally needs no support from independents, never mind Democrats, to win. The opposite is also the case in heavily Democratic states and districts, where a Democrat can win with no support among Republicans or independents.
Most states and congressional districts fall into one of those camps. But there are seven states and several dozen congressional districts that are not majority-Republican or -Democrat, where a candidate needs not just to hold his or her own party together but also a substantial share of the actual independents there. As this column has noted before, Trump is not at all popular in purple America, with only about a third of independents approving of the job he is doing.
While independent voters don’t mean so much in red or blue states or districts, they are awfully important in the purple ones that will determine whether Republicans hold onto their House majority, get their four-seat margin in the Senate whittled away, or hold their own in the 36 gubernatorial races next year, 17 of which are open. More to the point, there are five purple-state governorships up next year, with Arizona’s Katie Hobbs and Nevada’s Joe Lombardo the only incumbents in the group (Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin all feature open races). All five are currently considered toss-ups. There is never a good time to have a bad election, but this one is particularly bad, and midterm elections tend to be more disruptive than presidential years.
It has gone largely unnoticed that in the four elections since Trump was first elected president, Republicans have lost 17 of the 21 Senate races in those seven purple states. In 2018, Trump’s first midterm, Republican Senate candidates lost all five Senate races in purple states. Two years later Sen. Thom Tillis won in North Carolina, and two years after that Sen. Ted Budd won in the same state. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin won in 2022, and Sen. Dave McCormick won in Pennsylvania last year. But that’s it as far as GOP success in those states.
Meanwhile on the Democrats’ side, in 2018 Democrats won in Arizona with Krysten Sinema, in Michigan with Debbie Stabenow, in Nevada with Jacky Rosen, in Pennsylvania with Bob Casey, and in Wisconsin with Tammy Baldwin. In the 2020 cycle, both Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won in Georgia, as well as Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan. In 2022, Sen. Mark Kelly won in Arizona, Warnock won a full term in Georgia, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto won in Nevada, and Sen. John Fetterman prevailed in Pennsylvania. Last year, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin got elected for the first time, while Rosen and Baldwin were reelected.
Republicans fared only slightly better in governor’s races in those seven purple states, winning four of the 14, with Govs. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia both winning in 2018. In 2022 Kemp won reelection and Joe Lombardo won in Nevada.
For any Republican, those should be some pretty sobering statistics that should call for some soul-searching. When you subordinate your party’s identity to one man, you are putting all of your eggs in one fairly old and unreliable basket.
It is worth noting that there are a very few Republican statewide candidates who have managed to win in blue states—but notice who and where they are. In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins won in 2020 but is now fighting for her political life. In Vermont, by presidential voting now the most Democratic state in the country, Gov. Phil Scott has won four times since Trump took office. Before he retired last year, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu won in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Kelly Ayotte held onto the seat for the GOP in 2024. Another fellow New Englander, Gov. Charlie Baker, won reelection in Massachusetts in 2018, the same year that, a bit further south, Gov. Larry Hogan did in Maryland. But Collins, Scott, Sununu, Ayotte, Baker, and Hogan were not running as Trump clones or acolytes. That isn’t where many of the GOP candidates in other purple states and districts have positioned themselves, and it’s questionable whether Collins will be able to pull it off a second time.
The bottom line is that as screwed-up as Democrats are, anyone who thinks the Republican Party doesn’t have a serious challenge ahead of it is, metaphorically speaking, floating down that river in Egypt.