A chill wind is blowing across America…
It carries a virus and downturned economy….
And it has an echo of Donald J. Trump …..
Something we haven’t heard mentioned in a few years is responding….
Moderate Republicans…
With a general election coming in 6 months?
And with memories of the US House Democratic ‘Wave’ gains and Trump’s mediocre poll numbers?
Some of Trump’s party members could been seen talking out political life insurance…
Every evening from his kitchen table in southwestern Michigan, Representative Fred Upton, a moderate Republican running for his 18th term in office, posts a coronavirus dispatch for his constituents, highlighting his own efforts to respond to the crisis and the news from Washington, often with cameos from Democrats.
Absent from his Facebook updates are any mentions of President Trump, whose response to the pandemic has raised questions that threaten to drag down Republicans’ electoral prospects this fall, or of the president’s provocative news briefings, which have become a forum for partisan attacks on Democrats and dubious claims about the virus.
“You have to sort of thread the needle,” Mr. Upton said in an interview, explaining how he has tried to navigate Mr. Trump’s performance during the crisis. “I’ve been careful. I said, ‘Let’s look to the future,’ versus ‘Why didn’t we do this a few months ago?’ I’m not interested in pointing the finger of blame. I want to correct the issues.”
It is a tricky task for lawmakers like Mr. Upton in centrist districts throughout the country, who understand that their re-election prospects — and any hope their party might have of taking back the House of Representatives — could rise or fall based on how they address the pandemic. Already considered a politically endangered species before the novel coronavirus began ravaging the United States, these moderates are now working to counter the risk that their electoral fates could become tied to Mr. Trump’s response at a time when the independent voters whose support they need are increasingly unhappy with his performance.
The president’s combative news conferences, which his own political advisers have counseled him to curtail, have made the challenge all the steeper.
“It does make it difficult at times,” Representative John Katko, Republican of New York, said in an interview. He said he hoped his constituents would evaluate him not based on Mr. Trump’s record, but on his own.
“I’m hanging on — not hanging on, flourishing — in a district I should probably not have as a Republican,” said Mr. Katko, one of only two House Republicans running for re-election in a district Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Voters “are going to judge me on what I did or did not do, and that’s all I can ask.”
In an attempt to ensure their contests become referendums on their own responses to the virus, rather than the president’s, vulnerable House Republicans are instead brandishing their own independent streaks, playing up their work with Democrats, doubling down on constituent service and hosting town-hall-style events — avoiding mention of Mr. Trump whenever possible.
It is an approach that looks familiar to former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who tried to distance himself from Mr. Trump on immigration and other issues in 2018 as he fought to hang onto his seat in a diverse South Florida district, but was swept out in a midterm debacle that handed Democrats control of the House….
The clearer re-affirmation of moderate Republicanism has been the wide support enjoyed by sensible, effective GOP governors such as Charlie Baker (Mass.), Larry Hogan (Md.), Tim DeWine (Ohio) and Chris Sununu (N.H.)
Jack is not gonna be happy about the mention of ‘moderate Republicans’….
NOOOOOO!
Why would I care?
I’ve never said there weren’t moderate Republicans.
What I’ve said as that they exercise no power in the National Republican Party.
They are even anomalies among their fellow Republican Governors,the vast majority of whom are proudly “conservative” and are open supporters of Trump.
Indeed, Baker and Hogan would likely admit that.
Actually you HAVE said they don’t exist anymore Jack…
You gave me a hard time on this…
Well actually I was using the term “moderate” as it was used in the day,peopke lije Rockefeller Scranton and George Romney.
In my view, Hogan and Baker are Reagan .type conservatives
But since the terms themselves have been so skewered one can use them as one wishes.
I often, when discussing SC politics here, use the term “more moderate” to describe coastal Republicans.Im really saying they are Reagan type “conservatives “ in contrast to the the Trumpites who dominate today’s Republican Party.
For reasons I can’t explain, you intimate that “moderates” are still a force in the Republican Party .My position to make clear is they are not.Hogan and Baker are anomalies just like “conservative “ Democrats.
I accept ur wiggle Jack on moderate GOPer’s…
We agree they are NOT a ‘force’…
But i think there will be more going in that direction if Trump’s numbers remain where they are closing in on election day…
People gonna start looking out for their OWN jobs in a world that might not have Trump in th the White House…
Well then you are using “moderate” to simply mean “not vocally supportive” of Trump.
Thus, my point…these terms have become so skewered now that they simply mean whatever the person using them means at any point in time.
As Jack quite rightly points out, long, long, ago, in an America far, far away, there were genuinely moderate Republicans like Jacob Javits (N.Y.), Kenneth Keating (N.Y.), John Lindsay (N.Y.), Bill Green (N.Y.), Clifford Case (N.J.), Tom Keating (N.J.), Millicent Fenwick (N.J.), William Maillard (S.F.), Alphonzo Bell (L.A.), Richard Schweiker (Pa), Bill Scranton (Pa), Lowell Weicker (Ct), Edward Brooke (Mass.), Elliott Richardson (Mass.), Silvio Conte (Mass.), Charles Percy (Ill.), Don Riegle (Mich.), George Romney (Mich.) and Leon Panetta (Monterey).
But they first started falling away when Richard Nixon (who once called himself a liberal on civil rights, a moderate on economics and a conservative on national security), after, say his first Democratic Congress in 1969-70, began to shed his apparent openness to liberalism (e.g. the E.P.A. and the Legal Services Corporation) and align more closely to the right — one feature being an attempt to replace moderate suburban supporters and conservatively-inclined Negroes with former Wallace backers and hard-hats resentful of the counterculture and of privileged draft-exempt protestors against the shooting war that their sons were fighting.
In fact, that war precipitated the start of much realignment among moderate Republican office-holders, as well as their supporters. Some stayed unhappily within an ancestral Grand Old Party, while others (e.g. Goodell and Lindsay) became independents, often as a way stop towards joining the Democratic Party outright.
This process sharpened over time first with Reagan’s victory and then with the rise of George W. Bush, finally reaching an ambiguous consummation with the Tea Party and Donald Trump, which was more than even dyed-in-the-wool Reagan conservatives like CG could stomach.
One can never discount revivals in politics (who, for example, would ever have expected that democratic socialism would become once again a viable political movement 80 years after Norman Thomas’ heyday and a century after Eugene Debs’?), but there would have to be some huge seismic shifts (like the New Deal, World War II and integration) for moderate Republicanism to be a significant national factor, as opposed to a serious element in the local politics of many states.
[Others have, of course, made this point elsewhere with more facts, more comparative statistics, and more eloquence than I.]
Forty years ago, there were liberal Republicans, moderate Republicans, and conservative Republicans. The same for Democrats. Both parties were far more diverse ideologically.
Now, there are no liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats to speak of. The moderates are in smaller numbers but still exist. There are seemingly more “moderate Republicans” in elected office than “moderate Democrats” these days. The Republican Party in particular has an issue of ideological positions mattering far less because of the unorthodoxy of Trump.
I don’t see Trump as “unorthodox”
His administration is conservative Republican. Perhaps the most ideologically conservative in history.
Which is why he has a 90% approval rating among those who still call themselves Republicans.
Donald Trump has consistently worked against political norms and government rules…
Is THAT unorthodox ?
Another pice on the quiet advice to GOPer’s to start making space between their President and themselves least you possibly go down with the ship?
Endangered Republicans keeping distance from Trump
As the president’s numbers slip, Republicans are recalibrating their strategy for winning in tough times….
….Here’s what I’m hearing from smart GOP strategists now: Republicans should be talking about their work to help their communities in the wake of the pandemic, and avoid referencing Trump’s role in managing the crisis. To win battleground Senate seats that are looking more tenuous, it will be crucial to maintain support from some Trump-skeptical independents. If Trump’s political condition doesn’t improve by the fall, prepare to talk about keeping the Senate as a check against Democratic power, even if it means acknowledging the presidency is likely lost….
More…
And in my long catalogue, I somehow forgot my home state of Rhode Island: Claudine, Schneider, Ron Machtley, John Chafee (lifelong Republican) and Lincoln Chafee (R > Ind. > D > Libertarian).