‘Everything’s great’: GOP ditches election post-mortems

Democrats in Texas and New Hampshire are forming committees to examine the party’s failings in last month’s election. Less formal autopsies are underway in states across the country.

But the party that lost the presidential election isn’t soul-searching at all.

For the final act of his showman-like presidency, Donald Trump has convinced the Republican Party that despite losing the White House by 7 million votes — and despite seeing five states flip in 2020 — things could hardly be better inside the GOP.

Even as the Electoral College this week confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, interviews with more than two dozen GOP state and local chairs and Republican National Committee members reflect a party that, far from reassessing its embrace of Trumpism, is hell-bent on more of the same.

“Our president absolutely grew our party,” said Jennifer Carnahan, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, noting the GOP’s down-ballot victories and explosive turnout with Trump on the ticket. “He totally advanced our party … I think that as Republicans, we just need to continue to remain on the course.”

It hardly matters that Trump couldn’t beat Biden in the Rust Belt. Or that Trump ceded the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona to Democrats and, in defeat, became the first incumbent president since 1992 to fail to win a second term.

Six weeks after the election, Republicans are beginning to chart a multi-state effort to undo mail ballot expansions that disadvantaged the party in November. But that’s a mechanical concern. As it prepares for the midterm elections and 2024, the direction of the party is set.

“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s great,” said Stanley Grot, a district-level Republican Party chair in Michigan, a state Trump won four years ago but lost to Biden in November.

In one of the more surreal role reversals in modern post-presidential election history, the winning party nationally is poring over its congressional and legislative losses, while the party that lost the White House isn’t.

When Mitt Romney lost the national popular vote by 5 million votes in 2012, his defeat sparked a devastating, 100-page RNC post-mortem based on conversations with more than 2,600 people, in-depth focus groups and polling, a survey of pollsters, and an online survey featuring the participation of more than 36,000 individuals. Trump lost by 2 million more votes than Romney, and there is nary a peep.

To many Republicans, that makes total sense. After all, GOP turnout was up, and down-ballot Republicans over-performed, reducing Democrats’ House majority and positioning the GOP — depending on the result of two runoffs in Georgia — to hold the Senate. Even if the president did get swamped by Biden — an outcome most Republicans don’t accept — there is little belief among Republicans that it had anything to do with him.

“It wasn’t a matter of our candidate,” said Bill Pozzi, chair of the Republican Party in heavily Republican Victoria County, Texas. “It was a matter of the process.”

Republicans are traditionally less prone to hand-wringing than their Democratic counterparts. But not always — especially in unsuccessful presidential years. Recriminations inside the GOP followed John McCain’s loss to Barack Obama in 2008, and four years later, after Romney’s defeat. Many of the concerns Republicans raised after that — including the party’s difficulties with younger voters and people of color — persist today. And in any other year, Republicans might once again be asking what went wrong.

But in the Republican Party of 2020, second-guessing is heresy. Trump ignored the lessons of the 2012 post-mortem when he ran in 2016, and he won. And even in defeat this year, Trump received more votes than any presidential candidate in history except for Biden, dramatically expanding the Republican Party’s ranks and making some modest inroads with Latinos, a growing segment of the electorate. More important, he persuaded Republicans, without evidence, that the election was rigged.

It’s hard for a party to draw lessons from an election it doesn’t think it lost.

As a result, Republicans mostly aren’t reckoning with their erosion in the suburbs or their weakness with women. Instead, they’re turning Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud into a cause that will animate the party for years, spinning forward frustration with the November election’s administration to advance voter ID laws and measures to limit mail voting in future elections.

“I don’t think there’s a post-mortem about losing the election,” said Allen West, the chair of the Texas Republican Party. “The real post-mortem is about how do we protect our electoral system,” which he said will be “the No. 1 legislative priority for the Republican Party of Texas.”

Republicans are making similar plans in other states where they control legislatures, while continuing to pepper the courts. Already, Republicans have filed litigation challenging absentee ballot procedures in Georgia ahead of the runoff election there next month.

“I think nationally there’s going to be a huge focus on absentee voting and election integrity,” said Michael Whatley, chair of the North Carolina Republican Party. “There has to be a significant tightening of the rules around absentee balloting, and we need to have that conversation with state legislatures all around the country.”

If there's room inside the GOP for reflection, it’s primarily on how to campaign more effectively if those challenges fall short — and if expanded mail-voting procedures remain intact. Republicans downstream from Trump warned repeatedly this year that his criticism of mail balloting was hampering the party’s effort to turn out voters — a concern that has been amplified in Georgia ahead of the Senate runoff elections. Democrats in many states built a superior operation to track absentee voters and chase their ballots.

“The Republican Party hasn’t been matching that,” said Jason Shepherd, the chair of the Republican Party in Cobb County, Georgia. ‘Hopefully we will have something going soon, but the Democrats are well ahead of us on this.”

Like Shepherd and other Republicans, Glenn Clary, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party, said that if Republicans can’t change mail ballot laws, the party “will need to improve our method” of turning out mail voters and “get on the bandwagon, so to speak.” Victor Fitz, the Cass County, Mich., prosecutor and a district GOP chair, said Republicans need to develop a firmer “backbone” to counter what he called “a very flawed election process.”

At the same time, he said, "The game has changed some, and it's important for Republicans to recognize that."

Republicans are not without some traditional concerns about threats to the party. They complain about what they view as a liberal media bias, and Clary said Republicans must “find unique and less expensive ways to get the message out.” Other party chairs express concerns about fundraising, after Biden raised record sums, overwhelming Trump on the airwaves. Some GOP organizers — though mostly former ones, after Trump overhauled the party’s apparatus in the states — see the party’s erosion in the suburbs as a source of grave concern.

But the dominant post-election focus of the GOP is about how to emerge from 2020 bolstering Trumpism, not softening its edges. Heading into the midterm elections after a presidential race in which Trump drew out scores of non-traditional voters, Whatley said, “the Republican Party’s going to need to figure out how to translate Trump voters into Republican voters.”

“When you look at the numbers that Trump got here in North Carolina,” he said, “he carried other Republican candidates across the line, and there was a huge surge in enthusiasm for him over the last month of the election that really translated into wins across the board for us.”

For Democrats licking their wounds, the optimism of Republicans can be disorienting. In Texas, where Democrats are conducting a postmortem on the party’s shortcomings in 2020, Gilberto Hinojosa, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said the lack of a similar review by Republicans nationally is “just strange.”

However, Hinojosa could rationalize it: “But they didn’t lose,” he deadpanned. “I think that’s exactly why they’re not doing it. There is not a recognition that they lost, not just because they’re afraid of Donald Trump, which I think has a lot to do with it, but because they live in this fantasy world that whatever he says is gospel, and if he says it, it’s true.”

Hinojosa said, “It’s [Trump’s] electoral version of alternative facts.”

It’s possible that elements of the GOP will conduct an analysis of Trump’s loss after he is out of office. But his shadow over the party is likely too long — and no review of Trump’s performance is likely to be hard on him.

He expressed his disdain for election postmortems as far back as 2013, the day after the RNC released its infamous 100-page report. ".@RNC report was written by the ruling class of consultants who blew the election," he tweeted. "Short on ideas. Just giving excuses to donors."

In New Hampshire, a state where the Democratic Party chair, Ray Buckley, recently announced a task force to examine his party’s down-ballot losses, Wayne MacDonald, a former state Republican Party chair, said, “A lot of Republicans haven’t accepted the outcome of the presidential yet.”

“Once that new term begins, once the Biden presidency — if the Biden presidency begins — I think you’re going to see postmortems then,” MacDonald said.

For now, he said, “Republicans are feeling good.”