Can the Republicans Stop Another Tea Party?

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

I, like many people, am already sick of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).  People keep texting me asking about her, wondering if she'll be expelled, and how she possibly could've won.  The answers to these questions are obvious & unfortunate.  Greene is a freshman congresswoman, one who latched onto conspiracy theories & made defamatory, likely criminal comments about public officials, ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  She won because the GOP is Donald Trump's Party.  As noted political commentator Larry Sabato recently said, the Republican Party is "no longer salvageable."  You can convince yourself that you're trying to preserve the party of Lincoln/Eisenhower/Reagan but that's not what it is anymore-it's become something of a fascist front.  Greene is not a fringe member of the organization.  Her beliefs, and those of people like Donald Trump & Josh Hawley are representative of the actual party, and convincing yourself otherwise is ignoring reality.  It is people like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney at this point who are the outliers in the party, and it's difficult to see either Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy, both of whom have kowtowed to the Hawley's & Greene's of their caucus, being able to change that.  As a result, I don't think she will be expelled, though it's possible she could face criminal charges for her actions depending on her associations with the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.

So why am I talking about her?  I'm certainly not going to give light to her conspiracy theories, or to her deranged comments (I think the White House is taking the right lead on this).  These are things that authorities should keep an eye on (particularly the violent rhetoric she's engaged in toward public officials, which would constitute a criminal investigation), but they aren't things I want to promote in any fashion.  I texted my brother the other day if I should write an article entitled "Marjorie Taylor Greene is the GOP Frontrunner in 2024" but that feels too clickbait-y for me right now, even if there's a shred of truth there.  I don't think if Donald Trump's hold on the party continues (and Kevin McCarthy's actions in the past week indicate that it will if Trump wants to be involved) that someone like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz will be the nominee in 2024.  The party is not interested in Trump's politics under the guise of respectability.  Instead, they are interested in either Trump again (or one of his progeny) in 2024, or they are interested in someone like Greene, who represents the "indulgence of the id" that the party has made its chief priority over the past four years.  I think we discount her as a 2024 contender at our peril.

But Greene could also get stuck in the meantime by buying her own hype, which is the conversation I want to have today.  By-and-large in the past four years, while Republicans have fallen to Trumpism, it's only on rare occasions that it's cost them significantly in terms of actual seats.  Obviously the biggest loss was Trump himself.  It's easy to see a scenario with a President Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush in 2020 winning reelection.  In modern elections, incumbents have fared very well (other than Trump, only one other incumbent has lost in the past forty years), and the economy for most of Trump's term was strong.  Andrew Cuomo is proof that even a modicum of composure during a national tragedy (even if that composure is covering a serious mishandling of a crisis) gets you mad points from the media, and it's easy to see Rubio or Bush simply taking the pandemic seriously as being enough to win them a second term.  But other than Trump, there's not a lot you can point to that shows a Tea Party challenge from the right cost the Republicans a seat.  It never really happened in 2018/20 in the Senate, and while it did happen in 2018 in the House in South Carolina (Katie Arrington beating Mark Sanford, and then losing the general to Joe Cunningham), that was one seat, and one that the Republicans won back in 2020.  The cost here has not been huge, mostly because the Trump forces have not succeeded in taking out more palatable moderates in seats that can be won by the Democrats in the general (note the difference there-obviously Greene won a primary that the GOP didn't want her to win...it was just an impossible lift for the Democrats in the general once she became the nominee).

GOP Chair Kelli Ward (R-AZ)

That may not hold for much longer.  In Arizona, where the Republican Party has an open gubernatorial seat and a freshman Democratic senator up, the party recently reelected Kelli Ward as their chair, despite Ward losing that Senate seat (and the presidential race) just last year.  Ward's tenure has been rocky (to be charitable) and in a true moment of irony, her reelection's legitimacy has been called into question, but she's currently still the chair.  During her time, she's made a point of attacking incumbent Gov. Doug Ducey repeatedly, to the point where Ducey seems like he won't run for the Senate seat in 2022 despite being the best choice given his stature as a two-term governor to take on Mark Kelly.  This has led to the probability that Reps. Andy Biggs & Matt Salmon (or perhaps even Ward herself) will become the nominees for Gov/Senate in 2022, despite these candidates having significant deficits in a state that has turned purple in recent years, and could cement that in 2022 if the Republican Party is not careful.  Arizona is not Georgia-14, it is not Kentucky, it is not South Carolina-it is a winnable state for the GOP, but not if they bet on a gadfly.  It's easy to see Arizona keeping Kelly or electing a Democratic nominee for governor simply because the alternatives aren't worth the risk (just like they did with Trump in 2020), even if they might have gone for someone like Ducey for the Senate under normal circumstances.

Arizona is the most prominent example of this right now, but there are other places this could be a problem.  While he denies it, there have been lots of indications that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is looking at the Minnesota governor's race in 2022 (his personal politics would safely reelect Tim Walz barring a truly abysmal midterm environment).  Lara Trump might not be toxic in North Carolina, but if she runs for the Senate there the Republicans are taking significant risks on a candidate that comes with all of Trump's baggage but no guarantee of his connection with rural voters.  Rep. Mike Kelly, whose involvements in Trump's movement to steal the 2020 election have been very public, is looking at runs for Governor or Senate in Pennsylvania next year.  And incendiary former Gov. Paul LePage is running for governor of Maine, but now in an RCV system, starts out as a massive underdog against incumbent Janet Mills (LePage failed to get to 50% in either of his runs for governor, one of the main reasons RCV became so popular in the state amongst progressives).

Which brings us back to Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Greene does not strike me as a patient woman, and while it would be smart for her to stay in the House for four years if she does intend to run for president, particularly considering her chances are solid she'll be in the majority of the House come 2022 unless the Democrats can get HR1 through both houses of Congress (difficult without filibuster reform or a complete break of the reconciliation rule), it's possible she buys into this hype and runs statewide in 2022.  After all, there is both a Governor's race and a Senate seat up next year, and while Rep. Doug Collins is probably going to run for one of them, the other is also vulnerable & would be something that Greene might pursue (incumbent-Gov. Brian Kemp's political career moving forward is difficult to ascertain given the complete repudiation that he received from Donald Trump in the aftermath of Joe Biden winning his state).  Given Greene's racist political statements, the idea that she'd get to run against an African-American candidate, and run the kind of high-profile, racist campaign she clearly relishes against either Stacey Abrams or Raphael Warnock, would be something that would seem to appeal to her "destroy everything I can" style of politics.  Greene has not publicly said anything about a statewide run, but the opportunities for her are there.  Greene would start as an underdog in both of these races in the general (but would be a prohibitive favorite in the primaries), in my opinion, as the state's blue shift in 2020 indicates that while it is willing to pick Republicans, they don't want Trump-style Republicans in these seats (also, Greene would cause turnout similar to 2020 in a way virtually no other candidate could, and that turnout won the Democrats statewide seats).  But these are both winnable races for the GOP, and if Greene (or Trump, Kelly, Ward, & Lindell) end up being the party standard-bearers in 2022, it's possible that the Tea Party losses that congressional Republicans endured in 2010/12 could soon have a sequel.