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Democrats, in turn, delivered a message about health care with the repetitive force
of a jackhammer. They cracked congressional maps drawn to favor Republicans
and seized an array of open seats, while also felling longtime incumbents who had
grown complacent.
Republicans lost control of the House Tuesday night after eight years in power,
with Democrats picking up seats in several suburban districts where the party
traditionally did well. But if House Republicans were badly shaken by their defeat,
few party leaders were genuinely surprised at the nature of their losses. In
interviews with dozens of lawmakers, campaign strategists, activists and donors in
both parties, a clear consensus emerged about the arc of the 2018 election.
It was a campaign defined early by Mr. Trump’s divisive persona and hard-right
ideology, and by Republican leaders’ unswerving decision to align themselves with
Mr. Trump and his overwhelmingly white, rural base rather than politically
vulnerable moderates in Congress who hailed from the country’s population
centers and represented the political middle.
A campaign of retribution against Republicans who did not pledge fealty to Mr.
Trump — and to Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s legislative agenda — triggered an exodus
of senior legislators that opened the way for a Democratic takeover.
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“He was appropriations chair, and there were lots of people trying to tell him what
he could and couldn’t do as appropriations chair,” said Representative Steve
Stivers of Ohio, the head of the N.R.C.C. “At that point you’re not as much of a
chair.”
With their pursuit of an orthodox conservative agenda on health care and taxes,
Republican leaders split their party, driving moderate lawmakers into retirement
and handing Democrats their most powerful issue of the campaign season —
defending popular insurance coverage mandates in the Affordable Care Act.
Nov. 7, 2018
By last spring, more than 40 House Republicans were leaving the chamber. In the
Senate, two Republicans alienated by Mr. Trump, Bob Corker of Tennessee and
Jeff Flake of Arizona, also quit in frustration.
But the most stunning exit was Mr. Ryan’s. After alienating senior colleagues with
legislative arm-twisting and committing his conference to a hard-line agenda that
left them gravely vulnerable, Mr. Ryan announced abruptly in April that he was
retiring. While he promised to keep raising money for fellow Republicans, Mr.
Ryan’s contributions to the party would steadily decline; in the last fund-raising
quarter of the campaign, his political committee transferred a paltry $1.4 million to
the N.R.C.C., less than some first-time Democratic candidates raised for
themselves.
Mr. Ryan’s decision left the Republican conference in a baleful mood — and
enraged senior White House aides and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority
leader.
“He thought it was selfish,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s top political
adviser, recalling the lawmaker’s reaction to Mr. Ryan’s announcement: “If he
wanted to leave, he could leave after the election. He let all his guys hang out to
dry.”
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Beyond the speaker, Mr. Stivers said he pleaded with colleagues to run again and
named several — including Mr. Frelinghuysen and Representatives Frank
LoBiondo of New Jersey and Dennis Ross of Florida — as having undermined the
party. He sniped at Mr. Ross, who quit the day Mr. Ryan retired: “He saw the
cover of Paul retiring, and he slid right under it.”
Mr. LoBiondo suggested he could change his mind and run for re-election,
provided he could hang on to the chairmanship of a congressional subcommittee he
was scheduled to relinquish. Republican leaders assented, but it was not enough.
“He got what he said he wanted, and he still retired,” Mr. Stivers said.
Without the retirements, the Ohioan told a reporter who joined him as he knocked
on doors in his district last Saturday, “We wouldn’t even be talking about the
House being in play.”
Moderate Republicans in the House also quickly lost patience with what they saw
as Mr. Ryan’s deference toward the House Freedom Caucus, a far-right group
aligned with Mr. Trump. “Listening to the Freedom Caucus is a problem,” said
Representative Will Hurd of Texas, a Republican who on Wednesday was clinging
to a lead of a few hundred votes in his swing district.
“We probably should have taken on infrastructure in a bipartisan way first and then
maybe tax reform next, rather than health care first,” Mr. Tiberi said.
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President Trump endorsed Ron DeSantis this summer, but cooled on him as he ran
for Florida governor in the fall.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
A White House in disorder
The tweet came without warning, on the day of the South Carolina primary.
Watching television aboard Air Force One, on a flight back from his summit in
Singapore with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean despot, Mr. Trump decreed that
Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina must be defeated.
Mr. Sanford, an idiosyncratic conservative who routinely criticized the president,
was in a tough primary battle with Katie Arrington, a state legislator running as a
Trump loyalist. Hours after Mr. Trump’s message, Mr. Sanford conceded defeat.
If Mr. Sanford suffered in June for his apostasy, Mr. Trump’s party paid another
price Tuesday: Ms. Arrington lost the general election in a heavily Republican
district to Joe Cunningham, a Democrat.
He helped drive two senators, Mr. Corker and Mr. Flake, into retirement,
castigating them in humiliating terms online and driving up their unpopularity with
Republicans. In gubernatorial elections, Mr. Trump helped anoint highly divisive
nominees in states like Florida and Georgia — where the national G.O.P. had to
burn millions staving off defeat — and Kansas, where Mr. Trump’s favored
candidate, Kris Kobach, was defeated by a Democrat, Laura Kelly.
In other cases, Mr. Trump’s associates lashed out at Republican candidates who
failed to prostrate themselves sufficiently. When Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa
issued a supportive statement about a renegotiated trade deal with Canada and
Mexico, a White House aide sharply rebuked a strategist for Ms. Reynolds’s
campaign — because the governor did not praise Mr. Trump by name in her
comment. And because of the perceived slight, Mr. Trump’s aides dropped plans
for the president to headline a fund-raiser for the governor, instead insisting that
the event be held for the Iowa Republican Party.
The president’s relative political inexperience also left him open to manipulation
by aides and allies with agendas of their own. When a group of lawmakers and
White House aides lobbied Mr. Trump to endorse Representative Raul Labrador, a
hard-liner running for governor in Idaho, supporters of a competing candidate, Lt.
Gov. Brad Little, sprang into action. They assembled footage of Mr. Labrador
criticizing Mr. Trump during the 2016 primary, when he was backing Senator Ted
Cruz, and steered it to the West Wing.
The endorsement was off. The day after Idaho’s primary, Mr. Trump phoned the
triumphant Mr. Little and, unaware of the tape’s genesis, asked: “Did you see that
video?”
And in some cases, Mr. Trump upended his party’s well-laid plans, only to change
his mind or lose interest. In Florida, he endorsed Ron DeSantis, a member of
Congress who defended him frequently on Fox News, for governor. Yet when Mr.
DeSantis broke with the president, over Mr. Trump’s false claim that the death toll
in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria had been nefariously inflated, the president
turned on his handpicked candidate.
Mr. DeSantis ultimately won the governorship by a tiny margin, but Mr. Trump
criticized him bitterly in the final days of the race. The former congressman, he
complained to a friend, “was low-energy.” Mr. DeSantis even earned a nickname:
“Little Ronny D.”
For members of the House, Mr. Trump was most burdensome mainly because of a
mercurial approach to policy that left them unable to map legislation or political
messaging in a coherent way. In one instance, Mr. Trump aggressively pushed
members to vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act — and then, after a private
dinner with Democrats in the middle of June, publicly derided Republicans’ health
care legislation as “mean.”
On two other occasions — when Congress was set to reauthorize an intelligence-
gathering law and again when it was about to pass a sweeping government-funding
bill for 2018 — Mr. Trump telephoned a senior aide after watching unfavorable
Fox News coverage early in the morning and demanded, without effect, that the
bills be taken off the floor.
At no point, Republicans said, did Mr. Trump forge a cohesive political bond with
Mr. Ryan. Indeed, when Mr. Ryan disagreed last month with Mr. Trump over a
proposal to eliminate birthright citizenship, the president shot back with hot anger
that echoed his attack on Mr. Sanford: The speaker, he said, should not be
discussing “something he knows nothing about!”
Mr. Ryan’s allies only rolled their eyes at the all-too-familiar counterattack,
predicting that the president would soon also pin the loss of the House on the
speaker.
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Nancy Pelosi of California wanted the Democrats to narrow their message to focus
on health care.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times
Democrats find a message
Nancy Pelosi did not want to talk about Planned Parenthood.
It was a meeting of House Democrats early in 2017, during Republicans’ drive that
March to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Ms. Pelosi and her political
lieutenants laid out their counterattack: Democrats would talk about pre-existing
conditions and millions of people losing coverage. And they would talk about an
“age tax” — a provision in the Obamacare replacement passed by the House,
which would have allowed health insurers to widen the premium gap between
younger and older customers.
Ms. Pelosi acknowledged it would require restraint from Democrats. In her own
San Francisco district, she said, people wanted her to fight the health care battle
over funding for Planned Parenthood and Medicaid. “Those things are in our DNA,
but they are not in our talking points,” Ms. Pelosi became fond of saying,
according to a close associate.
That narrow focus on health care and a few economic issues came to define the
Democrats’ midterm campaign. It represented a wholesale rejection of Hillary
Clinton’s failed strategy in the 2016 campaign, which focused on Mr. Trump’s
fitness for office.
“Every time he would say something or tweet something, it would come back: ‘We
need to come right back at him! Define him!’” Mr. Luján recalled. “We would say:
Look, we don’t need to talk about him, he’s going to do it himself. We need to
continue to have a conversation with the American people about kitchen-table
issues.”
In a presentation compiled for the PAC in the summer of 2017 by the Democratic
polling firm Normington Petts, party strategists delivered an unambiguous
assessment: “The strongest policies for a Democratic candidate are almost entirely
economically focused.” And it warned that Mr. Trump was not the “most
important villain” — congressional Republicans were.
The same presentation, focused on the white working class, noted vaguely: “It’s
worth keeping in mind, Democratic leaders will be a significant villain highlighted
by the G.O.P.” If the report did not name Ms. Pelosi as a target, the meaning was
clear.
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Conor Lamb’s victory in a spring special election near Pittsburgh helped the
Democrats find a winning message of health care and economic fairness, but he
pledged to never support Ms. Pelosi for speaker.CreditGene J. Puskar/Associated
Press
That strategy of restraint brought Democrats steady gains, as they made inroads
into Republican territory in a series of special elections and off-year elections,
winning an improbable Senate seat in Alabama late last year, then seizing a solid-
red congressional district near Pittsburgh in March. The Democratic victor there,
Conor Lamb, ran on a message about health care and economic fairness, and
pledged never to support Ms. Pelosi for speaker.
Mr. Lamb’s upset rattled the Republicans and spurred other moderate Democrats
— including a sizable group elected this week — to disavow Ms. Pelosi. On the
Republican side, the race stirred new doubts about whether attacks on Ms. Pelosi
could save their majority.
“What was apparent there,” Mr. Luján said, “is that Republicans did not have a
playbook to run against our candidates.”
A majority, Ms. Pelosi made clear, that she fully intended to lead.
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Furious, Mr. Yoder telephoned Mr. Stivers and blistered him about being disloyal,
reminding the campaign chairman that he had been a vice chairman of the
N.R.C.C. and always paid his dues to the committee.
Mr. Stivers accepted the tongue-lashing, but Mr. Yoder’s campaign was beyond
repair: he lost by 9 percentage points to Sharice Davids on Tuesday.
Abandoning Mr. Yoder was a ruthless act of triage, aimed at saving money that
could be used to rescue other members. But bitter personal clashes between
Republican Party strategists hobbled their efforts to spend money coherently in the
last stage of the election.
Open animosity erupted between the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House
super PAC funded heavily by the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the
N.R.C.C. The super PAC would ostentatiously leak word of plans to pull funding
from vulnerable lawmakers, leaving the committee scrambling in some cases to
make up the difference. In some cases, the groups seemed to make decisions more
for the purpose of outflanking each other rather than thwarting Democrats.
In late September, C.L.F. decided to cut loose two lawmakers, Mike Bishop of
Michigan and Mike Coffman of Colorado, calling them unsalvageable.
Disagreeing, the N.R.C.C. rushed new money into Mr. Coffman’s district.
Soon, both groups would change their assessments: When a poll showed Mr.
Coffman losing by 14 percentage points, the N.R.C.C. rescinded much of the
money it hastily deployed. And C.L.F., after humiliating Mr. Bishop, returned to
spending in his district within weeks, trying to save him after all.
Mr. Coffman lost decisively on Tuesday, while Mr. Bishop was losing by nearly
four points with nearly all precincts reporting.
Rather than rallying to face that veritable war machine, Republicans turned on each
other. Corry Bliss, the super PAC’s sharp-elbowed chief strategist, badmouthed
party strategy around Washington, criticizing the House committee for spending
millions on incumbents he saw as hopeless, such as Barbara Comstock of Virginia,
who enjoyed infusions of party cash through the end of the election — and lost by
12 percentage points, becoming the first incumbent defeated nationwide on
Tuesday.
But the N.R.C.C. viewed Mr. Bliss’s group as reckless in its spending and
insensitive to the delicate web of egos and relationships in the Republican
conference.
“Fighting with allies is hard, just look back at World War II,” Mr. Stivers said,
likening Mr. Bliss to Bernard Montgomery, the capable but egocentric British
general.
Even before Mr. Trump began thundering against an “invasion” from Latin
America — spurning with finality the moderate swing voters that Republicans
desperately needed — his party’s facade of election-year unity was crumbling.
Panic mounting, Republican factions began looking out for themselves: Mr.
McCarthy, currying favor with the right as he positioned himself to succeed Mr.
Ryan, revived a push to fund Mr. Trump’s border wall. On the weekend before the
election, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a far-right rival of Mr. McCarthy,
began calling colleagues to gauge their interest in supporting him for minority
leader in a Democratic-led House.
And in a move that baffled their political peers, both Mr. Pence and Mr. McCarthy
visited Kansas City on the Friday before the election to campaign with Mr. Yoder,
among other Republicans — more than a month after the N.R.C.C. concluded Mr.
Yoder could not win.
Last weekend, the gulf between the two parties — in strategy and message, in
political tenacity and internal cohesion — could not have been greater. Meeting
with campaign donors in San Francisco, Ms. Pelosi declared confidently that the
House majority would soon be in Democratic hands. Next up, she said, would be a
“huge amount of work to repair the fabric of the country,” according to a person in
attendance who paraphrased her comments.
Campaigning in Georgia for Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor,
Mr. Trump delivered a message with all the subtlety of an arsonist’s house fire,
accusing Democrats of seeking to inflict “more crime and more caravans” upon the
country.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand jobs were created in America in October alone,”
Mr. Ryan said. “This is working!”