Sentiment Over Sense: the Far-Right Republican Strategy for the Midterm Elections

Former President Donald Trump arrives by helicopter at a "Save America" rally in Florence, Arizona on January 15, 2022. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

At a rally in South Carolina on March 12, Republican candidate Kaite Arrington listed her top four priorities should she win her primary and general elections to the House of Representatives this year: “[The] first thing we need to do when we get [to D.C.] is fire [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. Second: Get rid of the U.S. Department of Education. Third: start impeaching [President Joe] Biden and open Hunter Biden’s laptop.” None of these priorities constitute an actual policy or legislative platform, and it’s hard to see how removing the Department of Education, which has provided more than $3 billion in aid to South Carolina school districts since the start of the pandemic, would benefit Arrington’s potential constituents. The same could be said about Arrington’s professed intention to remove Dr. Anthony Fauci from his post as Director of the NIAID given that South Carolina has seen over 17,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the past two years. 

By establishing these goals for her first term in Congress, the former state representative is making a clear and public choice to place hot-button, far-right political issues at the center of her campaign. The uninformed political observer might view this strategy as counterintuitive for a legislator-to-be, but the savvy one will recognize it as entirely intentional. Although many Republican candidates will run normal, policy-based campaigns this cycle, Arrington’s political strategy is no outlier within a Republican Party that is moving further and further away from policy in its electoral strategy.  

Indeed, in the nearly seven years since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, his brand of Republicanism has become an inextricable faction of the Grand Old Party, which emphasizes hot-button cultural and social issues more than it does legislation or governance. Consequently, many within the party have embraced the divisive, emotion-inducing politics—more reminiscent of cable news studios than congressional committee rooms—that Trump peddled during and after his administration. Political allies of the former President have worked tirelessly to keep controversial issues like the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, and alleged election insecurity at the forefront of voters’ minds since Donald Trump left office in January of last year. 

This year, Trump tried to further cement his hold on the Republican Party by endorsing more than a hundred candidates, including Arrington, for the upcoming 2022 congressional election cycle, in many cases favoring primary challengers over incumbent Republicans. The 2022 election cycle will also feature newly-drawn congressional districts, many of which are gerrymandered or “drawn to be overwhelmingly safe for one party [and] likely to limit how many seats will flip—even in a so-called wave election,” according to Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti from the Times. The reduction of competitive congressional districts forces competition to shift from the general election to the primaries. For example, a Republican candidate will win the primary elections in a "safe red" district every election cycle. The kind of Republican that will represent those districts, ranging from moderate to far-right, is the fundamental question of the primary election process. It is a question that Donald Trump believes he can answer. 

 In fact, of the 66 candidates Trump has endorsed for congressional races, only two would potentially face Democratic incumbents in a general election; the majority are competing for nominations against members of their own party using a tactic known as “primarying,” or challenging an incumbent politician on the grounds that they are not sufficiently partisan. This aggressive electoral strategy of replacing Republicans with Republicans clearly shows the interest of the GOP’s Trump wing to usher in a new, larger class of congressional Trump allies. To bolster their partisan and Trumpian credentials, candidates eager to follow the former President’s lead have formed their campaigns around the same sort of hot-button political issues that comprise Arrington’s four points. This focus on the provocative is not unusual for members of the far right, including those who were elected to Congress in 2020. There may very well be a Trump caucus simply waiting to be formed. 

The notion of congressional class-building, or the coordinated attempt to elect a multitude of ideological or political allies in one election cycle, is not a new one for either party. But Republicans, who have formed multiple conservative caucuses within Congress over the past two decades, are much more effective at the practice. The Republican Revolution (1994) was a concentrated electoral effort that won both houses of Congress and kept the House in GOP control for ten years. More recently, the Tea Party (2010-2016) capitalized on much of the same “anger politics” and right-wing populism that Trump and his contemporaries now seem to harness. At the height of the Tea Party’s influence, the political movement delivered an electoral “shellacking” to President Obama, flipping more than sixty House seats for the Republicans in the incoming congressional class. In any case, midterms are typically grim affairs for the sitting President and their party, and it is doubtful that Obama’s own Vice President—an accomplished member of the upper chamber of Congress himself—needs reminding of just how politically damaging a powerful, organized opposition can be. A “red wave” that delivers a majority of competitive seats to Republicans, not far off from their 2010 victory over Obama and the Democrats, would most certainly put the narrowly Democratic House firmly back in Republican hands for the first time since 2018.

Yet, there is a singular and fundamental difference between the Tea Party Caucus in Congress and the still-amorphous, potential Trumpist congressional class. It is in fact that same substance that was lacking from Arrington’s “agenda”: policy. For all the failings of the Tea Party and its caucus, the movement maintained a consistent policy platform and advocated for fiscal responsibility, limited government, and open markets. Whatever the merits of these platforms may or may not be, compare them now to the top issues espoused by Trump-backed candidates like Harriet Hageman—who promised merely to stop “the radical Biden agenda” and “stand up for election integrity”—and find that the campaign promises of this new class of candidates are wholly political, and at that, barely promises. 

The lack of substantive policy platforms among far-right Republican candidates and politicians is more than just happenstance. It’s a recurring phenomenon of the past decade of change, so prevalent that author Steven Benen has dubbed the GOP the “post-policy party—one that no longer cares about the substance of policymaking.” And it is both the actions and  admissions of those Republicans that prove Benen correct: Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) wrote to his colleagues that “I have built my staff around [communications] rather than legislation” just two weeks after his oath of office. Two weeks later in February, 2021, a freshly-disciplined Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told reporters she was “fine with being kicked off my [congressional] committees, because it’d be a waste of my time.” If that were it not enough, the Republican Party itself has demonstrated that its appetite for substantive policy is waning. The Party simply forwent their traditional Committee Convention on Platform during their national convention in 2020 and instead stated, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support [former President Trump’s] America-first agenda.” Not every Republican this November will be elected on the “America-first agenda” or a platform of bad faith political promises. But, the Republican Party and RNC have offered a clear permission structure—a set of political conditions and campaign norms long in the making—that allow their candidates the same reckless freedom granted to Donald Trump in the 2016 election: to seek nomination, provoking as much political sentiment, and invoking as little actual sense, as they choose. 

Although there is no national convention in the leadup to this election season, it’s clear that the Republican platform remains unchanged. Given this permission structure and general rightward shift towards politics and away from policy, it is no wonder why Republican candidates in the upcoming midterms, as Benen puts it, “[hope] to effectively be a post-policy, far-right pundit with congressional voting privileges.” 

But they cannot be enabled to do so. The American body politic must not allow zealots masked as civil servants to win congressional nominations across the country in the coming weeks. If these candidates are left unchecked, the United States will see the rise of a truly post-policy Congress—a congressional majority with no other agenda or objective than to delay, derail, and destroy. Voters hoping to halt agents of this post-policy party must vote them down in their primaries, which begin in one month’s time. The familiar era of politics rooted in policy has ended in the Republican party, a shift that has markedly changed the American electoral game. This time, the game must be won much sooner than before. 

Dillon Mims CC ’25 is a staff writer at CPR studying Political Science and American History. He is from Norwalk, Connecticut, and you can usually find him in Avery Library behind a concerning amount of Red Bull cans.