Too Late, Donald: GOP is Already Tired of Winning

Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, spends a lot of time talking about winning, how he’s a winner and how much winning we are going to do when he’s president. There will be so much winning, he says, “that you may get bored with winning.” But it seems like Republicans already are.

As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report pointed out in a recent column, Republicans don’t care so much if we have a candidate who can win. She writes,

“…more than 60 percent of the way through the primary calendar and the issue of electability is a lower priority for voters than it was in 2012 — by 26 points.”

And,

“Overall, in fact, the issue of electability is less important than any other issue offered to GOP voters. Specifically, exit pollsters ask voters which of four candidate qualities mattered most in deciding how they voted: can win in November, shares my values, tells it like it is and can bring needed change. The issue of electability has consistently been the least important of the four issues offered.”

But not long ago, it seemed like the Republican Party was made up of winners — politicians, activists, staffers, donors and voters who all knew winning mattered. It mattered because it allowed us to set an agenda and control who called the shots. We knew that to make sure conservative policies were enacted we had to actually be in charge. And it felt good to win, to have our ideas validated and, at times, mandated.

But times have changed as the GOP has developed a real knack and contentment for losing.

The party can’t totally fault itself for how it got here. It’s hard to feel like a winner after almost eight years of Obama. It’s been a demoralizing period for the conservative movement and waking up everyday with a winning attitude has become a challenge. It’s dispiriting to watch GOP gains occur across the country with the knowledge that conservative policies will die at the president’s desk. So with no way to win with a Democrat president, we turned to making stands on principles, usually ill defined ones, and with it redefined losing as winning. And the party embraced it.

The GOP brand with voters is riddled with descriptors of losers. Stuck in the past. Stubborn. Tired. Out of touch. These are just some words that independent voters in a battleground Presidential and Senate state focus group that I witnessed this week used to describe the Grand Old Party. This is nothing new as the party brand has been suffering for years, but what worries me is that many in the party are starting to be ok with it. As a Republican friend said to me recently, “We like to lose.” Losing now seems to be the Republican mantra and the “shout and go home” strategy suits us just fine.

Speaker Paul Ryan gets this. He knows that, in order to win, the party needs bold policies and a way to communicate to new voters that we need to bring into the GOP tent. He laid out this blueprint in his terrific “Confident America” speech earlier this year. It’s forward looking and offers a counter to the left. It is the opposite of a “shout and go home” strategy. And he’s collaboratively (smartly) tasking his colleagues to come up with the bulk of the proposals.

Ryan understands that we are at a turning point as a party. At the time of the speech, Ryan said,

“Maybe the way to win the debate is to play identity politics, never mind ideas. Maybe what you do is slice and dice the electorate: Demonize. Polarize. Turn out your voters. Hope the rest stay home,” Ryan said. “And I would just say, ‘yes, it’s possible we could win that way — but to what end?’ “

I think Ryan knows that this “end” is a losing one. And this losing path is scary for the future of the party because no one wants to be on a losing team. Unfortunately, the GOP is starting to be a viewed as that team. It’s hard to attract new voters or young voters to something that never wins. It’s hard for losers to excite people on ideas because no one thinks losers have good ideas — if they did they would be winners.

Trump’s winning proclamations aside, it’s hard to see how Republicans aren’t losers again this year — when we could have been real winners. But sometimes missed opportunities offer clarity like nothing else. The good news is Speaker Ryan is already offering great clarity and great hope to those of us who would like to actually see us win again.