“Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war,” write Miles “Anonymous” Taylor and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman (still a Republican). The only way to save the party from “pro-Trump extremists,” they believe, is for like-minded Republicans to team up with Democrats in 2022.
With much of their party in thrall to conspiracy theories and the conspirator-in-chief, they plead for a return to sanity. They have considered forming a new, center-right party, but the history of such political start-ups makes that option a last resort. What they choose in the near-term is an alliance to save America. With moderate Democrats, at least.
It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.
Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.
But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate the leaders of the G.O.P. — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.
To that end, 150 conservative “former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders” are calling for Republicans to support a “Renew America Movement” slate of “nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates” in 2022. They support Democrats such as Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, and will defend moderate Republicans such as such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger targeted by Trumpists in primaries.
With the withdrawal of Craig Snyder from the GOP gubernatorial primary, they will support centrist Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb over any of the Trumpists in the race.
For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.
But theirs is a primary strategy, not one for the general election. To “throw their lot in with a center-right candidate” presumably asks Democrats to give “renewers” financial support or to vote for Republicans in open primaries rather than to vote in Democratic ones. Much of the political calculus for that depends on the dynamics in both major parties and the results of congressional redistricting.
Should a viable Republican from Henderson County, North Carolina challenge Rep. Madison Cawthorn in his home county, plenty of NC-11 Unafilliateds (the designation for independents in the state) would vote in the Republican primary to split the vote for a chance to knock Cawthorn out in the primary. How independents and Democrats would vote in the general is another matter. Should Cawthorn survive such a challenge, how many Republicans in the conservative district will vote for a left-of-center Democrat in the NC-11 general or for a Democrat for U.S. Senate over a Trumpist Republican? Tribalism is a tough nut.
Taylor and Whitman acknowledge that party animosities are an obstacle to their proposal.
To work, it will require trust-building between both camps, especially while fighting side-by-side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.
A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.
We’ll see what happens after the primaries are over next year.