Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer’s first few weeks leading the GOP’s House campaign arm are sure off to a great start. Last week, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, pointing out that she would be just one of 13 Republican women serving in the House, announced that she was leaving her leadership post at the NRCC and building her own operation to recruit Republican women to run. Emmer responded to this by telling a reporter that Stefanik’s plan to help women in primaries was “a mistake,” a comment that Politico reports immediately caused a firestorm in the GOP caucus.
Emmer quickly tried to clarify that he only meant that it was a “mistake” for the committee to get involved in primaries in the first place, but that didn’t stop several Republican House members from publicly rebuking him. Stefanik herself tweeted out Emmer’s “mistake” comments with her own caption: “NEWSFLASH I wasn’t asking for permission.”
There’s since been a slight rapprochement. The congresswoman later said that “Emmer’s tone has changed and has been a bit more respectful and encouraging of my efforts.” An unnamed NRCC aide even assured Politico that Emmer would hold a candid “listening session” to figure out what went wrong in 2018.
It sounds like Emmer could indeed use a candid “listening session” to learn about what led to the 2018 blue wave, because he still doesn’t seem to have any idea. In a new interview, Emmer told the National Journal, “There’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs.” But, claims Emmer, “That’s not true. It isn’t there.”
That would come to a surprise to the many suburban Republicans who lost last month, including in ancestrally red Orange County, California, which will send its first all-Democratic delegation to Congress since the New Deal era.
So what does Emmer think happened?
He argues that the GOP lost independents by failing to focus on the booming economy and instead spending the final days of the election talking about immigration. But in case this sounded at all like a rebuke to fearmonger-in-chief Donald Trump, Emmer “disputed attempts to fault the president specifically” and argued he wouldn’t be a liability in 2020.
If that kind of deranged happy talk sounds familiar, it’s because the New York Times also recently reported that congressional Republicans fear publicly blaming Trump for their brutal House losses. Indeed, one GOP pollster privately told the National Journal that, if the GOP is to win back the women and suburban voters who were driven away by Trump, they first have to admit that they were driven away by Trump.
Emmer, at least outwardly, seems very unwilling to accept this basic fact, and his early women’s outreach campaign isn’t helping. The Trump cult has in fact utterly paralyzed Republican leaders: While some House Republicans have called for a detailed look at their 2018 losses, Emmer has declined to say if this autopsy report will ever happen.
Indeed, it seems that some of Emmer’s would-be recruits are wary of his delusional thinking. Emmer says that he’ll begin contacting defeated House members in January to try and get them to run again, but the National Journal writes that “in interviews with about a dozen of them, few sounded eager to mount comeback bids and some raised issues more deep-seated than the national environment.”
The only defeated member actually named in the article is Rep. Mike Bishop, who lost re-election in Michigan’s 8th District to Democrat Elissa Slotkin by a 51-47 margin. Bishop didn’t directly address any of his own 2018 plans but he doesn’t sound keen to get back into the ring, saying he was worried about the party’s appeal to women. “[W]e have to now be honest with ourselves and figure out what we need to do,” said Bishop. “So it’s up to these guys to figure it out.” We’re optimistic those guys won’t figure it out.
If you’re reading this and wondering how the NRCC got stuck with Emmer as its leader, well, you can thank incoming House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and his smashingly successful women’s outreach campaign. Politico reports that Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner, who represents a seat in suburban St. Louis, had planned to run for NRCC chair. However, McCarthy reportedly told Wagner that he’d prefer that Emmer—yet another GOP white dude—lead the committee, and while Wagner apparently thought she could have defied him and won, she decided to step aside instead.
Wagner only won re-election 51-47 last month in a race that didn’t attract much national attention, so the NRCC might be better off not having a chair who could be in danger of losing her own seat in 2020. Still, it very much feels like while McCarthy and Emmer are willing to pay plenty of lip service to the idea that they need to appeal to suburbanites and women, they’re not exactly serious about it.
However, Emmer seems to be doing at least one thing right. The National Journal reports that House Republicans want a review of the NRCC’s independent expenditure decision-making process, which could use a through shake-down. In particular, Emmer says he was “inundated with complaints about the $5 million spent on TV ads to help Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock in Virginia.” Comstock received more financial help from the NRCC than any other candidate in the nation, even though polls consistently showed her badly losing to Democrat Jennifer Wexton—so much so that the top GOP super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, wrote Comstock off for dead months before Election Day.
However, then-NRCC chair Steve Stivers insisted Comstock was in a winnable race, going so far as to declare in September, “I know there have been reports about her potentially getting cut off. The last poll I looked at she's winning. I'm not going to cut off somebody who is winning." True to his word, the NRCC did not cut off Comstock, and they kept spending heavily for her well into the last days of the campaign. But Stivers was utterly wrong about Comstock’s chances, and she ended up losing by a punishing 56-44 margin. So we’d say we agree with the House GOP on one thing: Their independent expenditure arm’s decision-making process is very bad, to the tune of at least $5 million.