The Republicans are likely to win back at least one congressional chamber in November, and maybe both. We explain why the party is so good at opposition politics
When Mr Cheney’s daughter and political mini-me, Liz Cheney, decided to contest her father’s old seat in 2016 she had even less trouble. She won over 60% of the vote, despite having a law degree. But Wyoming conservatives have lately adopted a new political standard—Do you agree with Donald Trump that the general election was stolen?—which she has flunked.
The fiction that Democrats stole the election has become the main instrument of his grip. Over 70% of Republican voters believe it—a number that has hardly changed since the election, despite no supporting evidence having emerged from the many Republican-funded vote audits and legal challenges. Like enraptured millenarians checking their watches as they scan the night sky, over a quarter of Republicans were convinced Mr Trump would be reinstated by the end of 2021.
But other indicators are more persuasive. He has arm-twisted potential rivals to get them to say they would not stand against him. Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, and Tim Scott, a senator from South Carolina, have done so publicly. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is said to have given that assurance in private. Under Bill Stepien, his efficient campaign manager, Mr Trump has also kept much of his political team on the books.
Even the minority of Republicans who accept that he lost therefore do not appear to consider Trumpism a losing strategy. And given the party’s demographic advantage in the ageing, heavily white Midwest—where general elections tend to be lost and won—they might be right. Recent surveys of five key states by Mr Trump’s respected pollster, Tony Fabrizio, put him ahead of Mr Biden everywhere. Mr Trump leads the president in Michigan by 12 points and Wisconsin by ten.
Better indications of the party’s direction include the new blood it is attracting, the campaigns Republicans are running and the priorities of Republican state legislatures up and down the country. The Trumpist contingent in the House is wilder. It includes Paul Gosar of Arizona, a speaker at white-supremacist gatherings. In November he tweeted an animated depiction of himself killing a Democratic congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a charismatic left-winger with whom Trumpists are obsessed. The House has had plenty of right-wing maniacs before—including in the Tea Party influx of 2010. In the past, though, Republican leaders tried to control them.
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