For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.
The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.
The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.
“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was the last time Democrats swept the board of White House, House of Representatives and Senate. On that occasion conservatives exploited the financial crisis to stir resentment about government spending, giving rise to the Tea Party and winning back the House in the midterm elections.
But this time looks very different. Republicans were forced to watch from the sidelines as Biden oversaw the distribution of 200m coronavirus vaccination doses while bringing down unemployment. They failed to find a coherent line of attack on his $1.9tn Covid relief package, which opinion polls showed was popular with the public, including Republican voters.
Instead of setting out a clear alternative agenda, the party has spent much of the past three months wading into issues that animate the Trump base, such as the rights of transgender athletes and the withdrawal of six Dr Seuss books due to racist content. In this policy vacuum “cancel culture” and “wokeness” are the rallying cries while the loudest voices, such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, are also the most extreme.
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “When you don’t have a plan you go to what you think you’re good at and that is creating tensions and divisions that move people emotionally rather than practically. So the reality is, you’re going to talk about Dr Seuss when you have nothing to say about Covid-19. You’re going to talk about transgender issues when you have nothing to say on infrastructure.”
He added: “It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist. But at the end of the day, when you’re watching family members get sick and die, when you’ve lost your business, when you’ve been fired from your job in the midst of a global pandemic, you don’t give a damn about Dr Seuss.”
Republicans have also passed new voting restriction laws to appease activists pushing Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When corporations raised objections to such measures in Georgia, the party lashed out and called into question its longstanding relationship with big business – a further sign of identity crisis under Trump.
Its efforts to stall Biden’s momentum, for example by focusing on a sharp increase of migrants at the US-Mexico border, have fallen short; the president has a 59% approval rating, according to Pew Research Center study.
Trump’s charge of “Sleepy Joe” has failed to stick as the 78-year-old president’s verbal slips prove relatively rare, while Biden’s identity as a white male has shielded him from base instincts that were whipped up against Obama and Hillary Clinton. And his longstanding reputation as a non-threatening moderate has made it hard for Republicans to credibly define him as a dangerous radical.
Steele commented: “This goes back to the campaign. They tried to paint this guy a certain way and put him in a box. He’s just not boxable the way politically Republicans would like to box him in: try to create this impression this guy is some leftwing dictator or wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“People have a 50-year relationship with this man. They know who he is and so that has not helped them the way it may have served them with someone like Barack Obama, who the country largely didn’t know when he first came on to the scene.”
The iron laws of politics suggest that, if Republicans remain patient, Biden will suffer a major stumble or setback sooner or later. The coronavirus may prove stubbornly durable, the border crisis may flare up again or there may be some entirely unpredictable lightning strike. Even in the current climate, Republicans remain confident of winning back the House next year given that a first-term president’s party usually struggles in the midterms.
Nothing can be taken for granted, however, in a world shaken by both Trump’s election and a pandemic that cost half a million American lives. Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist, said: “Talking about the border when everybody cares about Covid and the economy, talking about Dr Seuss, is not the way to electoral victory.
“Biden is on a pretty steady course to deal with the pandemic and get the economy open and, if he does that and does it well, he has a chance to be the third president in a hundred years to do well in the midterms after his initial election.”
Typically a party that has taken an electoral beating holds a postmortem and regroups in an effort to broaden its appeal. Republicans might also have been expected to reckon with the deadly 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol and change course.
But Trump continues to cast a long shadow from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where a procession of party leaders have paid homage. The 45th president told Fox News last week that he will campaign aggressively during the midterms and is “very seriously” considering running for the White House again in 2024, ensuring that the party remains paralysed.
Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, observed: “He is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans. Some of them seem satisfied with that, some of them don’t, but no one seems able to overcome that on behalf of the party or to put themselves forward to be an alternative to Trump in terms of leading the party. So at this point, they’re stuck with him.”