Can the GOP do normal?

“What’s made Milwaukee famous / Has made a fool out of me.” So sang Jerry Lee Lewis back in 1968, another election year with a lively summer of party conventions. Donald Trump, an infamous teetotaler, will not be sampling the city’s brews as he secures the Republican nomination this month, the first convicted felon to do so. But that’s not to say he’ll be able to steer clear of the foolishness of his party’s attitude toward its quadrennial colloquium.

The selection of America’s Dairyland as host for the 2024 Republican National Convention is the punchline to an eight-year-old joke: Trump’s first opponent Hillary Clinton never bothered to visit the swing state, which could have cost her the election. Yet it’s remarkable how little else has changed for the Grand Old Party in the years since 2016, despite the high drama of the Trump years. In 2020, citing the pandemic as an excuse, the Republicans “unanimously voted to forego [sic] the Convention Committee on Platform,” opting to just readopt the 2016 Trump agenda. The resolution said that, had the full complement of delegates been present in Charlotte, they “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.” That may well have been the case — but it didn’t bode well for making an appeal to those crucial undecided voters in swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The Republicans offered nothing new, except for a first-ever convention address from the White House lawn and a bizarre viral moment courtesy of Kimberly “The Best is Yet to Come!” Guilfoyle — and then, despite the assertions of their leader, they lost the strange subsequent election.

Say what you want about the Libertarians — as many Spectator commenters often do — but at least they put Trump on the record with a couple of new policy positions when he stepped into the under-deodorized lions’ den that was their National Convention in DC back in May. A pledge to commute the sentence of the founder of an online illegal drug marketplace might help pick off a vote or two from the anti-seatbelt caucus — but how will it play with the soccer moms of the Philadelphia suburbs?

After the Dobbs decision, the Democrats made big inroads with suburban women, winning key votes in red states to secure access to abortion. South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, before her braggadocious about-turn over Kevin McCarthy’s House leadership, was vocal about the prospect of Republicans helping increase access to more forms of birth control in an attempt to chart a middle path that might appeal to moderate women. Her move seemed to be as much about outreach to a key voting bloc as it was securing more media attention — and it might have served to normalize the Republican Party’s image at a time when their opponents were portraying them as glum anti-sex puritans. Mace was an early endorser of Trump, over her state’s former governor Nikki Haley, and served as a surrogate for him throughout the primary. It’s worth wondering whether ideas like hers might find their way onto a 2024 RNC platform — at the risk of inflaming the ire of the pro-life Republican base.

Elsewhere in the middle, a number of sitting GOP senators have expressed uncertainty about even attending the Milwaukee circus. “There’s other competing priorities that week that I have to sort out before I make a decision,” North Carolina’s Thom Tillis told the Hill. There are a plethora of reasons why members of Congress may steer clear: chief among them is skepticism that a Trump-branded Republican Party will succeed where it failed in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

But the GOP does have some recent successes in the bag which it could look to for inspiration: Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021, for one, demonstrated how homing in on a wedge issue — the mad ideas being taught in public schools — could serve to rouse an animus that made suburbanites doubt that the Democrats were “the normal ones.” Similarly, Georgia governor Brian Kemp — who will be in Milwaukee — won by over seven points in 2022, in a cycle where Democrats ended up holding both the state’s Senate seats. It probably helped that his opponent Stacey Abrams had undermined her credibility by refusing to accept the result of their previous contest — which most folks don’t consider all that normal, wherever it originates.

2024 should have presented a golden opportunity to the Republican Party. President Biden is incredibly unpopular. Eight in ten swing voters think he’s too old — and at present their top issues are the economy and the border, areas where Republicans traditionally do their best to look serious-minded and trustworthy. As a result, Team Trump is presenting a rather bog-standard offering when it comes to domestic policy: lower taxes, more jobs, securing the border, cracking down on drug cartels, cheaper gas, stopping crime (don’t worry about a cohesive and costed-out healthcare policy, that’ll be a future administration’s problem). But the contents aren’t so much the problem as the box they come in — one that now has “convicted felon” scrawled on the side in Sharpie.

Back across the Pond, Britain’s Labour Party appears destined to take power this month for the first time in fourteen years, thanks largely to a simple election message: stop the chaos. Of austerity, of Brexit and its fallout, of the revolving door of Conservative leadership. The challenge for Trump, his soon-to-be-announced VP pick and his daughter-in-law-helmed party is to show Americans a steady hand and a normal face. It shouldn’t be too hard, right? The best… is yet… to come…

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2024 World edition.