Kevin McCarthy's Taylor Greene Problem
Rock, Meet Hard Place
If the House GOP are going to have a good night in 2022, they probably need to win Conor Lamb's district, the Pennsylvania 17th. Won by just over 2%, Lamb's district should be at the top of the target list for the GOP in 2022, especially if they want a majority of more than, at most, two seats.
It's a funky sorta district - a bunch of Pittsburgh suburbs and some rurals. He won it comfortably in 2018, but got a scare in 2020 as the suburbs didn't come in for him as expected and the rurals really came out for the President - and, consequently, for Republicans up and down the ballot. It was a nightmare for the Democrats nationally, as this pattern saw House Democrats lose vulnerable members and fail to gain easily winnable seats like NE-02. But, at least, Lamb survived - and, because Pennsylvania just got new boundaries before 2018, and there's split government, it's a near certainty that these lines will continue on for another decade in de facto the same shape. And if that's true, then it's a rare state where we can have fairly concrete 2022 takes. And, the 17th is a perfect district to illustrate how the GOP are in a massive bind over Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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I'll skip over the actual wording of Kevin McCarthy's frankly absurd statement about MTG, other than to say he's claiming there are Communist spies in the US House or some shit - I'm not really sure what he means and I actively don't want to know. Basically, he's turning MTG into Ted Yoho or Ted Cruz - a controversial conservative who should be protected against the efforts of evil Democrats. It's morally odious, but it's the Republican Party, expecting any better is your own damn fault. Is it good politics? Somehow, it's probably their best bet - but it's still a disaster for them.
Remember how the GOP came to almost beating Lamb - record rural turnout and better than expected suburban performance. You need to combine both results to get to even close to a victory number for the GOP, and they couldn't do it in 2020. So how do you do that in 2022? You either need 2020-style rural turnout again, with a little bit of Democratic erosion in the suburban parts of the district, or you need to compensate for that rural erosion in votes with a much bigger swing to you in the suburbs.
The history of every midterm is that they are lower turnout than Presidential elections, and that the electorate skews more educated in them. This was true in Georgia this past year - January 2021 was a less white, non-degree electorate than November 2020 was, as was 2018 as compared to both 2016 and 2020. 2014 - the great Democratic disaster - was 35% white with a degree. That electorate share in 2016? 30%. The GOP are facing a precipitous fall if that happens again, or they need to reserve a Global Fucking Realignment without explicitly trying to, which is about as hard as it sounds, given nobody had managed to do it.
So McCarthy is looking at MTG not as an asset or liability, but as an icon - an avatar of those Trumpy, irregular, low propensity voters that McCarthy needs to become Speaker in 2 years. Is his calculus - which is clearly that he needs those voters more than anything - correct? I think so, but that's because I don't think he's getting the suburbs back either way. The problem is, this isn't going to get him the turnout he needs anyways.
McCarthy is trying to walk a tightrope - please the base enough that they still vote, without pissing off the suburbs - except in trying to please everybody, he'll please nobody. The rural voters in the parts of PA-17 that border Mike Kelly's district are still not going to turn out in the same numbers as 2020 in 2022, because that's how midterms work, and the suburbanites are seeing this spectacle and recoiling.
There has been one political party in the world able to stop the realignment, and the Australian right managed it by running Australian Charlie Baker. The problem was, they ended up losing support in regional Australia - places like the exurbs of Pittsburgh. Going all in on the base turnout strategy is probably the right play, but with one statement, Kevin McCarthy waived the white flag on any strategy to win back disenchanted Romney-Biden voters. Maybe it'll work for him, maybe it won't. But let's not forget that that's what he did.