I Thought I Understood the GOP. I Was Wrong. The Atlantic - Politics by Stuart Stevens

Jul 18, 2024 

What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government.

In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.

Ohio was the home of Standard Oil, Dow Chemical, Goodyear Tires, and Procter and Gamble. Garrett Morgan, a co-founder of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, devised an early version of the stoplight, a symbol of a state that thrived on normalcy. The Wright brothers invented the airplane in Dayton.

The Taft family defined the Ohio Republican Party. Cincinnati-born President William Howard Taft went to Yale, belonged to Skull and Bones, and was anointed by Theodore Roosevelt to succeed him. He trounced the populist William Jennings Bryan. His son Robert was “Mr. Republican,” a senator from 1939 until his death, in 1953. His son Robert Jr. followed him to the Senate. His son Robert III was Ohio governor from 1999 to 2007. That’s a 100-year run of one family dominating the state Republican Party. There’s nothing else like it in American politics. You could argue that this dynasticism was stifling, but you could also say that it was the result of a desire for stability above all else.

[David A. Graham: The next Republican leader]

I first worked in Ohio for then-Representative John Kasich of Columbus. His parents were killed by a drunk driver in 1987 while leaving a Burger King. The son of a mailman, in Congress he became a powerful member of the House Budget Committee and voted for the assault-weapons ban and NAFTA. He was solid, funny, normal. Once, we sat around in his small house in a very middle-class neighborhood and listened to his impressive rock-record collection. He loved Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son,” embracing it as the anthem to his American story. He’d join in on the line “I’m no senator’s son,” laughing with joyous pride. We parted ways in 2000 when he ran for president, and I moved to Austin to work for George W. Bush, grandson of a senator and son of a president. Kasich lost that race but went on to serve two terms as Ohio’s governor, from 2011 to 2019.  

Later, I worked for Rob Portman, who embodied the Republican establishment in Ohio and nationally. A congressman from Cincinnati, he directed the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, and was elected to the Senate in 2010. In vice-presidential-debate prep sessions that I moderated for Dick Cheney, he played Joe Lieberman and John Edwards, and later Barack Obama for Mitt Romney’s presidential-debate preps. As Bush’s trade representative, he opposed tariffs and promoted NAFTA. He founded the Senate Ukraine Caucus and traveled to Ukraine frequently. I’ve visited Ukrainian American clubs with him, and felt the passion he has for a country fighting for its freedom.  

In the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns, I focused on Ohio, which we narrowly won both times. And I focused on the state again in Romney’s 2012 campaign, when we lost it by three points. I assumed that the Ohio Republican Party would continue along a Kasich-Portman trajectory that valued reasonable, conservative governing, a process that by definition demands compromise. I was wrong.

When Kasich ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2016, he did win Ohio; it was the only state he won. Once most of the leading Ohio Republicans chose to accommodate Donald Trump, ordinary voters soon followed, delivering him the state in the 2016 general election and again in 2020 by large margins. No one thinks Trump needs Vance to repeat his victory in November; the former president didn’t choose Vance to appeal to some new or contested constituency. Vance is Trump’s instrument to fundamentally alter American society. He is Project 2025 personified, and has the intellectual and verbal skills to defend it far better than Trump. He’s argued against no-fault divorce and has implied that women should be required to carry pregnancies to term even in cases of rape or incest. He’s said he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine.”

Given Kasich’s son-of-a-mailman ethos and Portman’s substantive focus on serious policy, I have a difficult time imagining a political ticket more repugnant to them than Trump-Vance. But these onetime giants of the Ohio GOP have proved unable to steer their party, and now J. D. Vance is its face.

[J. D. Vance: Opioid of the masses]

Kasich put up the strongest resistance, but it was ineffective. He refused to support Trump when he won the nomination in 2016. In 2020, he endorsed Joe Biden. After Trump received a Department of Justice letter notifying him that he was a target in the January 6 investigation, Kasich urged his co-partisans “to stand up and say something. And I’d like to see the donors step up and help them. The problem we have now is many people don’t want to make a winner; they want to be with a winner,” Kasich said.

In 2016, Portman was running for reelection in the Senate and tried to stay away from Trump, kayaking Ohio rivers while the Republican convention was held in Cleveland. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, Portman announced that he would not support Trump but added, “I will be voting for Mike Pence for president.” That was a head-scratcher. In 2020, he endorsed Trump. After January 6, he voted not to convict Trump in his Senate impeachment trial. And when Vance ran to replace Portman, the retiring senator remained neutral in the primary and then endorsed Vance.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, profiled two years ago in The Atlantic as “The Last of the Establishment Republicans,” has avoided confrontation with Trump. He says he will “support the nominee” in 2024 (though he notes that he will focus his campaigning efforts on local races).  

On one level, this is politics as usual. Supporting your party’s nominee is not odd. Nor is staying out of a primary to replace you. Mitt Romney became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a member of his party in the first impeachment trial, so Portman not voting to convict in the second was perfectly conventional, even if seven Republicans broke the other way. But it is precisely politics as usual that allowed the Trumpification of the Ohio GOP.

Could the trinity of Kasich-Portman-DeWine have saved the party if they’d persisted? We’ll never know. But the emergence of J. D. Vance, the first Ohioan to be on a national ticket since John Bricker ran with Thomas Dewey in 1944, has a Guns of August feel: that of powerful players sliding into a war no one desired or imagined. The once staunchly midwestern, mainstream Ohio GOP has now given us the first vice-presidential nominee who has pledged not to follow the Constitution if it stands in the way of political victory.

As historians frequently observe, autocrats are skilled at using the tools and benefits of democracy to end democracy. In the preface to their brilliant How Democracies Die, the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”

If 2024 becomes a turning point in America’s slide from democracy to autocracy, the Ohio Republican Party will serve as a case study of how well-intentioned people let the legacy of the American experiment slip through their fingers.