When Trump lays out his agenda tonight, count on practically each Republican within the Home chamber to present him a standing ovation. The heyday of anti-Trump Republicans is over, as a result of most of Trump’s intraparty critics from his first time period are now not in Congress.
Of the 293 Republican members of the Home and Senate on Jan. 20, 2017, solely 121 (or 41%) are nonetheless in Congress. A few of those that left did so for regular causes, like dropping reelection or retiring because of previous age. However lots of them retired as a result of they didn’t just like the course the get together was heading in underneath Trump. And others, resembling those that voted to question Trump, misplaced in primaries as a result of Trump endorsed one in all their challengers.
This quantity of turnover was unprecedented. In response to information collected by Ballotpedia and 538, extra members of the president’s get together left the Home throughout 2017-2020 than throughout any president’s first time period during the last 60 years.
And the Republicans who’ve left Congress in the course of the Trump period have been extra reasonable than their replacements. DW-NOMINATE is a metric that quantifies the ideology of members of Congress utilizing their voting data, inserting them on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal). The typical DW-NOMINATE rating of the 172 departed members was 0.480, however the common rating of the 118 Republicans who have been elected to Congress from 2017 to 2023 is 0.544.
In different phrases, Trump has succeeded at remodeling congressional Republicans right into a extra conservative unit that’s much less prone to stand in his approach.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
