The headline comes from former President Barack Obama. We’re Republicans, but we think the 44th President perfectly described the next one hundred and five days of the 2024 campaign. 

Such apt phrasing also explains the previous three-hundred and sixty-five: a Speaker of the House defenestrated; attempts to remove a former president from state election ballots; those attempts thwarted by a unanimous Supreme Court; a former president indicted and convicted of felonies; those convictions seemingly diminished by the Supreme Court; an assassination attempt on that same former president’s life; and Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock taking center stage at the Republican National Convention—to name just a few. 

And now this. With President Biden on Sunday making the fateful decision to abandon his campaign for a second term, Republicans, not to say the country at large, have a lot on their minds. July 13, 2024, will rightly live in infamy. No matter your political persuasion, it’s surely true that the events of that surreal day stirred, if only for a fleeting moment, the nation’s abiding patriotism and civic faith. 

Of course, the tide turned—and quickly. We’re back in the thick of things. And yesterday only confirmed that fact. We’ve read our fair share of conspiracy theories about what fueled Biden’s final decision to leave the race. But we don’t get hired to repeat such theories, nor, for that matter, do we, as Republicans, get paid to opine on Democratic politics. 

We can, however, speak credibly about the Republican Party, its various ideological factions, and the full panoply of its members, from leadership to freshmen members of Congress, from governors to state representatives, from California to New York, and everywhere in between. This memo explains what those Republicans are thinking, why they’re thinking it, and what you should expect from them over the remainder of a raucous, and unconventional, 2024 campaign. 

In sum, for Republicans, Biden’s performance in office and his exit raise serious questions about national security, but as a more mundane political matter, the sound and fury around Biden has unified the party—around former President Donald Trump, his Vice-Presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and their agenda heading into 2025. 

WHAT ABOUT JOE? 

Here’s a common syllogism we’ve heard from Republicans since at least the June 27th Trump-Biden debate: Mentally compromised presidents should be removed via the 25th Amendment (Section 4); Joe Biden is a mentally compromised president; therefore, Joe Biden should be removed via the 25th Amendment. (If you want a reliable GOP barometer for this line of argument, read Sen. Vance’s tweets.) 

For Republicans, this issue is, in part, smacks of hypocrisy from the chorus of Democrats who, in 2017, charged President Trump as mentally unfit to serve the office he secured through the ballot box, and suggested having Trump’s Cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. 

But Republicans tell us the shoe is now on the other foot. For them, as they see it, the logic is inescapable: If President Biden isn’t up to completing the 2024 campaign, how can he continue serving in one of the most physically and psychologically demanding jobs on the planet? Consider this from Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) yesterday: “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.” 

This is not just about the presidential race; it will likely be an issue facing vulnerable House and Senate Democratic candidates with tough reelections this fall. Far be it from us to speculate how Senators Brown (D-OH), Tester (D-MT), Baldwin (D-WI) and others would address this uncomfortable topic, but Republican campaign operatives tell us they will force the issue. 

(Speaking of the shoe on the other foot: To us, the clearest way to think in politics is to follow the old adage, “Know your opponent.” In other words, you get the best perspective by imagining how the other side would deal with a similar crisis, or success, or defeat. We hear this now from Republicans; to them, the thinking goes, “What would the Democrats be doing if the crisis engulfing them were instead besetting us?”) 

WHO IS, AND WHO WAS, IN CHARGE?

Pay close attention to the verb tense in that headline. Republicans will demand to know, via oversight hearings and other means, just who was (to quote George W. Bush) “the decider” on the critical national security and foreign policy issues that have emerged since January 2021. Everything is on the table, they tell us: Russia-Ukraine; Israel-Gaza; the sinister machinations of China, Iran, and North Korea; and other threats facing the nation. 

But perhaps more controversially—and we heard this during today’s House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing—Republicans, outraged over the (thankfully failed) assassination attempt on President Trump, will tie the Secret Service’s apparent mishandling of the security measures at Trump’s July 13th rally in Pennsylvania to managerial chaos in the White House. 

Moreover, they will take Vice President Kamala Harris to task along these very lines. For Republicans see Harris in a Catch-22 of her (and the Democrats’) own making: If President Biden can’t finish the 2024 campaign, because he can’t serve a second term, has he really been “mens sana in corpore sano” since becoming President? Based on what we’ve seen (Republicans say), how can you, Madam Vice President, possibly say Biden was really making decisions? If you were in fact making the decisions, then you lied to the public, repeatedly, and you are responsible for the consequences. 

Republicans will then return to the present. You will hear from them, and quite often: Who is running the country now? By their reckoning, Biden’s exit from the race had little if anything to do with a sober-minded assessment by his inner circle of his dimming political prospects. As the GOP sees it, Biden’s decision stemmed from a clinical diagnosis of a serious medical problem that the country has every right to know about. 

GOP UNITY 

By all accounts, the party is unified. To be sure, the attempted assassination of the party’s nominee was a galvanizing, and unifying, event. There were no internecine battles over the niceties of platform language, no disgruntled backers of losing candidates complaining or withholding support (as in 2016) for Trump. Even former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s most vociferous, and really only mildly serious, primary challenger, was invited, with a featured speaking slot. 

You may dismiss the assertion of unity as self-interested, but based on our years of experience working in GOP politics, Republicans are decidedly enthused about their “big-tent party,” with a diverse group of partisans mixing comfortably inside it. 

GOP MESSAGE 

From unity comes strength; from strength, confidence. In what, exactly? The message. More specifically, Republicans tell us they’re eager to discuss messaging around the issues, on which President Trump, according to numerous public polls over the last several months, enjoyed commanding leads over Biden, and, it seems likely, at least for a time anyway, Vice President Harris. 

You will hear much about inflation, foreign wars, and chaos at the Southern Border, but Republicans we speak with say they’re now comfortable going off this script. Between now and Election Day, you will hear, as a core message from GOP candidates across the board, that the Democrats and their media allies attempted one of the most egregious political cover-ups in U.S. history. 

In short, expect to hear various permutations of the following question, “What did Vice President Harris know, and when did she know it? From a messaging perspective, as Republicans tell it, this is as easy as it gets in politics—both Nikki Haley and J.D. Vance can say this without even blinking an eye. 

VANCE AND “CLASS DISMISSED” 

Vance’s selection was an unconventional choice, as he was chosen because of how he thinks and talks about non- traditional GOP issues. For example, in his acceptance speech, Vance spoke about poor, blue-collar communities and workers, or those left behind by bicoastal, Washington leaders. Put simply, this is not your father’s Republican Party anymore. This is a social and political phenomenon that we discussed in a CGCN Group memo released in January 2024, titled, “Class Dismissed” (https://millerstrategies.com/issues/class-dismissed-reframing-political-bias-in-congress/).

The Trump-Vance Republican Party is orienting itself around blue-collar workers, in a way that, completes the flirtation of “Reagan Democrats” with the GOP. And even more interestingly, the Trump campaign’s own data shows that Biden- Harris ticket underperforming with Hispanic voters. Indeed, Republicans will test long-held political orthodoxy, according to which a hardline stance on illegal immigration leads to alienation of this critical voting bloc.

WHAT’S NEXT 

But first things first. This morning’s House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle featured what will likely be short-lived bipartisanship on the attempted Trump assassination. We say this because if you have watched this committee over the last two years, you know that panel members “MTG” and “AOC” define its tone and tenor. 

To say it’s partisan doesn’t really do it justice. We’ve been in DC for a long time, and even we can’t imagine the twists and turns of where this committee, on this issue, will go. To us, this committee is, in microcosm, what turns off many centrists who long for more civil and responsible discourse in our politics. Sorry to end on this note, but, as we see it, this is the state of politics in America for the foreseeable future.