How False Republican Bravado Warps All Politics

We should all try harder to recognize the difference between confidence and kayfabe

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Democrat Tom Suozzi handily won Tuesday’s special election to fill the House seat vacated by the GOP fabulist George Santos, running ahead of polls, which showed him leading a tight race against Republican Mazi Pilip. His victory comes as a surprise only relative to a deluge of second-guessing—finger-in-the-wind style analysis rooted in little more than the media’s sense that Things Seem Bad For Democrats On TV. 

If you’ve followed elections closely in recent years you’ll recognize this as part of a pattern: Polls say Democrats are doing pretty well, elites question the polls, reporters echo elites—but then voters cast ballots and reality converges with data rather than headlines. Many liberals I know find this frustrating, even inexplicable. Will the strategists and commentators who set expectations based on whatever vibe they’re picking up at the moment never learn? Never face professional consequences?

I confess to finding this frustrating as well. But the phenomenon doesn’t spawn from bad journalism so much as from the clash between insecure liberalism and kayfabe conservatism. These sorts of headlines are inevitable, and aren’t even really falsifiable, because they reflect Democratic neurosis and artificial Republican aggression back out into the world, and the affects persist despite the more reliable barometer of public polling. 

Two changes would make this sort of thing less prevalent: First, a liberalism that was more confident in its appeal to a majority of the country; second, a press corps that was better at detecting false Republican bravado, and more willing to identify it as such.

HALL OF SMEARERS

A toughness schtick has been integral to almost every Republican campaign and strategy I’ve ever covered, but it has reached cartoonish levels in the Trump era. It’s visible in their efforts to spare Donald Trump from prosecution, their “don’t make me hurt you” threats of tit-for-tat retribution in response to any measure of accountability, and Trump’s constant lying about polls.  

Sometimes it’s so effective at warping political junkies’ sense of what’s what that they retroactively confuse the facade for reality. Ahead of the 2022 election, polls showed Democrats holding up surprisingly well, particularly given the historical pattern of incumbent parties losing badly in midterms. Republicans had just overturned the right to abortion, and fielded Big Lie election deniers for high office in key swing-states. Survey data said Democrats were poised to benefit. Republicans responded with a blitz of propaganda focused on crime (which has fallen under President Biden from its Trump-year highs) and inflation (which was actually elevated at the time). Elite Democrats were spooked; many of them second-guessed their campaigns for playing to the pro-choice, pro-democracy base. The distortion was so severe that when Democrats crushed expectations, observers stipulated that the polls must have been wrong. But the polls were right! The discourse was wrong. 

That’s what happened in NY-03, and continues even in the aftermath. Democrats are at pains to attribute Suozzi’s victory to his conservative bona fides; Republicans insist they’re on the march even in defeat. 

“Congratulations to Mazi Pilip on a remarkable campaign that fell just short,” said New York GOP chair Ed Cox. “Mazi was a phenomenal candidate and has a bright future in our party. Republicans will win this seat in November when the campaign resets to focus on Joe Biden and Democrats’ disastrous open-border, soft-on-crime policies, rather than the specific circumstances that brought about this special election.”

This affect warps the legislative process as well. When Senate negotiators announced they’d agreed upon border security and foreign aid legislation earlier this month, House Republicans erupted, imploring their colleagues in the Senate to kill the bill. “Any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time,” GOP leaders insisted. “It is DEAD on arrival in the House. We encourage the U.S. Senate to reject it.”

This was widely interpreted as an indication of House Republican resolve, but it was actually a testament to their desperation. If the leaders genuinely believed the bill was bad and should not or could not pass the House, they could have simply said so: whether or not the Senate passes this legislation, it lacks the votes to pass here. The House leaders wanted the Senate to reject it because they feared rank-and-file representatives would ultimately force a vote on it, and that it would thus become law over Donald Trump’s objections. But the gambit worked! Senate Republicans reneged on their own deal, and the legislation died. 

PUFF, PUFF, ASS

I write a lot about Republican bad faith. I think it’s the most important and debilitating force in American politics. However! This is not really coterminous with bad faith. There is a lot of overlap, obviously, and it’s no surprise that a party steeped in bad faith would be more comfortable pretending to be confident and aggressive no matter their mental state or the truth of their circumstances.

I think Republicans are morally obligated not to lie about elections or try to steal them, not to make claims about public policy that they know to be false or that they don’t believe. Not to subvert the rule of law with vague threats of political violence.

It’s utterly faithless of Republicans to pretend to care about corruption in the Trump era; to pretend to believe Ukraine aid and U.S. border-security legislation are linked ideas; to flip around and further pretend the U.S. doesn’t need border security legislation, but refuse to advance Ukraine aid without it—all while denying the plain fact that their goal is to help Russia win the war. Impeaching an official who did nothing wrong to keep an issue they refuse to address in the news is an abuse of power. That’s all bad faith, and there’s a lot of it to go around. 

I’d thus caution people not to overcorrect and reduce everything to the idea that Republicans are always posturing when they act aggressively. When they promise to purge “vermin” or intern immigrants or cheer Vladimir Putin on as he marches into NATO countries, they may at some level be trying to demoralize liberals, but we should still take them at their word. 

A puffy chest, though, is not a concrete promise to commit atrocities. 

“You better be scared of the silent MAGA majority that’s gonna whoop you at the polls” isn’t bad faith anymore than bluffing in poker is bad faith or idly threatening to walk away from the negotiating table is bad faith. Commissioning fraudulent polls to create the illusion of public support is bad faith; mind-tricking your opponent into thinking they’re losing is just smart. 

No politician or party is obligated to concede all of their doubts. Republicans certainly don’t do it 100 percent of the time. In 2016 their doubts about Trump’s electability were pretty pronounced, particularly after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. 

Moreover, phony swagger isn’t necessarily always the optimal tactic. There may be some benefit in some circumstances to setting expectations low. Democrats if anything playact in the opposite direction, broadcasting exaggerated fear of losing to mobilize their voters (the subject lines of their fundraising emails suggests this is a conscious strategy). By the same token, pretending as though the enemy is always on the run may invite complacency.

But losing is demoralizing, feeling like you’re losing is both demoralizing and disorienting. When you’re not actually losing, it makes you prone to errors—like changing the theme of a campaign, downplaying issues that benefit your party (abortion rights, democracy protection) in order to increase the salience of issues like crime and immigration that galvanize white reactionaries. 

It’s hard not to fall into this trap. Circumventing it requires good, consistent mental habits. I find myself struggling sometimes not to get psyched out by the right’s manipulative games, and think back often to John Fetterman’s response to GOP impeachment threats as a model for the whole party.

But even if you can’t see through the nonsense every single time, healthy skepticism of GOP rhetoric and healthy confidence in our own values are available to all of us. They’re more productive than chasing neurotic self-doubt into the fetal position every time a Republican pretends to be triumphant or angry.