Republicans keep losing because they won’t take hostages

By now, most Americans have figured out that the push for the SAVE America Act is performative — perhaps even more than the usual Washington standards.

Republicans have a closing window of unified control of the House, Senate, and White House. Yet the structural advantages Democrats spent decades building remain largely untouched outside temporary executive action. The SAVE America Act is one way to answer that problem with basic election rules such as voter ID and limits on mail-in voting.

John Thune understands leverage perfectly well. It is time for Republicans who say they want this bill to pass to prove they do, too.

Elections remain vulnerable to the same disputes over identification, mail voting, and administration that Republicans have spent years denouncing, while other institutional fights — immigration enforcement and reform of the FBI among them — remain unfinished. If Republicans lose unified control without locking in durable changes, a future Democrat administration can reverse much of what has been done by executive order.

Despite what the D.C. consultant class says, Republican success in the midterms will hinge on base motivation. Voters need something to vote for. Democrats are already portraying Republicans as the party of their own DEI: data centers, the Epstein class, and the Iran war.

Fair or not, those are political anchors. Without a positive agenda, the charge will stick.

The consultant class responds with the usual sermon about unity, which in practice means: Get in line and do what leadership says. But voters do not want WWE. They want UFC.

The Republican Party is already in an internal fight over what it will become after Trump, and only one side seems willing to use leverage. Some will call that destructive infighting. But the fight is already happening, and it will shape the party for decades. The question is not whether Republicans should have an internal struggle. It’s whether conservatives intend to participate in it as effectively as the senators and institutions working against them.

Recent Senate fights make the point. Republicans have held up ICE funding to block an Anti-Weaponization Fund and delayed Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) used leverage to extract millions for Alaska nonprofits.

Politics is, at bottom, the acquisition and use of leverage. The Senate’s left-wing Republicans understand that. The right too often makes threats it will not carry out — and loses.

The real show is not on the Senate floor. It is in the bank accounts.

The money controlled by Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, led by Tim Scott (R-S.C.), explains more than another ideological taxonomy ever could. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow through leadership-aligned committees and outside groups from interests that want something from Washington. That money becomes both carrot and stick: protect friendly incumbents, discipline troublesome ones, and keep conservative senators talking rather than acting.

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That’s how Thune and Scott can go on television praising the SAVE America Act while the leadership machine supports senators who stand in its way. My friends and I call this the head pat: Give conservatives a little rhetorical affection while making sure nothing they want actually happens. And it works. All the time.

The same network is lining up behind Senator Darline Graham Nordone (R-S.C.), rather than original SAVE America Act co-sponsor Ralph Norman. The scale is enormous. As of June 30, the Thune-aligned Senate Leadership Fund reported $238 million cash on hand, while its allied network, including One Nation, said it had raised more than half a billion dollars for the midterms. Those are obscene sums for a party that increasingly presents itself as the vehicle of working-class voters.

More important, the money is not politically neutral. It is a mechanism for deciding which senators get protected, which challengers get starved, and which legislative priorities receive serious attention.

Some of that war chest will protect senators most resistant to the SAVE America Act. Leadership gives them money and political lifelines while they deny the bill a vote. Those dollars do not come with strings attached for Republican voters. They come from donors and industries that need things from the Senate.

That is the leverage SAVE America Act supporters have ignored. If leadership can use money and floor time to reward compliance, conservatives can make leadership pay a price for blocking their priorities. Until they do, they have not begun to fight.

The absence of pressure is itself revealing. If leadership truly regarded passage of the SAVE America Act as a must-have priority, it would be using every institutional tool at its disposal to find votes and impose costs on holdouts. It is not.

The Senate made the problem obvious on August 8. Instead of forcing a vote on the full SAVE America Act, it took up a narrower photo-ID bill from Senator Jon Husted (R-Ohio). It failed 52-46. Then, that same morning, Thune filed cloture on the CLARITY Act crypto bill — a leadership priority that could consume much of the Senate’s limited September floor time before the midterm campaign takes over.

Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), one of four Republicans who refuses to back the SAVE America Act, said the quiet part out loud: Unless its supporters find 60 votes, “they know it’s dead, and so all this is theater.” Thune says the Senate is “bound by arithmetic.” But arithmetic is not an alibi. Leadership chooses where to spend its money, floor time, and pressure.

So stop asking nicely.

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Senate leadership routinely holds unrelated priorities hostage to get what it wants. Republicans who actually want the SAVE America Act should do the same. When the Senate returns in September, it will face a college sports bill, Thune’s CLARITY Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act. Those are leverage points.

A team sport works only if everyone is playing the same sport, wearing the same jersey, on the same field. Senate leadership is not behaving like it is on your team. Treating it as though it is only guarantees another round of speeches, cable hits, and failure.

The base needs to see a cage fight. Give the people what they want.

Refuse to hand leadership what it wants until the SAVE America Act gets an up-or-down vote at a 51-vote threshold. That is the same kind of hostage-taking the Senate’s left flank uses successfully. Thune understands leverage perfectly well. It is time for Republicans who say they want this bill to pass to prove they do, too.