When the 2023 legislative session in Ohio began, it was supposed to be another tour de force for the Republican Party.
Having gained an additional three seats in the state House and one in the state Senate to secure supermajorities in both chambers, alongside a landslide reelection for Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH), the GOP was on cruise control, locking the Democratic Party out of every corner of state government.
However, when the Republican supermajority in the state House went to the floor that January to begin its legislative session, it fell apart. Instead of backing state Rep. Derek Merrin, the Republican conference’s chosen nominee to be speaker, 22 Republicans joined the Democratic minority to elect state Rep. Jason Stephens and built a different majority that robbed the Republican conference of its elected government.
The goal of the coalition was simple: prevent the Republican majority from passing bills that would have pushed Ohio policymaking further to the right. These bills would have expanded the state’s school choice program, reined in public sector unions, and cut government spending. However, they were stalled because of Stephens’s speakership.
After a single two-year term as speaker, Stephens will not serve another. He managed to beat back a primary challenger in his reelection campaign, but four of the so-called “blue 22” lost their primary races, and five opted not to run for reelection. To secure another term as speaker, he would need to win the support of at least three Republicans who had not supported him before or are new to the chamber. That would have been unlikely.
Faced with difficult math, Stephens has withdrawn from the speaker race. In his absence, the Republican conference has nominated Matt Huffman, who faces the task of preventing Democrats from building another coalition government with renegade Republican votes.
A state-level GOP civil war
With the presidential election at the top of the ticket, the battle for the identity of the Republican Party is exemplified by President-elect Donald Trump and his rivalry with longtime Republican leaders such as Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the latter of whom has led the Republican Senate conference for the past 18 years but is now retiring from that post.
The struggle over the political and cultural identity of the national party has overshadowed a similar and arguably uglier struggle within state governments in which Republicans have been notionally dominant in recent years. In many ways, the 2023 fight in the Ohio House over the speakership is a microcosm of the party’s problems with lawmakers who represent deep-red districts but espouse a centrist agenda and are often funded and supported by political organizations that typically align with the Left and the Democratic Party, including teachers unions.
This intraparty struggle has turned ugly at times, especially in states with more conservative governors who expected to use their numerical monopolies to pass bills expanding school choice, aggressively regulating public education, restricting abortion, or banning children from receiving sex-change drugs or procedures.
Governors versus lawmakers
The split between state lawmakers and conservative governors was most clearly pushed into view in Texas and Iowa over the matter of school choice. In 2022, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) took the unusual step of endorsing primary challengers against incumbent lawmakers in her own party with the explicit goal of passing universal school choice in the state.
The effort was wildly successful, and Reynolds, fresh from her own landslide reelection campaign, was able to pass universal school choice in Iowa in 2023.
Eager to join Iowa and other Republican-controlled states that were passing universal school choice, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) championed the cause in his own state Capitol but encountered a wave of resistance from members of his own party. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a favorite of the centrist bloc who had a history of appointing Democrats to lead key committees, was also pushing an impeachment effort against the Republican incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton. While Paxton was acquitted by the state Senate, the conflict set up a personal enmity in the attorney general against numerous sitting Republicans.
In the 2024 primaries, due to the efforts of Abbott and Paxton, several incumbent lawmakers lost renomination, effectively giving Abbott the pro-school choice majority he sought. The efforts also imperiled Phelan’s hopes of being reelected speaker, and he withdrew from consideration last month. With Phelan out of the way, the Republican conference nominated state Rep. David Cook to be speaker of the Texas House.
However, in a move reminiscent of what happened in Ohio, state Rep. Dustin Burrows is now trying to peel enough Republicans away from voting for Cook on the House floor to ensure that the Texas House and its comfortable Republican majority is led by a speaker who has the support of the Democratic minority and a rebellious sliver of the Republican conference.
The liberal Republican problem
Republican civil wars in Ohio and Texas are a reminder of the problem the ruling party faces when it dominates the political landscape in a given state for a long period of time. Faced with political irrelevance, liberals in these deep-red states with political aspirations have resorted to running as Republicans but usually end up governing in a manner indistinguishable from Democrats.
The problem is not restricted to lawmakers. In Utah and Wyoming, these left-liberals in conservative clothing have risen to prominent statewide offices, including the governorship. Conservative legislative priorities have either stalled or required significant pressure campaigns. Policy initiatives that have been blocked by governors and lawmakers include reining in critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion in state education systems, requiring athletes to compete in sports programs based on their biological sex, and curtailing the power of public sector unions.
The ever-looming threat of a primary challenge has often led governors and lawmakers to rethink their opposition to conservative policy proposals. In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox (R) vetoed a 2022 bill banning biological men from competing in female sports. However, a year later, he signed legislation that banned minors from receiving sex-change drugs and puberty blockers, a move that acknowledged the political realities of the matter.
State governments are, in effect, a testing lab for governing policies for one party or another, as the framers of the Constitution intended. How a party wields power in a state can go a long way toward burnishing or damaging that party’s political brand in that state. However, if the Republican Party is plagued by members of its own coalition who are eager to work with the opposing party at the expense of their own, it cannot effectively govern in the way voters have charged it to do.
When lawmakers buck their own party to create new coalitions with the opposition, they not only betray themselves as slimy backroom dealing politicians who have little regard for the mandate they have been given by voters. This insult to the voters that charged them with governing conservatively also threatens to undermine the party’s ability to govern and claim the mantle of competence.
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Good, competent, conservative governance from the Republican Party is capable of vanquishing the Democratic Party as a viable political project. In the span of four years, a unified and conservative Republican Party turned Florida from a swing state into a deep-red state that has condemned its political opposition to the wilderness. This transformation was achieved by a willingness to expand what conservative policymaking could be.
If that successful project is to be maintained, the party must recognize and be alert to underhanded tactics its vanquished opponents employ to maintain their voice and relevancy and, in doing so, thwart the will of the voters who have given the party a mandate of conservative governance.