The Paradox of Republican Governance

Dr. Shields is a professor at Claremont McKenna College.

Republican governance is peculiar. In Washington, it is a clown show, comically unserious and incompetent. But in the rest of the country, it has often seemed as good as, if not better than, its Democratic alternatives. Many red states in the Midwest and the Mountain West have higher levels of social mobility than blue states do. The Deep South has led the way in recovering from the pandemic’s impact on schools. Even red-state Democrats sometimes find it easier to address the most intractable social problems than do Democrats in blue states. Reformers in Houston have been far more successful at combating homelessness than their counterparts in Los Angeles, in part because there are fewer regulatory obstacles to building apartments in Texas than in California. Millions of Americans of all political stripes have moved to red states since 2020, mostly looking for a better quality of life.

Why does Republican governance in the states still seem so, well, competent? Partly, it’s because many local Republican elites have been quietly resisting the MAGA-fication of their party, even in the heart of Trump country. But that resistance is increasingly fragile — and it may not hold out much longer. If the old guard is driven out of the party once and for all, many Americans will eventually confront an unexpected legacy of President Trump’s revolution: a nation where there are no sound alternatives to progressive rule.

Consider Republican politics in the state of Wyoming, the subject of my new book with Stephanie Muravchik. Some 71.6 percent of its citizens voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, a higher percentage than in any other state. Still, old guard Republicans in the Wyoming legislature are waging an impressive rear-guard campaign against a Trump-aligned Freedom Caucus. The practical-minded group wants to preserve their party’s longstanding emphasis on solving local problems, which means keeping national issues off the state’s agenda. Cheyenne shouldn’t be allowed to mirror Mr. Trump’s Washington, they feel.

Wyoming’s traditional conservatives are resilient partly because they have been targeting — and bringing down — newly elected MAGA-aligned Republicans. One of the old guard’s candidates, Julie Jarvis, defeated Jeanette Ward for a seat in the state House in 2024. Ms. Ward had behaved like a typical MAGA legislator, often pushing bills that were high in national symbolism, low in local relevance. They included one that criminalized discrimination against citizens who refused to wear masks. Another tried to block World Health Organization influence on the state government. Last November, Ms. Jarvis won by running a campaign that stressed local issues. “Wyoming is a political circus that has forgotten how decisions impact local people,” she said in one campaign email. She won with 56 percent of the primary vote.

Ms. Jarvis’s victory was based on a successful playbook. Two years earlier, Stacy Jones defeated a two-term state senator, Tom James, a major local figure on the MAGA-aligned right. Mr. James had pushed largely symbolic bills, as Ms. Ward did. One would have imposed fines and jail time on state workers who enforced federal vaccine mandates. By contrast, Ms. Jones’s campaign stressed her willingness to get real “results” for her county through “collaboration.” The message seemed to resonate; like Ms. Jarvis, Ms. Jones won handily.

The victories aren’t all on one side, of course. Plenty of traditional Republicans have either retired or lost their own primaries. But enough of them have hung on to give the old Republican elite a significant bloc in the state legislature. Take Landon Brown. Despite openly defending the former U.S. representative Liz Cheney against Mr. Trump, Mr. Brown has managed to hold on to his legislative seat, beating away serious challengers in 2022 and 2024. Like Ms. Cheney, he was scandalized by Mr. Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election, he told my co-author and me. More recently, Mr. Brown has softened his criticisms of Mr. Trump, but he continues to be troubled by the cultlike devotion of many of his followers.

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