In the long, tumultuous political career of Senator John McCain, it would have been remembered as a turning point. It was only rumored at the time. But the Arizona senator nearly bolted from the Republican Party in 2001.
In secret negotiations with then-Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, McCain plotted how he would depart the GOP. He was furious over the way the party establishment had treated him in the 2000 race for the Republican presidential nomination against the eventually victorious George W. Bush. And within weeks of Bush’s swearing-in as president in 2001, McCain told Daschle that he was looking for a way out of the GOP, probably by declaring himself an independent—a move that would have thrown control of the otherwise 50-50 Senate to the Democrats. The negotiations got far enough, Daschle later told me, that the two men discussed the logistics of the news conference at which McCain would make the announcement. “We came very close,” Daschle said.
All these years later, amid the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency and with McCain casting his historic vote last week to defy the White House and derail a fevered Republican effort to undo Obamacare, Daschle and other Democratic strategists and lawmakers are questioning whether the party should mount a new campaign to lure McCain and other wavering Republican senators away from the GOP.
Other obvious targets for the campaign, they said, would be the two women Republican senators who stymied the GOP’s repeal efforts last week: Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
“After what we’ve seen on health care, and on so many other issues, it is important for us to reach out to Republicans right now to let them know how welcome they would be to join us,” said Daschle, who left Congress in 2005 and now runs his own political advisory firm. “I’m sure some of those conversations may already be well underway.”
Republicans currently hold 52 Senate seats. Two or three defections would swing the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats—a political earthquake that would give Democrats control of the Senate confirmation process for Executive Branch and Supreme Court nominees, as well as the ability to launch more aggressive investigations of President Trump and his administration, including of possible collusion between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign. It would also make Republican priorities from Obamacare repeal to tax reform even less likely.