Reporting for Business Insider last week John Dorman and Brent Griffiths wrote that DeSantis and his [illegally coordinated] super PACs spent approximately $35.06 million in Iowa through January 15 and received roughly 23,000 votes during the caucuses. The result was DeSantis spending $1,497 per vote in Iowa. Trump and his super PACs spent nearly $18.5 million on advertising in Iowa and received over 56,000 votes, meaning that Trump spent roughly $328 per vote in the state, a much leaner figure than DeSantis. And Haley and her allies spent roughly $37 million through that same period, earning over 21,000 votes, having spent approximately $1,760 per vote.
It would be funny— in a macabre kind of way— if ruthless opportunist, designing New York Congresswoman Elise Stafanik winds up as president it having cost her nothing but her dignity… and her soul. First Trump would have to name her his running mate; then he’d have to win; and then he’d have to keel over and die. Stefanik has proven herself a politician willing to exploit every opportunity, regardless of moral or ethical constraints, to further her own ambitions. What more could this incarnation of whatever the GOP is want or expect? Her evolution from playing the role of a relatively sensible mainstream conservative to that of a crazed MAGAt, catapulted her into House GOP leadership and she’s making a no holds barred run at the Trump VP slot now.
Katy Ferek, Kristina Peterson and Alex Leary reported that “The highest-ranking woman among House Republicans grabbed the spotlight when she grilled the leaders of elite colleges over antisemitism on campus, setting off a chain of events that led to the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. Her performance drew broad praise from conservatives, and she is now being actively floated as a potential running mate for Trump this year… Stefanik, 39 years old, is one of the House’s fiercest culture warriors, a centrist Harvard graduate turned Ivy league foe whose political antenna is now closely tuned to Trump and his populist brand of conservatism. In recent weeks, she made headlines for referring to people imprisoned for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as ‘hostages’ and pointedly rescinded her endorsement of a GOP congressional candidate in Ohio after he called Trump arrogant. Stefanik, an early endorser of Trump for the 2024 vote, opened the weekly House leadership press conference by praising his win in the Iowa caucuses, and on Friday evening joined him at a campaign event in New Hampshire. Trump introduced her to the crowd as brilliant and said she ‘got very famous’ for questioning the college presidents. She ‘did it in a surgical way,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it beautiful?' While her political journey has reflected changes in the Republican electorate, who are now lining up behind Trump in the 2024 race, critics say it was a cynical shift to capitalize on Trump’s popularity.”
Has the GOP sunk this low? Lower. In fact, a couple of days ago, Tom Nichols asserted that the GOP has collapsed as a party, its voters not giving a whit about what it once represented. Last week, she “called for an end to the GOP primary season— in January, after one caucus in which some 56,000 Iowa Republicans chose Donald Trump. ‘I am calling on every other candidate— all of whom have no chance to win— to drop out,’ she said in a statement, ‘so we can unify and immediately rally behind President Trump so that we can focus 100% of our resources on defeating Joe Biden to Save America.’” She probably didn’t even need the Trump campaign to write it for her… but they may have. It reminded Nichols of “old-school Kremlin Bolsheviks nominating the new general secretary and calling for an end to all this messy voting. Comrades, we have heard the voices of the Iowa regional party organization; they speak for the entire nation. The unreliable cadres who support the deviationists must now unite with us to defeat the wreckers and saboteurs.”
Stefanik, of course, is just one of the many Republicans who have jettisoned their inconvenient principles and sworn loyalty to Trump. Such reversals are still shocking, if we care to remember them: GOP leaders such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham once declared Trump unfit for office but now sing the praises of the Great Leader. As my colleague Mark Leibovich put it last night on MSNBC, this is “white-flag week,” when even the last peeps of primary-season dissent in the GOP are being snuffed out.
Long before Stefanik’s call for less democracy, I wondered what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat in 2024. The Republican answer is easy: To be a member of the party is to abandon all political principles, of any kind, and bend the knee to the personal needs of Donald Trump.
…The Republicans, meanwhile, have in the course of a decade sublimated from a solid party into a miasmic gas of partisan incoherence. As I wrote in the summer of 2022, when I tried to define why I still thought of myself as a conservative, the GOP is not identifiably “conservative” in any way that people like me ever understood that word. I was a Republican because I wanted a small, efficient government that believed in constitutional limits on its own power, a strong national defense, and the advancement of free markets. That party no longer exists.
Partisan inconsistency is hardly news: Political scientists have known since at least the 1960s that voters are attached to parties but are far less coherent about policies. (Although much of this work is about the American system, plenty of evidence indicates that irrational partisanship is something of a natural human tendency that’s affecting other democracies as well.) But one American party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile, but so far dominant, prodemocracy coalition. In this unprecedented situation, our politics have been largely emptied of meaning beyond the existential question of democracy itself.
This is as it should be. Nothing is more important than the survival of the Constitution, even if some voters (and some legislators) insist on being mired in their own particularistic interests. I wrote in 2020 that I can never again be as partisan as I once was; I long ago quit the GOP and will never remarry another party. But I miss politics as a process, a series of arguments, among people united in their wish to better the country while disagreeing about how to do it.
... um... politics as a process? you must mean getting what you want (power and wealth?) by lying and fooling dumber than shits? and you think that's an honorable endeavor?
"the GOP has collapsed as a party, its voters not giving a whit about what it once represented."
Not even close to true, but it does illustrate the chasm between the two parties.
The nazi party is now what the white racist misogynist homophobe christian taliban drives it to be -- the party of hate and revenge. Yes, the money is still slathering them in green. One must only assume that they want even MORE than democraps might be willing to give them. Behind closed doors one can only specul…