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Writer's pictureHowie Klein

Democratic Candidates Would Rather Run Against MAGA Than Against Republicans-- Easy To See Why



Most everyone has seen the new New York Times/Siena poll by now and knows it finds that Biden and Señor T are tied, 43% to 43%— the classic lesser of two evils matchup that the Democrats feel most comfortable with. As we saw yesterday, Nate Cohn wrote that “Trump’s resilience is not necessarily an indication of his strength. In most respects, he appears to be a badly wounded general election candidate. Just 41 percent of registered voters say they have a favorable view of him, while a majority believe he committed serious federal crimes and say his conduct after the last election went so far that it threatened American democracy. But Biden shows little strength of his own. His favorability rating is only two points higher than Trump’s. And despite an improving economy, his approval rating is only 39 percent… At least for now, he seems unable to capitalize on his opponent’s profound vulnerability.”


But why are the Republicans competitive at all, not just Trump, but the whole toxic party with its reactionary unpopular agenda? Good question and I can’t help but feel relatively certain that next year the Republicans are going to be eviscerated. We should get a hint of that in the special election in Ohio next week, where voters are expected to reject the GOP anti-Choice agenda by a wide margin. Early voting has begun— with an unexpected bang that has been accelerating— and over a quarter million Ohioans have absentee ballots in their hands. And, by the way, Senator J.D. Vance (R) is pushing the anti-Choice position and Senator Sherrod Brown (D) is pushing the pro-Choice position-- although he’s joined by former Republican governors John Kasich and Bob Taft. The most current USA Today poll shows 57% opposing (the pro-Choice position) and just 26% siding with the anti-Choice Republicans.


Let's not forget this kind of thing, though. If advertising like this plays frequently enough-- and it will-- there are plenty of people who will, at least, feel doubts about Biden-- especially with Trump's media allies and congressional puppets amplifying the message:



Yesterday, Ron Brownstein tackled the greater question of why Republicans are even still in serious contention at all— not just in the presidential race or in the Ohio special election— but everywhere, anytime. He started with a question in light of Trump’s mounting disgrace, which has been like water off a duck’s back from most Republicans: “can anything break the sustained electoral stalemate that has left the country divided almost exactly in half between the Republican and Democratic coalitions?” This has been, after all, “one of the longest periods in American history in which neither party has been able to establish a durable or decisive advantage over the other. The parties now represent coalitions with such divergent visions of America’s future, particularly whether it welcomes or resists racial and cultural change, that it’s unclear what could allow one side to break out from the close competition between them. And that includes the prospect of Republicans choosing a presidential nominee who could be shuttling between the campaign trail and the courtroom.”


Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections— something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. That suggests the Democratic coalition, on a national basis, is somewhat larger than the GOP’s.
But the Democrats’ difficulty competing outside of large metropolitan areas, as well as the small state bias in the Senate and the Electoral College, has allowed the GOP to remain highly competitive in this era. In almost every critical dimension, the political system is now defined by stasis and stand-off. In this century, for instance, majorities for either side in the House and Senate have consistently been much smaller than they were in the late 20th century. Each party has now established a virtually impregnable sphere of influence across a large number of states in which they dominate elections up and down the ballot-from the presidential contest through Congress and state races. Forty of the 50 states, or 80% of them, have voted the same way in each of the past four presidential elections; that’s a higher percentage of states than voted the same way even in the four consecutive elections won by Franklin Roosevelt from 1932 through 1944.
The latest measure of this deadlock came last week in a joint survey by Tony Fabrizio and John Anzalone, the lead pollsters in 2020 respectively for Trump and Biden. In a study for AARP, the giant advocacy group for older Americans, the two surveyed attitudes in the 40 congressional districts considered the most competitive by the non-partisan Cook Political Report.
The results pointed to an electoral competition in which the concrete has settled very firmly. The poll found voters divided exactly in half over whether they intended to vote for Democrats or Republicans in the next Congressional election. And it found Biden leading Trump by four percentage points across these 40 districts: that was exactly Biden’s advantage over Trump in these seats in 2020.
…[UCLA political scientist Lynn] Vavreck, the UCLA political scientist, and her co-authors John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, argue in The Bitter End, their book on the 2020 election, that American politics is likely to remain this closely balanced for years. The reason, they believe, is that voters are now choosing between the parties primarily on their views about changes in America’s fundamental identity, rather than their assessment of current conditions, or even differences in economic and foreign policy priorities. And on those identity-focused issues— from abortion to LGBTQ rights— the chasm between the parties has grown so large that very few voters can envision switching sides, even to register a protest over the country’s immediate direction.
“Maybe in the 1980s,” Vavreck said, voters could “give the other side a go” when they were disenchanted with the incumbent president’s performance “because they weren’t that far apart on those [identity] issues.”
…Simon Rosenberg, the long-time Democratic strategist who was proven right as the most prominent public skeptic of the “red wave” theory in 2022, argues that Trump, in particular, is unlikely to match his 47% of the vote from 2020 if the GOP nominates him again… [and there’s] “an opportunity” for Democrats to amass a bigger majority next year than most consider possible. But to get there, he argues, the party will need to think bigger, particularly in its efforts to mobilize younger voters aging into the electorate. “It’s a man on the moon kind of mindset,” Rosenberg said. “We have to want to go there to get there. We have to build a strategy to take away political real estate from the Republicans because they are giving us the opportunity to take it away from them.”

"Throw The Book at Him" by Nancy Ohanian

Sometimes when I want to know what's going on with Republicans, I turn to ex-Republicans-- like Charlie Sykes or Jennifer Rubin-- who know them better than they know themselves… fine, though that “ex” thing means they won’t keep knowing them as the party and its members change and devolve. One person who will though is anything but an ex-Republican, fire-breather partisan Republican Jim Geraghty, the editor of the National Review. Last week, he revealed a lot about his party and a lot about why it’s foundering— The Quiet Collapse of Four Key State Republican Parties. The MAGAtization of the GOP has been, frets Geraghty, “taking them out of contention in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota. I’d like to see it happen in lots more places— from Long Island to Riverside County and in specific races in red territory this cycle, where things are looking up... in Missouri, Ohio and even Montana.


Geraghty, though was concentrating on the 4 states (+ Georgia) that he wrote are “going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms… If Republicans are disappointed with the results of the 2024 elections— for the fourth straight cycle, mind you— a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party or the basic blocking and tackling involved in helping GOP candidates win elections. When a political party adopts a mindset that prioritizes loyalty to a particular figure— in this case, Donald Trump— over all other traits, eventually it tends to run low on those other traits. We see the consequences of this mentality in the condition of several state Republican parties.”


The Arizona Republican Party picked a bad time to run out of money.
There are two competitive House seats on the line as Republicans are looking to defend their slim majority in the lower chamber next year. Not to mention, Arizona is going to be a major swing state in the 2024 presidential election.
But the state GOP has just over $23,000 in cash on hand in its federal account, according to federal filings, and roughly $144,000 according to their [second-quarter] state filing. That pales in comparison to state parties in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, where both had more than $1 million in cash on hand at the end of the most recent quarter.
In the wake of the vote in Congress to raise the debt ceiling, [state Republican Chair Dave] Williams delivered a strident attack on all Republicans who voted for the measure, and specifically his former primary opponent, Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn (he lost to Lamborn last year by 18 points).
In a blast email, he basically called Lamborn a liar and a hypocrite and said “Colorado Republicans are fed up with say-anything politicians like Doug Lamborn…”
This is not only wildly inappropriate for a party chair but seems utterly unmoored from any serious strategy to build a robust, statewide election-winning organization. In fact, he included a plea for donations at the end of the anti-GOP email by touting his efforts to “put the Democrats on defense.”
Also in Colorado:
Stolen election conspiracist Dave Williams, the new state chairman, has announced the Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRC) will vote on August 5 on whether to cancel the 2024 Republican primary election. And to accomplish this act of political suicide, they want to make a change in the committee’s voting rules that would make the old Soviet Politburo proud.
Voters passed Proposition 108 in 2016 which allows unaffiliated voters to vote in the primary election of their choice.
Unaffiliated voters receive both parties’ primary ballots in the mail and they can choose one. Voting in both primaries nullifies both ballots.
Recent filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) reveal that Minnesota’s Republican Party is financially struggling, with barely $54 cash on hand. Additionally, the state GOP has more than $335,000 in debt, according to the FEC paperwork filed in late June.
At least four county parties in Michigan have been at open war with themselves, with members suing one another or putting forward competing slates that claim to be in charge. The night before an April state party meeting, two GOP officials got into a physical altercation in a hotel bar over an attempt to expel members. The state party’s new chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, has struggled to raise money and abandoned the party’s longtime headquarters.
Also in Michigan:
The Michigan Republican Party has about $93,000 in its bank accounts 16 months before the November 2024 presidential election, a revelation GOP insiders said paints an alarming financial picture for a political party that had full control of state government five years ago.
And we might even throw in what’s going on down in Georgia:
The Georgia GOP spent more in the first six months of 2023 than it paid out in all of 2022 to represent “alternate” Republican electors targeted amid Fulton County’s probe into whether Donald Trump and his allies committed crimes while trying to overturn his 2020 defeat.
Newly filed campaign disclosures show that the party paid out more than $520,000 in legal expenses in the first six months of 2023. That’s about 75% more than what was paid out in 2022 and five times what the party spent for legal expenses in 2021, according to disclosures.
More than $340,000 of that went to defend the fake electors who are possible targets in the Fulton County probe. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to announce indictments in the case in August. It’s unclear whether any of the fake electors will face charges. . . .
The party raised $722,000 during the previous six months, through June 30, so a large chunk of what it took in went for legal expenses. It still listed having nearly $1.4 million banked.
…In these states, we are seeing the self-marginalization of the Republican Party. No outside force came along and forced these state parties to spend money, alienate traditional supporters and donors, pick nasty fights with their own lawmakers, turn loyalty to Trump into the preeminent litmus test on all issues and disputes, and alienate and repel once-persuadable swing voters. No, the people who took over these parties chose this path.
Yes, the pre-Trump Republican Party had its faults, and there’s no getting around that. Perhaps you remember it as being boring, stuffy, and predictable, with the state and local parties largely being run by nice old ladies who liked to wear big hats. But those allegedly boring types also tended to get the basics right: get more money coming in than is going out, pay attention to down-ballot races, and avoid infighting and messy public squabbles. Prudence, diligence, coalition-building, and cooperation— sure, those traits might not quicken your pulse, but they are required to get the job done. You cannot bellow, snarl, table-pound, and rage your way to an effective state or local party organization.
…The modern, very Trumpy Republican Party attracts certain people and repels certain people. It attracts people with passion, a sense that the fate of the country is at stake, and an eagerness to denounce any Republican official they deem insufficiently devoted to the cause. They also often adamantly insist that the 2020 election was stolen and see conspiracies at work everywhere. This same party repels the old guard and anyone with the old guard’s positive traits.
These state party leaders are not interested in attracting the votes of anyone they deem insufficiently dedicated to the MAGA vision. That includes a lot of suburbanites, white-collar professionals, soccer moms — the kinds of voters who are fine with voting for the likes of Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Georgia governor Brian Kemp (who’s at odds with the leaders of his state’s GOP), Ohio governor Mike DeWine, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. Sometimes you hear this rejection of past Republican voters expressed explicitly, as when Kari Lake declared at a rally shortly before the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!”
A movement driven by a sense of a culture war requires enemies, and a lot of members of the MAGA crowd are perfectly happy to cast the old Republican base of boring, sensible, prudent suburbanites as one of its many enemies.
Unsurprisingly, those voters start to leave the party, both formally and informally, and they close their checkbooks. When the lunatics come in, the sane people want to leave.
The MAGA crowd now running these state parties insisted they didn’t need anyone else. And now we see where that got them.


3 Comments


Guest
Aug 04, 2023

hatewatt with a bit of substance.

Still projecting, though. You imagine a cave? why is that?

Also, I'm not bitching per se. I'm iteratively proving to all of you who are trying (?) to cajole positive change that it cannot be done via your hapless worthless feckless lying CORRUPT neoliberal fascist pussy democrap party. I find it reassuring (?) that your pussy democraps iteratively prove my assessment of them correct... yet it never seems to hurt them at the polls. They should have lost all their voters decades ago... about when slick willie convened the DLC.


What I'm doing here is not all I do. My own efforts to improve society include volunteer work, though no longer political. I'm ol…


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hiwatt11
Aug 03, 2023

Guestcrapper, Doing nothing but sitting at home bitching and moaning in your cave instead of actually trying to go out and help create something positive in the political world doesn't help either. Some of us have careers dedicated to improving things. Others use their free time. Some do both. The key is not to throw up your hands and blame everyone else.

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Guest
Aug 03, 2023

The question about half/half is disingenuous. It's really the nazi third vs. the dumber than shit democrap third vs. the third who never participates. Draw out 5m... 10m.. from that last third and your democraps could win every national election and majority forever.


The question should be ... why can't the democraps ever do anything to draw out just a few of the dormant third to DO that?


The answer is in who owns the democraps and who they serve and who they are.


In FDR's time, the GD made voters toggle to Democrats because the Rs were there when the crash happened and reacted haplessly to it making it much deeper and awfuler than it should have been.

And…


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