Entropy & Disarray Plague The GOP’s Tiny, Fractious Majority-- Virginia Voters Are Watching

Don’t Expect Even Any Relatively Mainstream Conservatives To Act Like An Adult

The Virginia legislative elections a month from tomorrow will probably be the best barometer of the electorate available for people worried about the 2024 elections. As Steven Shepard reported Saturday, “Polls show deep dissatisfaction with President Biden. But Democrats keep winning special elections, overperforming Biden’s 2020 margins. Economic indicators point to durable growth and low unemployment, but few voters say the economy is headed in the right direction. At a moment when the best electoral indicators are all over the place, the Virginia races will help cut through the noise. It’s a large sample: Some 140 seats in the General Assembly are up for election on Nov. 7. Both parties are conducting robust, fully funded campaigns. And the territory on which the majorities of the state House and Senate will be decided looks a lot like the kinds of places that could determine which party wins control of the presidency and Congress a year later… Virginia is shaping up to be a highly competitive proxy for the national mood. Once a battleground state, Virginia has turned blue: It’s voted Democratic for president in the past four elections, and Biden beat Trump by 10 points three years ago. But both public and private polls show Youngkin is more popular than Biden in Virginia, including in many of the races in play next month.”

Next year, Herb Jones will be running for Congress in one of the swing districts, VA-01, a sprawling district with 18 counties. Most of the voters like in 2 swing counties, Chesterfield and Henrico, with significant numbers in Hanover, James City and York. Jones is a retired Army Colonel and former New Kent County Treasurer. His positions are strongly progressive/pro-family/pro-worker. He’s watching— and helping— in the legislative races, especially in his own district, this year. Keep in mind that in 2020, Trump won the district by just over 4 points but Biden push Democratic performance across the board and, besides the momentum, chalked up solid wins Chesterfield, Henrico and James City.

He’s been helping with early voting turnout, and some of the parts of his district have the highest early turnout in the state, especially around Williamsburg, where he is working with Delegate candidate Jessica Anderson. Yesterday Jones told me that “As a nation, we are at an inflection point in our history. If we, collectively, make the wrong decision at the voting booth next month and next year, the United States will be forever changed. Virginia is a bellwether: As Virginia goes this year, so goes (most of the time) the nation in the ensuing year. As Virginia is a bellwether for the nation, the two largest locales in Virginia’s First Congressional District, Henrico, and Chesterfield counties, are bellwethers for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Over recent years, these two counties have changed from Red to Blue to Purple. Democrats have strong candidates across the district not only in Chesterfield and Henrico, but in smaller localities— Gloucester County, Hanover County, James City County, and the City of Williamsburg— as well. I expect a strong democratic performance across the First District next month. I will build on this momentum for next year.”

This cycle, Blue America is backing 3 progressive candidate>— Victoria Luevanos in a red-held swing Senate district in the Virginia Beach area, Jessica Anderson in a red-held swing House district in the Williamsburg area and Kannan Srinivassan in a blue-leaning Loudoun County district in the DC suburbs.

All these high tension races in Virginia will be taking place in the midst of Republican dysfunction and chaos in the neighborhood (DC). Much of Virginia shares the DC media market. The voters know what the Republican clown show is up to and they see the anarchy and the inability to govern very clearly. Right after the election, there’s almost certain to be a government shutdown, a shutdown that will impact Virginia far worse than other states.

The “divided and demoralized” House Republicans are trying to change the rules to elect a speaker, 90 of them demanding that no candidate go to the floor without a unanimous agreement from the conference, which means that Gaetz and the 7 others who toppled McCarthy have to agree, albeit not in view of the public. Annie Karni noted that “The idea that the fractured GOP conference could unanimously come together behind either Scalise or the other declared candidate, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, is also virtually unthinkable.” This is going to be thrashed out starting tomorrow… behind closed doors.

Or at least they’ll try. For a party that has become devoted to chaos, actually successfully thrashing it out, looks almost impossible. On Friday, Michael Bender blamed the turbulence— not just last week’s but for the last 7 years— on Señor Trumpanzee. “This week,” he noted, “that chaos looked like an organizing principle. Internal discord rippled through the party’s ranks in battleground states and the nation’s capital, showing clearly how a Trumpian algorithm has incentivized Republicans to keep their electorally self-destructive patterns in place.”

Long gone are the carrots and sticks that traditionally helped party leaders shepherd their flocks, like fund-raising help from national committees or plum committee assignments.

Instead, the way to rise as a Republican is, one, to display unbending devotion to Trump and then, two, to embrace some mix of relentless self-promotion, militant opposition to Democrats and a willingness to burn the federal government to the ground— even if it means taking the party down, too.

This all goes back to our reward structure, and how that’s gotten turned on its head,” said Doug Heye, a former aide to Representative Eric Cantor, the onetime majority leader ousted in 2014 by a far-right challenger, pointing out that some of the most controversial Republicans in Congress have bigger social media followings than the party’s leaders.

“As long as you’re talking about fighting— regardless of whether you have a strategy to land a punch or win a round— you never actually have to win, because that’s what gets the most attention,” Heye continued. “And that means Republicans are now sort of always talking between ourselves, and the rest of the country we either don’t engage or hold in contempt.”

What’s new is how ingrained such instincts have become among Republicans. Impractical purity tests are creating new divisions in an already fragmented party, like an uncontrollable mitosis damaging nearby tissue with potentially fatal consequences.

That means the challenge for one of the nation’s two major political parties is whether it can find a way to thrive when it is powered by a strain of conservatism that somehow grows more potent in defeat.

This quandary was articulated by Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana, a far-right Republican weighing a Senate bid against Jon Tester, the Democratic incumbent. Mr. Rosendale recently told donors that while his party had anticipated a wave of victories in last year’s midterm elections, he had been “praying each evening for a small majority.”

“Because I recognize that that small majority was the only way that we were going to advance a conservative agenda, and that if it was the right majority, that if we had six or seven very strong individuals, we would drag the conference over to the right— and we were able to do that,” Rosendale said in a video of the meeting posted by The Messenger.

McCarthy’s ouster on Tuesday was carried out by just eight Republican members of the chamber, including Rosendale and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Floridian who sat next to Rosendale during the donor event.

…[T]his antagonistic partisanship has proved successful only for the most provocative members of the party who represent the most gerrymandered districts, which leave them accountable only to primary voters. Republicans following this playbook in battleground states or more competitive districts have shouldered the blame for the party’s underperformance in recent years.

So far, many Republicans seem uninterested in mitigating their electoral misery.

Virginia Republicans, on the other hand, are panicking. Please consider contributing to Jessica Anderson, Victoria Luevanos and Kannan Srinivasan here. And like Glenn Youngkin and his operatives in Virginia, the U.S. Senate is flipping out over the GOP dysfunction in the House. “The chaos-ridden, speaker-less House,” wrote Burgess Everett over the weekend,” is threatening to stymie a host of bipartisan legislative efforts across the Capitol— and senators are getting really tired of it. Forget the expectations earlier this year of achieving even modest policy reforms, or passing spending bills under so-called “regular order.” Senators will consider themselves lucky to escape the calendar year without a catastrophe. Among the possibilities: a shutdown and a crush of blown deadlines on expiring legislation addressing aviation law, surveillance authority and flood insurance. Possibly, the best case is lurching from crisis to crisis until the presidential election. ‘It’s hard to pass legislation and send it to the president when one House is not able to function,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said of the prognosis for the months ahead, one of several senators interviewed who implied the legislative calendar is looking bleak.”

Aid to Ukraine, spending bills (and avoiding a shut down) are two more top priorities that significant numbers of House Republicans oppose. And working with Democrats is for the extremists— including Jordan— verboten. Unless 4 or 5 Republicans agree to work with the Democrats— as Hakeem Jeffries suggested in his Washington Post editorial Friday— the government is going to grind to a halt. “What’s more,” wrote Everett, “with no speaker and no clear candidate who has the votes to wrap up an election quickly, there’s no one currently empowered to negotiate with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the White House on behalf of the only Republican-controlled lever of the federal government. ‘It’s a group of politicians over there that make people hate Washington,’ said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who chairs the Senate Banking Committee. He has several bills he’d like to turn into law, primarily the bipartisan rail safety bill and clawing back pay from bad-acting CEOs. Bypassed priorities do not help Brown, who is up for reelection in a red state.”