Why Have Voters Turned Against The GOP? Is It Policy Or Personality? Of Course It's The Toxic Combo

MAGA is dead

Yesterday Georgia crackpot Marjorie Traitor Greene tweeted “I just filed privileged Articles of Impeachment on Secretary Mayorkas,” seemingly— and likely— unaware that Congress, and particularly her party, are in deep shot because of this kind of gameplaying by extremists like herself. Her colleagues in the House despise her and the handful, true, a big handful now, of MAGA radicals who have made Congress dysfunctional and chaotic. And Traitor Greene, who used to lure male customers to her gym by offering blow-jobs, has been reminding Republicans in the House that her ex-best bud, Lauren Boebert, used to make her living as an escort (which is how she met Ted Cruz, who persuaded her to run for Congress). Zach Petrizzo reported that Traitor Greene “is telling GOP colleagues, according to lawmakers, that Boebert is a ‘whore.’ One Republican lawmaker, who has heard Greene use that word multiple times to describe Boebert, told the Daily Beast that Greene has been at this campaign for some time. ‘Calling her a whore, that’s not new,’ this GOP lawmaker said. ‘She’s been doing that for a while.’ Another GOP lawmaker also witnessed Greene refer to Boebert as a ‘whore.’"

Yesterday, former speaker McCarthy, a Traitor Greene ally, sat down for an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, who asked him how much the Republican Party would benefit if Matt Gaetz weren’t around. “Tremendously,” said McCarthy without hesitation. “People have to earn the right to be here. I mean, he’ll admit to you personally, he doesn’t have a conservative bent in his philosophy. And just the nature of what he focuses on.” Watch:

McCarthy would to see the Republican conference expel him and he also noted something that’s become increasingly obvious: Nancy Mace does not deserve to be reelected. He talked about Members who “care a lot abby press, not about policy.” The 3 members who McCarthy had harsh words for him shot right back at him. Watch the catty Mr. Gaetz on his podcast.

“Mr. former Speaker, thoughts and prayers as you’re going through all of your stages of grief here… The notion that the Republican conference is going to kick me out for doing something that was exceedingly popular, seems unlikely. The decision to fire McCarthy and replace him with Mike Johnson has been popular— popular with Democrats, popular with Republicans, popular with independents. It may be one of the most popular things House Republicans have done… If what Kevin McCarthy wants is to make a motion to throw me out of the Republican conference, I guess all I can really say is bring the effing motion.”

And people wonder why suburban voters turned on the GOP Tuesday. Jonathan Weisman observed yesterday that “From Northern Virginia to Northern Kentucky, the American suburbs rejected Republican candidates on Tuesday, sending a message that leafy residential communities where elections were once won and lost increasingly side with the Democratic Party— especially on abortion rights.”

Weisman chalks it all up to policy “voters rejected Republican messages on abortion, LGBTQ issues and crime,” and he quoted Republican pollster and McCarthy roommate Frank Luntz: “Suburban America left the GOP in 2016 when they didn’t like Trump’s behavior. They began to come back in 2022 when they rejected Joe Biden’s economic policies, but they will leave again if the conversation is about abortion and social policy.”

Similarly, John Whitbeck, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, said the Republicans had “let the Democrats drive the message and make it all about abortion. The Republican Party has to modernize its message on this issue if we’re going to convince Democrats and independents to cross over and vote Republican. The reality is Virginia has some districts that vote blue. In a year where Roe v. Wade is driving intensity, there’s no way for us to win those districts.”

He made the point that Republican policy didn’t just drive swing voters to Democrats in the big races in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky. “In the highly contested school board races around Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” wrote Weisman, “voters soundly rejected every candidate endorsed by the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, which had been leading efforts to excise LGBTQ books from libraries and exert more conservative control over curriculums. In 2021, with the pandemic still hanging over the schools, the group claimed victory in 33 school board seats in the swing Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County. On Tuesday, Moms for Liberty candidates lost five school board races in central Bucks County.”

OK, that’s all correct. I don’t dispute a word of it. But I want to add something— the chaos and dysfunction in Washington, the crackpot Republicans like Traitor Greene, Gaetz, the Freedom Caucus circus… people have seen that— and shuddered. The weeks without a speaker, the inability to pass the legislation, the nonsense impeachments the handmaidens in Congress for Trump, Boebert giving some guy a handjob in a theater filled with families… It’s been piling up and in the end it means something, sometimes as much as policy.