Yeah but the MAGA base has been radicalized to hate RINO’s like Liz Cheney even more than Democrats it seems. Gonna be a tough sell to the MAGA base at this point.
I agree with you though, without moving left (closer to center) on a lot of things, the GOP will have a hard time competing state wide or nationally going forward.
“In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
The GOP leadership has to break off its relationship with the MAGA base. MAGAs don’t represent a majority of Republican voters, but with Trump in charge, it’s as if they do. Until that changes, their candidates will continue to be considered whackos and lose elections. That’s not sustainable long-term for the party.
Yes, Goldwater was nuts, but he won the nomination of his party, so what does that tell you?
Yes, but they’d have to be ok with losing for maybe a decade if they rejected their MAGA base.
That’s a risk I’m willing to take.
I’ve come to believe that whenever I read a political opinion which has the word “should” in the first paragraph, I am going to read a useless fantasy/rant. Whatever x or the x’s should obviously do, it’s a sure bet that they won’t. Otherwise they would have already done it.
So far, skimming articles has shown me I am not wrong.
The currently-powerful Republicans want to lose Trump more than ever before, but they are not going to be able to. He may not be able to do anything but damage them and cause a scandalous mess filled with criminality and violence, but if that’s all he can do, he will certainly do that.
Oh me too, in a heartbeat.
They are too craven to put long term party health above short term lib ownin’ though.
They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They’ve put themselves in a terrible position that nobody could have foreseen… I was surprised he was allowed to run in the primary, let alone be nominated by the party. What could possibly go wrong?
I knew it would be a disaster, I just thought it would play out even faster, and that we wouldn’t all have to be hurt in the process before MAGA burned itself out. I didn’t see all these GOP old timers following dear leader this far down into the abyss.
The only way they can pivot is for a few of the more prominent ones to disavow everything MAGA, then run as write-ins when they get inevitably primaried. Worked for Murkowski. But then, the Murkowski name carries weight in Alaska. I don’t know of very many others who have that built-in loyalty in a state.
Can’t win a primary without being MAGA, but can’t win a general being MAGA. Catch-22 for them, and I am here for it. They made their beds…
As long as Murdoch et al control the for-profit propaganda machine that energizes the MAGAs, and not coincidentally a lot of more mainstream conservative-leaning citizens, the GOP as a party will dance to whatever tune Murdoch et al choose to call.
So I propose we quit thinking about what the GOP ought to do or even what the GOP will do. The GOP has outsourced control of itself and its agenda to Murdoch & folks like him. What will they do? Given that their goal is not to win elections, but to control how politics is played. Damn hard question IMO.
I don’t know if they need built-in loyalty, just built-in name recognition. Were Ted Cruz to try this, he’d certainly not have anyone “loyal” to him, but I’d bet there’d be a significant number of voters who’d vote for him just because that’s the name they’ve checked off for years, and they wouldn’t notice that the party has changed.
The problem with this is, it would require Ted Cruz to have enough integrity to be willing to lose an election just to screw up the MAGA candidate’s chances of winning, in favor of the Democratic candidate, and there’s nothing in his life that suggests Ted Cruz has anywhere near the loyalty to the United States to take that hit. If he did, he’d have never started supporting Trump in the first place.
And I suspect any other Republicans we could name, with sufficient name recognition to pull this off, would similarly lack such integrity.
Rick Wilson of Lincoln Project fame posits that in the end, Republicans will turn back to Trump. So long as Trump controls 30%+ of their base, it’s their only available strategy.
Wilson knows Republicans better than most, so I’m inclined to listen to him.
Summing his twit thread:
Thanks for that. I rarely read Twitter unless a specific tweet is referenced here on the forum, so reading that was informative.
Wilson really fleshed out his reasoning, didn’t he? I agree with him. Much as I wish it weren’t so, Trump is far from over.
I still support (and would strongly have considered voting for) John Kasich. But he’s a far, far closer to a true RINO than Cheney would ever dream of being. So yeah, a pipe dream to consider him getting any honest to god support from even sane (R) if he ran again.
But, I’d argue there’s at least a 50/50 chance he’s have the integrity to try, but don’t honestly believe it would make a difference in the (R) final vote - until Trump is dead or otherwise prevented from running, he’ll be able to sabotage any otherwise ambitious or sane candidate from his party.
That’s what I figure. Some friends of mine had this discussion back in October of 2015 and figured he had it in the bag simply because nobody else was polling in the double digits while he had a solid 30%
The same reasoning still applies. There’s no other clear challenger and nothing’s shaking that 30+% built-in support. Indictments and the midterms won’t matter. Nothing short of a serious medical condition that clearly and obviously affects his ability to move and speak (death, a stroke, etc) would move the needle at all, and I’m not too convinced even that would be enough.
It’s an interesting thread, but I think it’s important to note it was published on November 7th.
I do think most Republicans are going to eventually pivot back to Trump just to avoid being destroyed by him, but I don’t think they are all going to clear a path to him for 2024. I think he’ll have serious primary challengers.
At this point I would suggest that “Lock Him Up” is not a partisan viewpoint. I still think he should be arrested, but I think if he is running around free it will be good for the Democrats. He pretty much pivoted to Presidential primary mode the second the polls closed, and he’s set to spend the next year and a half attacking Republicans.