MILWAUKEE — Timothy Ramthun’s entry into Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary last weekend was the car wreck no one could look away from.
His campaign is built around the preposterous idea the 2020 election could still be overturned — something even sympathetic Republicans here acknowledge is impossible. His campaign website went live, only to be deactivated. His three-hour campaign kickoff featured the appearance of Mike Lindell, the pillow salesperson and conspiracy theorist…In Iowa County, west of Madison, the local Republican Party’s own social media offerings last week featured a warning that “GOP leaders are making a grave mistake if they continue to refuse to listen to their constituents,” with voters “who either ARE DETERMINED not to vote in upcoming elections (if the situation remains unchanged in terms of fixing the problems that occurred in the 2020 election) or who will not vote for any of the current Republican leadership who refuse to address the people’s concerns about election integrity.”
The Republican leadership made a huge error, imho, when it went all in on the stolen election thing. Sure, it allowed them to pass dozens of Jim Crow laws across the nation, but way too many Republican voters believed it, and are demanding stupid crap like
“de-certifying” past election results.
Their statement that the January 6 insurrection was “legitimate political discourse” was a new low. And that followed their 2020 electoral platform, which basically just said, “We stand with Donald Trump.”
It’ll take actual electoral consequences before anyone can claim that the GOP is “disintegrating.” Based on the very small sample pool of the NJ and VA state elections last year, I’d say they’re doing fine.
What’s disintegrating is the fig leaf of everything the GOP has ever pretended to be… an intellectual movement, a party of limited government, a party of family values, of equal upward mobility, of American excellence, the best and the brightest.
All that has evaporated. The Republican party has basically devolved into a pirate ship captained by whoever can “own the libs” the hardest.
It would be very unwise to interpret this as a sign of a weakening party. They wouldn’t be selling this media product if there weren’t a market for it. The people who allow Fox News to use their brains as an open latrine need a party to join. They’re never going to join the Democrats, and Mittens Romney is fooling himself if he thinks they’re looking for a moderate-conservative Moses to lead them from the wilderness.
As long as Tucker Carlson can be a force on national television spouting the wildest nonsense his staff of comedy writers think up and force actual sitting Senators to abjectly lick the shit off his shoes in atonement, the crazies are the Republican Party. They have taken it over completely.
The rational world can call this disintegration, but that’s not helpful if the crazies can win elections.
They’ve figured out that you don’t have to have any ideas, you don’t have to stand for anything, all you have to do is paint the opposition as a threat to your target demographic and you can win. We’re in a post-policy political world now, Republicans have figured it out first. When voters demand that Republicans spell out what they would do if elected, that might change. Until then, they’re doing just fine standing for nothing and doing nothing.
Yeah, I’ve been saying for years here that Democrats need to stop thinking that if they just offer the right policies all the right-wingers will go, “oh, that’s sounds great; sign me up!”
One little brouhaha in Wisconsin doesn’t amount to much. If anything, the GOP is bizarrely united. The Democrats hound people out of the party for far less than the likes of Lauren Boebert do.
I agree with both the above. Nevertheless, there is a strong point to be made that Republicans are straying farther and farther from any semblance of fact-based reality, a phenomenon that greatly accelerated in the Trump era. To the extent that they’re fully embracing a comically false counterfactual reality, led by an orange crackpot who in many respects is certifiably insane, it’s a strategy that is headed for a catastrophic implosion no matter how stupid and uninformed the voters are. The Republican Party might still be saved by a heavy injection of sanity and a return to its conservative roots, but that is decidedly not the trajectory that they’re on.
I think, to be honest, that the GOP is, for all intents and purposes, gone.
Or, rather, the political entity and platform that we used to define the GOP as of, say, 20 years ago, is gone. The last old schoolers can and will be phased out over the next decade or so.
Sure, they’ll keep the name, but it’s going to be a party that stands by the most base instincts that were always dark stains on the more rational elements of the GOP: Racism, Christian Supremacy, Negation and Hate. They won’t call it those things, but that’s what it’ll be. And the mechanisms of the system will keep them around, no matter how small a portion of the population they may one day be… unless they break the system entirely.
We will never again have elections where two parties present opposing ideas and their visions of how to address the nation’s issues. Instead, we will always have one party doing this while the other spreads misinformation meant to gin up fear and hatred.
Scary as it seems and dangerous as it is, I think this is a necessary stage in the dissolution of the GOP. Instead of dog-whistling and self-righteously minimizing the prevalence of racists, xenophobes, open fascists, anti-science etc in their party, the GOP has now accepted that they are the base of their support. Dems are now able, as they never were before, to present a choice to the rational members of the GOP: Are you with the crazies? Or are you willing to vote crazies out of office and have a place either as conservative members of the D party or as a minority party in the Congress? In the main I think this a good thing.
Of course, I’m the idiot who was saying that the GOP putting up Trump in 2016 was a good thing. Maybe ultimately it was, but ultimately still seems longer off than I would have thought.
As long as the GOP has a reasonable expectation of taking the House, and the Senate, in the next election, then a resounding NO, they are not disintegrating. As long as the GOP has a reasonable expectation of taking the White House in the next Presidential election, then a resounding NO, they are not disintegrating.
I still, STILL cannot believe that trump is the hill upon which the Repub party could potentially die on, the monkey wrench big enough to jam up the GOP gears. He’s so comically inept and hateful, so clearly lying through his teeth all the time. So obviously uninformed and misinformed.
I keep hoping there will eventually be a “have you no sense of decency” moment that will cause the bubble to burst and drain trump of his populist appeal, as happened almost overnight with McCarthy. I thought losing the election would finally mean he’d slink away to the dustbin of history. But nothing seems to shake his populist core.
the lines are hardening. The crazier are ever-crazier, and the choice to stay with them gets harder and harder. I don’t see how they’re going to be able to grow their coalition unless they start appealing to the sane, and they appear to be pursuing the opposite tack.
Ye, that’s exactly what I’m saying–it gets harder and harder for them to defend themselves on rational or traditional grounds. The more they become the party of Crazy, the harder it gets for independents or moderates to say “OK, I’ll vote with them.” If they’re putting one or two nutty positions out there, they might say those are exceptions, but when it’s wall-to-wall nuttiness only hardcore nuts will see that as attractive.