Trump And Trumpism Are Endangering The Future Of The GOP
Thanks mostly to it's complete and enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump , the Republican Party faces a bleak demographic future.
The biggest legacy of the Trump Administration may be the dismantling of the Republican Party:
Ever since Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, much of the media attention has been on how Democrats need to reconsider their strategy for winning voters in future elections, particularly Obama-to-Trump voters. But the results of the 2018 midterm elections suggest that Republicans have some soul-searching to do as well.
They lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections and suffered battering losses in the House in 2018. Republican strategists must grapple with how to keep their party viable nationally, and our data suggests that Trumpism may continue to hurt them in the future.
It has flown under the radar a bit, masked perhaps by the switch of millions of Barack Obama’s voters into Mr. Trump’s column, but in 2016 Mr. Trump did not receive support from a large segment of voters who pulled the lever for Mitt Romney in 2012. In fact, our data shows that 5 percent of Romney 2012 voters stayed home in 2016, while another 5 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton. These voters tended to be female, nonwhite, younger and more highly educated — the very voters Republicans feared would be alienated by a Trump victory when he was seeking the party’s nomination.
Most strikingly, one-third of 2012 Romney voters who were under 40 in 2016 did not vote for Mr. Trump, but rather stayed home, voted for Mrs. Clinton or voted for a third-party candidate. Among the under-40 Romney voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2016, 16 percent appear to have defected from the party to vote for a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Of course, we don’t know how they will vote in 2020, but what this means is that in the past two elections Republicans may have lost more than 40 percent of Romney voters born after 1976.
Republican House candidates performed worse among 18- to 39-year-olds than they have in decades. The voters Mr. Trump and his party lost in 2016 and 2018 represent the future of American politics. If the Republican Party becomes the party of the past — that is, of aging white men with less education — it could make winning elections increasingly difficult.
(…)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, Mr. Trump shed a large share of 2012 Romney voters of color — precisely the type of voters that Republicans have been struggling to attract for some time. Among Romney-to-Trump voters, 91 percent were white (the breakdown for Romney-to-nonvoters was very similar, with 89 percent white). However, among Romney-to-Clinton voters, the nonwhite share was twice as large, 20 percent.
Mr. Trump also lost support from Romney-supporting college-educated voters. While only one in four Romney-to-Trump voters had a college degree, 39 percent of Romney-to-Clinton voters did, and 31 percent of Romney-to-nonvoters were college-educated.
Crucially, the Trump campaign alienated a lot of younger-to-middle-aged voters who had turned out for Mr. Romney in 2012. Four percent of Romney-to-Trump voters were under 30 years old in 2016. In contrast, 18 percent of Romney-to-Clinton voters were under 30, as were 21 percent of Romney-to-nonvoters. Each of these patterns should raise red flags for Republicans, even more so after 18- to 29-year-olds went from supporting Mrs. Clinton by a 25-point margin in 2016 to supporting House Democrats by a 44-point margin in 2018, according to the voter file firm Catalist.
Perhaps the most significant thing that Trump has done, though, is to accelerate the graying of the Republican Party, something that will eventually lead to the further shrinking of the party base as the population ages especially if younger voters remain as distant from the party as they are today While there are several alleged truisms that attest to the reality that it’s not uncommon for people’s political views to change over time, but actual studies have shown that partisan identity and voting behavior is something that people tend to adopt early in life and that they typically tend to carry on later in life. What this means for the GOP is that all those millennial voters they are losing to the Democrats are, at the very least, going to be very hard to get back, especially as long as the party remains associated with its current ideology that combines Trumpism and social conservatism to create a party that is largely anathema to people under the age of 50 or so.
This becomes especially true when you look at actual issues and the extent to which this impacts partisan identification. In areas such as immigration, international trade, and social issues such as LGBT rights, the Republican Party is distinctly out of step with where younger voters are. As these voters become a larger and larger part of the American electorate, while Republicans see their older, mostly white, base slowly die away, the party is likely to find it increasingly difficult to put together national majorities or to win in states that have been drifting away from the Republican brand since Barack Obama became President. This includes states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, where we’ve seen Democrats make real gains on a statewide basis over the past decade, and it also is likely to eventually include states such as Florida and possibly even Texas, where changes in demographics are proving to be more favorable to Democrats than Republic.
As the authors of the piece quoted above note, though, Republicans are doing the exact opposite of what they need to do to win back voters who voted for Romney in 2012 and Clinton 2016 and to at least try to appeal to millennial voters in the future. On immigration and trade, for example, they are moving further and further away from the traditional Republican position that has defined the GOP going back at least thirty-nine years when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush conducted a debate in which they effectively argued over which one of them was more open to immigration. You’d never see such a debate in the GOP today. Additionally, you’d have to see the GOP back away from the radical isolationism that the Trump Administration is adopting as a foreign policy which consists primarily of rejecting traditional alliances while cozying up to dictators in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, The Philippines, North Korea, and China. Finally, the party would need to step back from the social conservatism of the so-called religious right when it comes to both abortion rights and the rights of LGBT Americans not only when it comes to an issue like marriage equality but also when it comes to employment discrimination, discriminatory actions by Federal, state, and local governments, and the treatment of transgender Americans, which is quickly becoming a hot-button issue. In addition to all of this, the party will need to repudiate and Trump and Trumpism. As long as they remain associated both, they will be forever tainted in the minds of a class of voters that are quickly becoming the majority. If they don’t then the fate that awaits them will be rough indeed.
Good, the party deserves a 1940s-1990s style half century in the wilderness as punishment.
Trumpism is just the Tea Party with venarial disease. Post Trump, they will clean up the party with a round of antibiotics, low information voters will think “well, thank gd things are back to normal” and then start complaining about hw both sides are the same, and that all American problems are because of pointless partisanship.
And then 47% minimum will vote Republican.
I wish Trump was destroying the Republican Party, but when Mitt Romney runs for President in 2024 as a “severe conservative without an infectious sore” people will be saying how good it is that Republicans are serious again, although policy differences will be minimal.
American Greatness’ Victor Davis Hanson wrote an excellent piece in which he looks at how government bureaucrats were able to perpetrate and maintain their plan to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy and, once elected, his presidency. Hanson begins with a declaration that all phases of their highly coordinated coop have failed. He believes their plot to overturn a fair election and to remove a sitting president, will one day be recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history.
Hanson writes:
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/17/autopsy-of-a-dead-coup/
Back when Howard Dean was named DNC chairman, a commentator, I forget whom, said “The Democratic Party published its suicide note in the front page.”
Well, not quite.
Still, when El Cheeto won the GOP nomination, my thought was “Well, the GOP’s gone and committed suicide.” This seemed shaky when Dennison went on to win the general election.
But it’s looking a lot better now.
I guess some poisons take years to kill the victim.
@jake:
How come? Were there no chickens?
Isn’t that much ado about a coop empty of chickens?
I think the problem is that the Trumpidians’ delusions of grandeur themselves suffer from delusions of grandeur.
@jake:
And now the CHICKENS have come home to ROOST!
@jake:
No one cares what you and your racist magazine think.
“Hanson writes that the Mueller team learned early on that there was no Trump/Russian collusion, “yet they went ahead to leverage Trump campaign subordinates on process crimes in hopes of finding some culpability in Trump’s past 50-year business, legal, and tax records.”
Following three years of investigations, President Trump is still standing. The Senate Judiciary Committee last week announced they have found no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia and Democratic lawmakers and journalists are finding it hard to come to terms with it. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), one of Trump’s most virulent critics, told CNN yesterday that “you can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence. There is a difference between seeing evidence of collusion and being able to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt.”
It will be hard for them to accept that they’ve lost. It will be even more difficult for those whose unethical behavior crossed the line into illegal behavior for which they may be held responsible one day. Those who were involved in obtaining the FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page might fall into this category as well as those like McCabe who lied to investigators and leaked stories to the press without authorization.
Hanson is correct that the coup has failed. Too much has been revealed for Democrats to continue the ruse – though they will try.
It’s your move, Mr. Barr.”
https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-vaughn/2019/02/18/victor-davis-hanson-pronounces-coup-trump-dead-performs-autopsy/
@I Can’t Believe It’s Not Devin:
Welcome back, Bung. For the moment, anyway.
I’m a pessimist on the demise of the Repug party. That large swath of red states aren’t likely to turn blue or even purplish soon. The Repugs are quite likely to maintain enough support in the south, mid west and mountain west to have majorities in the senate and continue to control enough state legislatures and governor’s mansions to perpetuate their gerrymandering of congressional districts for another decade. Add that the Dems are endanger of running so far to the left that they will lose votes in the center.
The GOP placed its bets on white, rural, old and uneducated.
We placed our bets on diverse, urban, young and educated.
The arc of history may not bend, but demographics do.
@Stormy Dragon: I wouldn’t say “no one,” and while I don’t care about the content, I do care about the difficulties long term of having an “opposition” party that looks like the GOP.
While Trump is vulgar (and stupid), he doesn’t really have any positions that are not bog standard GOP drivel. He takes them to offensive levels, true enough, but the wall, “stay out” as immigration policy, the rich pay too much in taxes, people with no health insurance need to die because caring for them costs too much, the safety net is too generous and turns otherwise good white folk into “lazy
nigCLANG”, end NATO, and all the rest are what the candidates would have been talking about even if Trump hadn’t run in 2016. And GOP primary voters would still have voted against any one for modifying ANY of those “God given principles.”Alas, we do need to care (or at least pay attention to) about what these knotheads think. They’re not dying off fast enough.
@jake: Son, fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m not so sure ‘further left’ isn’t where the votes are. The social issues still get the goobers fired up, but at the national level it’s settled. We will keep gay and trans rights, we’ll lose some local ground on abortion, but if Roe is overturned it will still be legal outside of the rustic belt.
Which leaves economic issues taking on greater weight, and when you look at the specifics, the left has the winning message.
I look at this period like a battle. The Democrats came out strong with general Obama and made large gains. The Nazis, er, Republicans counter-attacked at the Bulge. They’ve done a lot of damage but not gained much ground and if their tactics are sometimes very effective, their strategy isn’t a strategy at all. They have no plan, no playbook, no path to victory. Try to reach Antwerp and, um. . . the Allies will quit?
That’s where the Republicans are. They’ll fight like crazy til we get to their final bunker, but long before Hitler blew his brains out the aggressive threat was terminated. Hitler was done by late ’42 but not dead til 45.
Racists have the great strength of unity. They have the great weakness of inability to attract allies. Who on the Left will defect to a misogynist, white supremacist party? Blacks? Latinos? Gays? Educated whites? Young people? All but whites are unwelcome. Look, I am 64, well-off and white, and often find my lefty friends insufferable. But I would no more vote GOP than I would vote KKK.
@jake:
Does not compute.
@Michael Reynolds:
State boundaries don’t bend. I have no doubt that Democrats will continue to win the popular vote, but a lot of states don’t really have urban. Or educated. Not in the majority needed to win — batting overreach from the Republicans.
2020 is going to be a good year. After that, I fear us continuing on our trend to a Podunkocracy, where a system that favors rural states produces undemocratic outcomes.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’d like to believe that in places like Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania there’s an unclaimed contingent of people who respect non-conformity. Some of these people probably voted for Trump. He was, after all, threatening to the establishment. Mostly because he was an idiot. But interestingly enough–he was a racist idiot while giving the impression that he was above being uptight. He talked about getting screwed and projected some empathy and uptight people don’t talk like that. It was a total lie, and he and his base have proven themselves to be complete 100% lockstep authoritarians who lack empathy and who are uptight about everything, and they’re going to run on that–Jesus and abortion, gays and socialists.
It leaves a huge opening for a message that isn’t only about tolerating trans people, but about making rich people scream and run vanity campaigns. If I were a rich man who did not want a left-wing candidate, I would do anything to get a guy like Howard Schultz out of the spotlight. Or when Obama raised taxes in 2010, Stephen Schwarzman compared it to the Nazis invading Poland. If I were a strategist for a likable left-wing candidate, I would pay serious money to have this guy complain about that, and then have Trump blather on socialism and call Black Rock the real victim, and then have idiots like David Brooks explain that European health care systems suck and that the real issue for Real Americans is the tyranny of SJWs. It’s a gold mine out there.
BRITTANY: If you ask many Americans which political party is the party of preference for racists and white supremacists, the answer seems clearly Republican. But you have a very different take on that… Can you talk about racism in our political parties from the Civil War to 2018?
CANDACE: The Republicans freed the slaves in the civil war. The Republicans put an end to Jim Crowe. The Republicans were the first to elect black Americans to Congress. Under no interpretation can Democrats claim to be the party of inclusivity – and yet they have managed to by gaining control of the education system and effectively presenting a revisionist history.
Did The Political Parties Switch?
BRITTANY: You argue Democrats have historically been more racist as a party, from slavery to the KKK and Jim Crow laws, but Democrats today often say that the parties switched at some point and that the Republicans of old were really the Democrats. No one can seem to give a clear definition of how they switched. What is your take on that?
CANDACE: The first bit of knowledge that any person that is still under the spell of the Democrat Party will present to you is that the Parties magically switched sometime during the Nixon era. When you ask them to specifically name all of the congress members who switched — they can’t seem to do it. It is the clearest symptom that a mass brainwashing has taken place. They know it happened, but they can’t seem to tell you how it took place, or who exactly was involved. When they conduct independent research, they are naturally shocked to discover that they have accepted a reality that simply isn’t so.
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/dear-black-america-candace-owens-wants-to-talk-about-your-future/
@Sleeping Dog:
The major parties are too entrenched in the various states and the structure of the Federal government to just die.
Now, I’ve never seen Dr. Who, but I gather after some time the title character dies and gets regenerated in a different form. The major parties may not die, but they change to the point they’re no longer recognizable.
Today’s Republican Party is not only not the party of Reagan, but hardly even the party of Bush the younger.
Oh, there is some resemblance, especially as regards tax cuts and such, but if Reagan were alive today and campaigning as he did in 1980, he’d be called RINO.
@Jake: didn’t Candace Owens just say that Hitler wasn’t so bad?
@Gustopher: “didn’t Candace Owens just say that Hitler wasn’t so bad?”
She’s also apparently never heard of the Civil Rights Act.
Memo to Jake: Quoting people who literally do not know the first thing about the subject on which they’re speaking does not, in fact, persuade anyone.
Democrats have been banking on Demographics to swing the tide in their favor for 30 years. How may more 17 year olds have reached voting age since Obama’s election 10 years ago? How many more geezers have passed on since then? Its a ridiculous urban myth. The divide is not young vs old….its rural vs urban. Rural youth think Democrats are pu**ys. Ambitious, progressive rural youth move to urban areas where their votes are marginalized being in already staunchly blue areas.
How about developing a Democratic brand that can garners some votes versus waiting on this mythical demographic swing that will never come? Democrats should get off their lazy arses..and do the work of talking to rural people and crafting a message that can play–be a real “big tent” party for once.
Interesting. I assume that this Candace Owens I have never heard of is a professional idiot? There actually were a few very prominent politicians who canned parties like Thurmond and Helms. However changing parties was always risky. You need to look at how the voting patterns changed. It was the voters of the North, the Rockefeller Republicans who voted against Jim Crow while the Southerners voted against it. Those southerners all started voting for Republicans and those from the North stopped voting for Republicans. This is very easy history, well documented.
Steve
@steve:
Funny. Well documented.
Watch and learn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GGNquVFbw
@Modulo Myself:
That may be part of it. But a crucial ingredient–perhaps the most crucial–was dislike for Hillary. According to CNN’s exit polls, voters who claimed to disapprove of both candidates voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Nationally it was 47-30. In Michigan it was 50-29, in Pennsylvania 56-31, and in Wisconsin 60-23.
That’s why when people talk about the motivations of Trump voters, sometimes I think they’re looking at it the wrong way. A lot of those votes for Trump were just as much votes against Hillary. Despite the fact that her favorability ratings were not quite as terrible as his–even in the crucial states–the lack of enthusiasm for her convinced just enough voters to stay home, or vote third party, or swallow the idiotic claim that Trump was the lesser of the two evils.
Obviously the Dems should try to avoid nominating someone as toxically unpopular as Hillary, but that’s not going to be of much help if the slime machine succeeds in turning whoever the Dems nominate unpopular, just as they did do to Hillary (who began the cycle with astronomic favorability ratings).
From Doug’s lips to God’s ear. GOPus delendus est.
The Reformicons; Frum, Salam, Douthat, et al have been preaching for years that the Republican Party needs to back away from subservience to wealthy donors and embrace more working class friendly policies. They have had zero influence because they are delusional.
Ryan Lizza wrote a piece a couple years ago saying the closest any GOP has gotten to the Reformicon agenda is Trump. He campaigned against tax cuts and promising to protect SS and Medicare. Like Roseanne said, he talked about jobs. He was lying, and the only reason he could get away with saying it is that he wasn’t dependent on the Kochs, Adelson, Friess, etc. The rest of them are. If the GOPs back off tax cuts, deregulation, and AGW denial, who’ll fund them? If they back away from abortion and prejudice, who’ll vote for them?
@steve:
From what little we know of this person, they’d seem to be an amateur idiot in the literal sense. That is, someone who is an idiot out of sheer love of idiocy.
@wr:
Except, alas, it does. It persuades the ignorant who both want to believe what they’re being told, and are not going to do the homework to find out that it’s a baldfaced lie.
The RWNJ propaganda machine has discovered that The Big Lie works beautifully in America, where education is locally-controlled. You and I know the actual history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, desegregation, the Southern Strategy, etc. Jake might; it’s hard to tell evil from stupid on the internet. But the audience for the Brittany and Candace does not, and will not, and gets a nice warm fuzzy from being told that their prejudices are in fact well-founded in historical fact. It’s the same mental mechanism as people wanting to hear about how science has proven the historical reality of Noah’s flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the earth standing still for Joshua.
Learn what? We already knew that D’Souza is a liar…
…a sleaze ball…
..a phony Christian hypocrite…
…and an all-around despicable waste of space…
And you also favorably quote Candace Owens, who obviously can’t come up with a decent defense as to why she said nice things about Hitler…
You should really stop posting any comments, as just about everything you type makes you and your cause look stupid and pathetic…
@steve:
It was also something conservatives once routinely acknowledged. For example, a 1980 National Review piece written shortly after Reagan’s election traced the GOP’s increasing electoral dominance directly to Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential run in 1948, and ultimately to the defection of the Dixiecrats to the GOP:
“The first, faint rumblings of the anti-liberal revolution were felt in 1948, as the formerly solid South broke away from the Democratic Party and ran a Dixiecrat campaign against Truman. It gathered its energies under Eisenhower, then burst to the surface again in 1964 as Goldwater, invading the Old Confederacy, showed that the South was indeed up for grabs. The revolution really got rolling in 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon between them put together a 60 to 40 landslide against the liberal candidate, Hubert Humphrey. It reached into all sections of the country when Nixon achieved his 49-state trouncing of George McGovern.”
Notice that this writer plainly admits that (a) Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, while originally Democrats, were no liberals (b) the voters who supported them went on to be an essential part of the coalition that helped elect both Nixon and Reagan.
It was only in later years that conservative media found this frank discussion of the modern GOP’s roots to be a liability, and attempted to bury it with revisionist propaganda suggesting today’s Dems are still the party of Thurmond and Wallace, and that GOP dominance of the Old Confederacy has got nothing to do with race.
@steve: @Kathy: I just Googled her. She’s the current token black for the conservatives now that Thomas Sowells has entered his dotage. But she is presentable.
@Concerned Citizen: There are no exploding heads just people pointing it that jake is peddling tired, disproven lies, issued by people who are notoriously untrustworthy.
I remember when Republicans were better at this. They didn’t just make up nonsense, they tied their nonsense to American principles. They favored equality of opportunity, not a guarantee of result, etc. They favored “empowerment zones” in the inner cities to cut tax rates on businesses and create jobs. They at least pretended to want equality, and were just disagreeing on how to get there.
Ok, riddle me this: if the Democrats are still the racist party, why do 90% of African Americans vote for the racists? Are they stupid?
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael it is not the social issues that are a problem, but the fact that a significant number of grassroots Dems are beginning to talk about litmus tests. For several years we’ve heard about RINOs and we are beginning to hear about DINOs and calls for primary challenges against Dems who aren’t “right” on the
The tent needs to be big enough accommodate a range of Democrats.
The votes are for health care for all, but not Medicare for all if that means giving up an individuals existing plan. Then there is the problem of cost and how it will be paid for. Add the cost of free college tuition and an expansive infrastructure program (which should be done) and a 70% marginal rate and a 2-3% wealth tax won’t be enough money to pay for it.
@Modulo Myself:
On most social issues, except abortion, when an opponent is exposed to an individual who is suffering due to a combination of government and societal oppression, they’ll be sympathetic and drop their opposition. But the question becomes how much change will they tolerate to their personal situation, before gravitating to what they perceive is a safer option? Dems, if they follow their most vocal advocates of democratic socialism will be over reaching and lose the opportunity to control the legislative and executive branches.
Frankly, I believe Tiny can be beaten by a moldy ham sandwich and that will be good. But it will be better if Dems can control the senate as well and gain control of at least one legislative body or the governorship in each state. That would break the Repug gerrymander and put the party in a good position for the next decade.
Thoughts and prayers.
@Sleeping Dog:
Aren’t there private Medicare Plans? Medicare Advantage or some such?
And aren’t there add on plans, that cover things above Medicare?
I’m a few decades from needing to know about all of this, but it would seem like that might be a place to start, so people can keep their private insurance.
We spend a metric fvckload on health care, and this *should* make it cheaper over all. The question isn’t cost at all, it’s simply how to capture enough of the current expenditures — its a big change that will have a lot of winners and losers. More winners than losers, but we might want to pay some of the costs through debt for the first few years to buffer that for the losers.
Since most people get their health insurance through their jobs, payroll taxes seem like the obvious solution — which should annoy some business folks, but not too much. They don’t really want to be on the hook for as much of the healthcare costs as they are, and increased payroll tax would be offset by lower costs for insurance (they may offer their employees an add on plan)
Losers are businesses that don’t offer healthcare at all — and here is where I think we wud want to take on some debt to avoid a big shock to the system, and phase that in over N years, so we aren’t putting them out of business.
Current insurance companies and their employees are also likely to be losers. Screw the companies, but we’re going to have a problem with layoffs. We can build Medicare administration centers in the hardest hit areas, but it’s still going to hurt.
So, there, bare bones outline of a plan to pay for it, tossed together over a few minutes, and mostly plausible. Smarter, more knowledgeable people could make a better plan if they took the time.
@Concerned Citizen: So, no answer? That’s adorable.
@steve: ” I assume that this Candace Owens I have never heard of is a professional idiot? ”
Nice article on her in Rational Wiki, if you want to know more. It starts out, “”Candace Owens is a nutty alt-right commentator and rising star of the young conservative movement. She is the founder of Red Pill Black on YouTube and also serves as Turning Point USA’s “director of urban engagement.” Get it? Because she’s the only black female TPUSA supporter who isn’t a stock photo model. White supremacist leader Richard Spencer has described Owens as “the last stand of implicit white identity”.[3] As of April 2018, she is also Kanye West’s new best friend.[4]”
You’re far too optimistic. As long as the Electoral College is in place in its current form, the GOP will always have a better chance of winning the White House than the demographics would indicate.
@jake:
The very first sentence in your link;
Nothing…nothing…in the dossier has been disproven. Much has been collaborated.
If you are going to read shit, then your opinion is worth shit.
@Gustopher:
To which Concerned Citizen (who is not a racist) is thinking “do you really need me to answer that for you?”
@Sleeping Dog:
I’d need to see the math on that. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that I’m not sure you have a handle on how much of the total wages in addition to the capital supply are jammed into the the top half of a percent. It’s not as big a challenge as you might imagine, I don’t think.
Additionally, I don’t think that Trump can “be beaten by a moldy ham sandwich.” I’d like to, but the nature of the schism and societal failure here is to big. If Trump runs again, he’ll get roughly the same percentage as he did the last time and if the same people stay home in the same places, we’ll hear MAGAots everywhere chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS!”
@Lynn: comment removed due to failed link.
@Jake: You (and Candace) are totally igorant of American history. I can not stand it when people try to make this arguement becuase it doesn’t even attempt to explain why the GOP is the party most bigots choose today. The whole civil rights act thing that occurred during LBJs administration and the affect it had on the base of both parties at the time goes completely over your head.
The Fox “News” moron crowd and associated idiots pushing the “COUP!!!!!11!!1!!” bullshit probably missed how the FBI went to Congressional leadership very early on and told them–including McConnell and Ryan–they were opening a CI investigation into the President. There was no push-back. Notably, scumbag treason-enabler Devin Nunes was there and ran straight to the White House.
Pretty hard to claim a “coup” when the Senate and House Majority Leaders knew about it pretty much from day one and did nothing.
@Mikey: Subsequent to Atlantic reporter Natasha Bertrand’s story detailing this, she went to McConnell’s people. Her Tweet on their response indicates anything but a denial:
@jake:
You do realize that Hanson is writing a partisan opinion, he is NOT a journalist unearthing facts about the Mueller Investigation, about which he knows nothing more than you or I.
Victor Davis Hanson either believes, or is trying to sell is, all kinds of right wing talking point bullsh**.
@Concerned Citizen: Victor Davis Hanson commenting on current affairs is akin to going to an oral surgeon for a cardiac bypass. He’s a respected classicist, but not someone with enough expertise to carry much weight as a political commentator.