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I’d like to take a moment to discuss the present and future of the Republican Party within the United States, specifically as it pertains to how a post-Maga consensus and organization may emerge.
Following the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions by then president George W. Bush, public sentiment had largely turned against what is colloquially known as the Neo-Cons, largely exacerbated by media outrage and Democratic politicians lambasting said interventions as wastes of time, lives and initiated upon faulty grounds. In spite of both operations being successful in toppling the reigning dictatorial regimes within the respective middle eastern countries, they were predominantly framed as failures both internally within and without. Largely as a result of this antagonism, a countermovement emerged within the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump which sought to subvert not only the Neo-Con interventionist stance, but also the Atlanticist and pro-NATO foreign policy which had dominated the party since the second world war, in favor of an “America First” way of thinking.
The result of his tenure as president, both first and second term combined has largely been to the disappointment of many, even the many hardliners within the party as the man in question proved unable to deliver on his many promises such as bringing manufacturing back to the Rust Belt (of which tariffs could not abate the decay), the end of Free Trade as a means of lowering prices back home (the former is arguably a success, the latter is not), and in ending foreign entanglements (more on this below). The GOP all the same has become almost entirely captivated by his personage, and outside of Trump, there is little consensus among Republican politicians and political theorists as to the path the party ought to follow. What is clear however, is that his rule has largely been to the detriment of the country, especially as it pertains to America’s relationship with its allies in NATO, and as it pertains to its capability to project force abroad.
The recent conflict with Iran underlines this point quite clearly. Unlike the War on Terror, which successfully managed to overthrow tyrannical regimes stoking Islamist sentiment within the region, the American military has failed to effectively incapacitate Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-how-many-nuclear-bombs-b2967811.html), nor has it effectively weakened the regime sufficiently for a popular uprising to topple it. Whether this is solely due to an atrophying of the military industrial complex, the lack of cooperation and involvement with allied countries via NATO, Trump hamstringing the army and navy due to his obsession with “making deals” or any number of other possible explanations (never mind the possibility of it being all of the above), it is quite clear that as of now the USA is in no position to contest the globe with the likes of China or Russia. Only once these industries are revitalized, the military let of its leash and true cooperation established once more within NATO can this problem be resolved, and that’ll require an end to this Maga experiment and Donald Trump’s hold over the party.
A sentiment which has become increasingly prominent over these past few years of Maga influence is the need for a revitalized GOP, capable of once more cooperating across the aisle with their Democratic counterparts for the betterment of America as a whole. Pelosi echoed this sentiment in 2024 (https://www.npr.org/2024/08/07/nx-s1-5058779/pelosi-says-we-need-a-strong-gop-and-that-this-one-is-a-cult-to-a-thug), noting the significant differences between prior Republican leaders and Trump, as well as the need for “a strong GOP”. Obama has similarly noted the need for a post Trump consensus last week (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/barack-obama-worried-democrats-republicans-gobbledygook_n_69fb66d0e4b0cb033e4de37a), which will require a rehabilitation of some sort for the past of the GOP, one which can only begin once we look past populist politics. Hasan, perhaps unsurprisingly in response to Obama’s words, said he wanted “no Republican party”, which is perhaps indicative of the conflicting interests between the two groups.
This goal of a strong GOP, as stated, will require a reexamination of past Republican politicians and presidents, and a more generous way of assessing their successes and failures. This work however has already begun, and was most notable during the campaign of Kamala Harris. Her campaigning with Liz Cheney, the fact that Dick Cheney prior to his death voted for her (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/dick-cheney-kamala-harris-liz-cheney-rcna169979), and Liz’s attempt at getting George W. Bush to endorse Harris (https://www.thedailybeast.com/liz-cheney-tells-george-w-bush-to-endorse-kamala-harris-its-time/) shows that there is a significant desire among the moderates of the GOP to escape the influence of Magaist politics. Naturally, how exactly this transformation of the party will take place after Trump leaves the White House is purely speculative, and doubtless there’ll be those who'll seek to emulate his success. However, I believe there is sufficient reason to assert that broad, consensus-based politics will once more emerge within America, which’ll hopefully initiate a process of rebuilding for the damages the last decade of Trumpist politics have inflicted on the nation.
That will never not be funny to me. The Great Satan of All Great Satans for the liberal side of the equation, Dick "Darth" Cheney, came out in support of the First Ever Female Asian Black President-Presumptive, and then they tried getting Chimpy McHitler to endorse her.
Under what moon did they think this was a winning strategy? Get the guys our party has spent twenty years publicly excoriating as Worse Than Hitler to state "We just love that little coloured girl" and then lose all or most of our own supporters and don't win any of the other side's supporters?
I think the Cheney strategy did not really do anything one way or the other, sorry Liz there went your hopes of being the Token White Gal in the Coconut Queen's administration, but I couldn't believe it then and I still can't believe it now.
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Bro, you should visit America sometime.
And citing a roster of Democratic talking points concern trolling the guy who just handed them their absolute asses time after time is less than convincing.
Both the far right and far left are locked out of power and fighting themselves. The political coalitions that make up the parties are shifting fast, and no one knows exactly when the cultural music will stop and we'll all be stuck again. But it is my estimation that the political energy and momentum is with the right generally, and bog-standard MAGA specifically. Trump is speed-running the Big List of American Opposition Countries on his way to cement his legacy as the most transformational president since FDR (and perhaps just as damaging). Even if there's a glitch or two, the current state of Ukraine, Israel, Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are all in much better realpolitik position than when he started. The middle east generally is lining up and making nice. These are not losses for Trump, no matter what Huffpo and NPR say.
All the hysterics are just the old guard losing control of a narrative that gave them cultural and political control for half a century. But nothing is forever.
Fuck you again, JTarrou, for being a great master of phrase. You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
The first Trump admin was important for its cultural shift and, frankly, vibes. But what were the major accomplishments? Tax cuts (Republican standard forever) and SCOTUS confirmations (the personal project of Mitch McConnell). Other than that ... not so much.
The second admin has been eventful to say the least. Things are happening and getting done. Now, as your wonderful comment says, is that to an ultimate good or productive end? T-B-fucking-D. There are some clear wins like broad deregulation. The Rubio architected western hemisphere foreign policy may be the biggest sea change since the Marshall Plan. While I broadly agree on your realpolitik assessment regarding the middle east, Trump may have, ironically, done more for the deep antisemitic movement in the USA than Representative Ilhan Omar of
MogadishuMinneapolis. The Tariffs may be a nothing burger macro-economically, but they may have been the last nail in the coffin for disaffected rust belt White Men. You know, the ones who vote 90% for Trump.After Trump is going to look something like a loose alliance between the Christian Nationalist (I say that endearingly) Josh Hawley's of the country and the neo-neo-con Rubio's. Stuck in the middle will be the MAGA-by-convenience Vances, Hegseths and Patels. The problem with the latter group is that they never actually had a durable or deep political theory to begin with. They're essentially right leaning opportunists.
I worry about the intellectual and "formal" (if that's the right term ... perhaps "institutional") backbone of the GOP. Close political watchers are aware of the current case of Steve Daines, Senator from Montana.
Daines was elected as a Republican Senator in a State that had been solid blue since the 1980s (Montana has a weird union history). During the Biden Admin, he was the head of the Republican Senate Reelection Campaign. His job was to flip the Senate for the Republicans in 2024. He did that, including hand recruiting the other Senator from Montana, Tim Sheehy, who unseated Jon Tester, a Montana native who had been a Democrat Senator since 2007.
After such a successful time at the head of the NRSC, Daines was expected to, perhaps, join the 2024 Trump Admin. At the very least, he could be chair of any committee he wanted. What did he choose?
To retire.
Unexpectedly in March, Daines announced he wouldn't file to run for re-election in what promised to be an absolute Sunday stroll back into his Senate seat.
Daines never grabbed a lot of headline attention but was quietly very influential and a prolific fundraiser. He was also a dyed in the wool Regan era conservative.
Speculating, I wonder if folks like Daines see that MAGA 2.0 is hurdling towards a crack up. Mid-terms are looking bad, although perhaps not as apocalyptic as once thought. But, beyond that, 2028 is looking to potentially setup Little Marco to get down and dirty with J.D. Vance. Is that the divorce that kills the party? Who knows, but I'd bet people like Daines have a strong opinion.
The talk around the water cooler is that Daines is either considering a run himself or gunning for a VP or cabinet slot in 28.
Almes, the man he endorsed as his replacement is a Trump appointed US attorney whose main thing has been cracking down on NGO fraud so make of that what you will.
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Much to be seen in the future. I wonder about the anti-semitism though. It's endemic in the middle east, but Trump has managed to get most of the Sunni arab countries to moderate on Israel and many are doing public or private deals, including Saudi Arabia and the new Al Qaeda government of Syria. Something weird is happening, where over half the Palestinians didn't join the last jihad, the Sunnis are mostly out of the mideast terror game, but antisemitism is rising at least publicly in the west. Somehow Iran, the only Shia power, is the last holdout for Sunni supremacy in the Levant, funding the last dead-ender Hamas.
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...
...I don't think it is 'quite clear' and the case laid out here just takes it for granted.
I'm sorry was there not a whole thing where Russian and Chinese anti-air completely failed to pose a real threat in Venezuela and later in Iran?
Did I hallucinate a whole news story about an incursion into Venezuela without even needing to perform a significant amount of bombing? Last I checked Maduro is still in prison in New York.
Was that not a notable development that suggests that U.S. air superiority is even more lopsided than might have been assumed?
I'm actually asking for a chain of reasoning to explain how you came out of the last 5 months with a higher estimate of Russian and Chinese military efficacy compared to the U.S. than previously. This viewpoint befuddles me.
I don't know what your precise definition of "contest the globe" is but holy cow, if nukes were off the table, how exactly do those countries even show up for the competition, let alone win it convincingly. What exactly is the edge you're giving to them that will outperform demonstrated U.S. capabilities, before discussing the stuff that is as-yet undemonstrated.
Find it annoying to see these posts that basically affirming the consequent by bolstering a given conclusion they've reached (the U.S. failed to completely demolish Iran's nuclear program) then pretending their premise (U.S. military capacity is hamstrung under Donald Trump) without a supporting scaffold of logic. We're barely two years into Trump two, after four years of whatever the hell Biden was, and making bold prognostications about his efforts being failures kind of belies the results we've seen overall.
Can't help but notice some motivated reasoning there, bub. Especially because there's that glaring interruption in "the last decade" of Trumpist politics that goes utterly glossed over.
Curious to mention Kamala in your post but I do a ctrl+f "Biden" and its empty. Howboutdat.
Anyway, sorry to sound flippant, but it really helps that when you're trying to advance a particular conclusion, you actually back up the premises you're using that are the most controversial or extraordinary, such as "a decade of damages" from Trumpist politics (damage inflicted where? of what magnitude?), or "...that his rule has largely been to the detriment of... America’s relationship with its allies in NATO" (As compared to before? What precisely has deteriorated?).
Anyhow:
Rubio or Vance remain the favorites for winning the 2028 Presidential election Much can change in between, but the assumption that there isn't a viable path forward that actually preserves much of the Trump coalition seems wishful, there's likely a power struggle to come, but all those Trump-backed challengers just blew out a bunch of incumbents in Indiana, so it seems pretty clear where the center of gravity within the GOP lies right now.
Oh, also, on the manufacturing front. Upward momentum after decades of decline... suggests something has changed or improved. Yes, that includes the Rust Belt.
I dunno, this analysis seems to be a little undercooked.
Taking it by candidate and not by party which has a 60:40 leaning towards Dems is a mistake. The issue here is that Rubio and Vance are considered significantly more likely to be the Republican nominee (64% collectively) than Newsom and Harris (the top two Dem choices at this moment) are expected to be the Dem nominee. (33% chance collectively).
Basically the markets are expecting a Obama/Trump style moment where someone unexpectedly comes in and wins the Dem primary and then goes onto winning the presidency.
I think I take your meaning, but allow me to try and parse this:
The markets expect that the unexpected will happen. I guess its just a wait and see thing, account for the uncertainty.
And as much as Obama provides good precedent, I think the subsequent years where Hillary and then Biden locked down the nom against upstarts (including Bernie... twice) makes it less likely.
Yeah. They don't really have an idea who it will be, but Harris and Newsom combined are only 33%. Add AOC and it's 41%.
So basically, it's more likely to be none of the top three candidates than it is to be any of them right now.
Basically this amounts to an expectation that the current 'frontrunners' are vulnerable and some as-yet-uncertain player will succeed in disrupting their runs.
Which I can see as a possibility, but I'm not sure where to look for them.
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Generic Dems always outperform real Dems. People tend to imagine a nice Leslie Knope and then flinch at the inevitable Jean Ralphio.
That we don't know who the specific real Dem will be in 2028 doesn't change that there will be a specific real Dem in 2028, and thus the polling effect of "Generic Dem vs Generic Republican" doesn't really impact the predictions. They're not predicting generic Dem, they're predicting currently unknown specific Dem who will be dealing with specific Dem issues.
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Your analysis to me reads so differently from what I hear about American politics from my fellow Americans that, politely, I suspect you are not American or otherwise don't follow American politics that closely. You seem to ascribe great important to events or figures that nobody I know regards as important. (Liz Cheney?)
Trump has within the Republican party extremely high approval ratings. Whose disappointment? Later you cite the desire from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to have a reformed GOP. Liz Cheney also failed and was decisively rejected by the voters. "There is a significant desire among the moderates of the GOP to escape the influence of Magaist politics". Like the legislators just primaried in Indiana?
Perhaps your analysis that Trumpism has failed is motivated by something other than objective analysis? I mean, when I consult the oracle bones I'm not convinced MAGA will have run of the table after Trump fades, and there are a lot of ways this could all go. But MAGA is also the predominant faction now in the Republican Party, its mantle can easily be taken up by Rubio or Vance, and voters clearly still support it. MAGA is powerful. MAGA is more popular than the moderate faction you imagine supplanting it. MAGA has spent ten years purging the moderate faction. So where are you getting this idea that the moderate faction is about to totally win? From the pronouncements of the moderate faction? From the pronouncements of people who want MAGA to lose?
You see why this looks like wishcasting, yes?
The Japanese radio broadcaster assured me that the Japanese are winning in the Pacific -- it must be true. Let's discuss.
See what I mean?
I don't see why Republican voters would want to cooperate with the Democratic party, but I can see why the Democratic party would want pliant Republicans again.
Well I guess if you believe that Trump should be surrendering any day now, although he seems to have had the chance to already. But I have to add that if you are calling the war with Iran a failure and the war with Iraq a success, this is such an inversion of American sentiment that I'm not sure you really are a part of it. Are you aware of being provocative? Consider:
Nobody in America would judge that the MIC is getting weaker.
Nobody in America considers NATO all that powerful, frankly.
(Actually, I think if I went around to average Americans and said something like "We could have won in Iran already if the Europeans had joined us" I would get a lot of laughs. The only people who seem to consider the Europeans important in the way you're describing are the Europeans themselves.)
So the theory is that Trump is sitting on a big button labeled "Win the Iran War" and hasn't pushed it because he's too nice? He negotiates too much? I think I need an explanation here. The idea is that we are going to replace Trump, who is weak because he is "obsessed with making deals," with a "revitalized GOP, capable of once more cooperating across the aisle"? MAGA is weak because Trump is a failure because he likes making deals, therefore we need a strong GOP that... makes deals with Democrats?
This contradiction seems so damning to me in your entire frame of reference that I'm tempted to delete the rest of my post and just emphasize this. You believe that America should replace Trump and his "making deals" with a "broad, consensus-based politics"? Huh?
Besides this, there is obviously no hunger for that right now in America.
Are you European, by chance?
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GOP is probably fine electorally for a generation. They should win the gerrymandering wars. And Dems need to moderate on a bunch of issues like law and order and common sense regulations that GOP should be able to hold the 48% of the vote they will need to.
The liberal of my childhood was Sandy Cohen of the OC. He was one of us but “do-goodery”. Mamdani is like an alien to me and most of the power structures in the left now.
Demographics have changed. Politics will be like Brazil for a while. I don’t know if that ever ends but for it to end you would need assimilation into closer to 1990’s norms.
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The future of the GoP is now.
The post 2020 GoP is essentially a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies, and is only remarkable insofar as our intellectual class has strayed so far out into the weeds that moderate center-right politics appear incomprehensible to them.
If anything MAGA can be understood in part as Republicans re-embracing their mid-century role as the big-tent party after spending much of the 90s and early 2000s/GWoT era in the wilderness.
The East-coast populists and Sothern Tea-party coalition allied to wrest control of the party from the old Rockefeller-style corporatists, the Evangelicals started out defending their long-time allies on the corporatist right but their support had been wavering due to perceived betrayals on abortion and LGBTQ issues. 2020 and the lockdowns killed that alliance for good leaving the corporatist isolated from the wider party and they simply didn't have the votes to maintain position on their own. Cheney died and his heirs (both intellectual and biological) found themselves getting primaried. Now the populists are setting the agenda, and while the Evangelicals might grumble about Trump's lack of couth, they appreciate having the populists' support on issues like abortion and school choice.
The Newt Gingrich surge in Congress in 1994 followed by the GWB presidency from 2001-2009 is "in the wilderness?" That's a lot of power for, literally, "most of' the 1990s and 2000s.
As I said in my post on Cheney,
We had a solid 20+ years of Democrats being the party of progressivism and Republicans being the party of progressivism-lite and it is the manifest failures of progressivism that lead to the rise of the Tea-Party and the eventual exile of the faction that men like Cheney and Gingrich represented from the party because the GoP actually has a functioning primary system.
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Fuck the GOP. They should be in prison or in a care home at this point; the Maggots especially. We need an entirely new conservative wing that at least gestures at interacting with reality instead of tilting at not even windmills; at this point they are fist-fighting imaginary bugbears.
It turns out you can't run a country based entirely on having a victim complex and a dream, even if you accidently hit on a real grievance like immigration, you need to at some point make contact with the world as it is instead of the world as it makes you feel good.
EDIT: I throw myself on the mercy of the crowd, ya'll caught some blowoff from a mothersday family gathering where all the libed out retired professionals and leftist current graduates were observing the traditional detente, but the foxnews-ite conservatives refused to take a hint to the point where they were exiled to the outer darkness (disinvited from memorial day, such that they might learn.)
I was hanging on by a thread, you don't understand the level of autistic restraint required to not go off on a motherfucker who doesn't know what the word 'litoral' means, but has lots of opinions about combat in that particular zone which she will just not shut the fuck up about. It was BAD guys, I'm not kidding, this is the worst it's been since 2020.
I guess you're calling specifically for me (a "Maggot") to go to jail so there's no polite way for me to interact with this post. (Anything I say is inherently inflaming tension, no? I don't think the mod response to your comment goes far enough frankly.)
However I would still like to try to politely point out this contradiction: You call for putting MAGA in jail, and then complain that we need people to interact with reality. Imagining that you can roll up an entire political faction and put them all in jail (representing ~30%+ of the country) is obviously political fantasy.
When I find myself thinking like this, I try to go for a walk and read a book and not log on for a day or more so that I can drink some tea and reflect on higher things. Chamomile with honey and glycine helps me dream deeply.
You right, observe the edit.
That said, I do think Trump and co. would be in prison right now in a functional system that didn't provide infinite deference to people once they accrued a certain amount of popularity or capital. If I took documents without the black band on them out of the building they were in I would not see daylight for a LONG time; if I then refused to cooperate with the feds I would 50/50 be fucking dead.
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The Dems are the new conservative wing (i.e. Rightists), whether you like what that is or not. "Slam the brakes on every new development, intentionally make sure problems aren't fixed, keep giving power to the bureaucracy like we've done for the last 60 years" is not exactly a liberal thing, though I get that the term's been redefined away from what it used to mean.
GOP are reformers (i.e. Leftists), again, whether you like what that is or not. This is the "bureaucracy has done fine, but the regulations it's demanding are too expensive" people, which... well, looks like they're a natural complement to the new guys who are also saying this. It's more salient now that the US is poorer; those regulations were passed in a richer time.
The entire Anglosphere, and Western Europe, literally all do this. Have been for decades. Seems to have worked out well for the Establishment.
(The victim complex and dream is very gyno-centric; "It's Her Turn" and all that.)
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One could argue that this is what already MAGA is, a coalition of the people who "interact with reality" on a daily basis rebelling against the laptop and email class and this is the driver of so many of complaints held by that class. The thing about interacting with reality is that you can just do things.
Trump won because people felt the economy sucked, and because of the border. People try to make US politics more complicated than it is. If people don't like the economy, they vote for the other guy. With gas up 50%, we'll see how the "interacts with reality" thesis holds.
Note that gas is still lower than it was under Biden.
Compared to where gas was at the end of Biden's term, though?
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These are not mutually exclusive statements. People who's job is to "interact with reality" on a daily basis, IE cops, plumbers, meat-packers, bus-drivers, retail clerks, Et Al are also the people most impacted by the negative externalities of luxury beliefs like "decarceration" and "open borders".
So long as people don’t have to live with the ideological byproducts and waste generated by the downside of the policies they advocate, they’ll continue to be at liberty thinking up all kinds of fanciful garbage encircled with every halo of bullshit you can think of. You saw this with the hysteria of Martha’s Vineyard and the controversy surrounding that debacle.
It wasn’t just the economy though. People vote just as much along identitarian lines and projected onto Trump the values they sought to find in his statements.
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Yeah, you’re coming in too hot here.
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The ‘future of the GOP’ discussion is mostly dumb, because the GOP is now thé big tent party and the democrats are now thé ideological party, opposite of mid-late 20th century when ‘I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a democrat.’ was a recognized enough statement to be attributed to more than one person. The GOP going forwards probably won’t have an ideology. Oh, there’ll be principles- support for fossil fuels to name one- but nothing like the democrats, or like Reagan of yore.
Now there’s some advantages to that- it means republicans can be competitive more or less everywhere.
Its frankly hilarious to me that the Dems are basically stuck with the coalition they built and all its dysfunction because they elevated the AOCs, Kamala Harris', Jasmine Crocketts and Stacey Abrams amongst them, and the most motivated and active parts of their base are all-in on identity politics, so trying to wrest back the controls will require exercises of raw, naked power that is just as likely to bite them in the ass as it is to select a viable candidate.
My biggest fear for the GOP is post-Trump (or the small chance Trump simply declines to leave the stage) power struggles and the constant tendency at infighting at the most inopportune times.
But the GOP now has a deep qualified leadership bench by comparison, and one that isn't (as far as I can tell) beholden to constituencies that will demand the faucet of grift, graft and fraud be kept all the way open or they'll revolt. Which is to say, a GOP official can actually try things that might make things better.
The alternative to all-in on identity politics is all-in on socialism, communism, redistribution -- the DSA, basically. Mandami won NYC handily, Katie Wilson has Seattle, Washington State has its new millionaire tax and California its proposed wealth tax which has already driven several billionaires out. At the national level this is mostly represented by fossils like Warren and Sanders, but AOC could make a return to relevance. They've got allies here with some of the anti-boomer right, which would like nothing more than to redistribute the spoils of dispossessing old people of their homes.
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There's certainly quite a bit of dark humor to be found in the fact that the DEI party is willing to hurt itself as a way to provide a costly signal that it really does believe in DEI. I just can't help but keep thinking of the trolley problem meme "You can stop the trolley at any time, but in doing so you need to admit that you made a mistake."
The best thing about DEI in my entirely uncharitable opinion is the selection pressure is non-meritocratic. So the more DEI initiatives in politics and corpos succeed, the more unstable and brittle the DEI machine itself will become.
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Oh absolutely, the GOP could easily lose the presidency, important races, etc though infighting. But it's unlikely to cede a trifecta to democrats; the GOP coalition is not very ideologically coherent, but it's very suited to the political system we exist in.
From where im standing the GoP seems to have a much more coherant idea of both what it believes and desired path forward than the Democrats do.
They're a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies.
Meanwhile the Democrats are currently stuck trying to square the circle of being the party of "anti-racism" and "punch a nazi" with also being the party of art school socialists who believe in the primacy of race and blame Jews/Isreal for all the worlds ills.
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The GOP isn’t really acting like a party which is competitive everywhere. It made gains in coal country, Alaska, and Montana while doubling down on blaming Coastal Elites. Very Trump. I don’t see how that converts into lasting popularity elsewhere.
Trump can’t carry turnout forever.
In 2024 the Republican party increased its performance virtually everywhere in America outside Atlanta and Utah. It's been the subject of some very famous maps
It's possible this is a high-water mark and maybe the GOP is losing and this redshift is all an affect of Trump. In that case I guess you'd be right. But it's not really in evidence. The Democratic Party remains extremely unpopular. Why couldn't a Republican Party sans Trump continue to win, say, a consistent 52-48 national victory.
That doesn't mean that the Republican party is building a new coalition that makes it competitive everywhere. It means that the swing was more uniform than is historically normal - in other words that the two coalitions look roughly the same in 2020 and 2024 but with Harris doing worse with swing voters than Biden. If part of your raison d'etre as a movement is mouth-foaming hatred of the kind of society represented by the "Gen Z boss and a mini" video, you don't want to be competitive in the parts of the country where those kinds of people live, any more than the Democrats want to be competitive in redneck country.
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Trump beat a nearly senile Biden (2024 edition), Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. Putting forth bad national candidates has a lot of downstream effect during a presidential election year. If the Republican party maintains the trifecta after 26' midterms it would be a sign of continued broad public support.
Time to dig this and this out again about who the pundits were saying would win pulling up 😁
(Whatever happened to Hilary Rosen, by the way?)
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It was only in hindsight that everyone declared Hillary a weak candidate. In 2015 everyone in America knew that Hillary was probably the next president.
Anyways, Trump isn’t running again. If the theory is Trump is a bad candidate and only beat worse candidates, that bodes well for Republicans. GOP will pick Rubio or JD or DeSantis. Dems will pick…? Maybe they won’t pick a bad candidate for the 4th time running.
Everyone in America in 2015 knew that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate because the Clinton machine had stitched up the primary. I don't think Republicans went into the 2016 primary cycle expecting to lose the general - they had a crowded field of superficially-strong candidates and believed (correctly) that Hillary was unpopular with the median voter. The median voter obviously knew this, the Bernie campaign knew it, and the minority of pundits who actually paid attention to public opinion knew it, but couldn't say it without being called sexist by the pro-establishment left peanut gallery.
Hillary then struggled in an uncontested primary, to the point where she ended up shoring up her position by burning the centre-left commons by attacking Bernie from the left on idpol issues (hence the "BernieBro" slur). Apart from the MSM, the main source of left-wing commentary on US politics I was consuming at the time was Crooked Timber which had multiple posts asking the questions "Do Clinton's problems in the primary predict trouble in the general?" and "Just how many voters are there whose top two preferences would be (1) Bernie (2) Trump?"
Counter @Opt-out below, Hillary's defenders repeatedly said that she was the "most qualified candidate" in decades, not that she was the strongest. They knew they were talking about her CV and not her popularity with the voters.
Hillary was the strong horse. She ran an extremely close primary in 2008 against Obama, which was extremely close and made her the obvious next candidate. She had name recognition and the majority of the Democratic Party on board. She was made Secretary of State as her consolation prize, which meant she was effectively one of the most powerful politicians in America. And she had the better part of a decade for the public to accept that she was the most obvious candidate to be the next President of the United States. Seemingly every TV procedural and light fiction had a blonde lady female President. A woman president! She had this mystique too. Hillary was then able to cut deals within the party to ensure the nomination was all but won. (I do believe the wikileaks reveal that Tim Kaine allowd Debbie Wasserman Schultz to replace him as head of the DNC in exchange for being made Hillary's running mate. But there were other deals made as well.) Hillary was qualified, she was experienced, she was successful, she was famous, she was even relatively popular. Secretary of State, Senator, First Lady, consumate politician. Foreign policy, Domestic policy. In the lead-up to the 2015 Democratic Primary she was the obvious obvious frontrunner, which is a big part of why nobody serious bothered to run against her.
In hindsight the weaknesses there were latent. A lot of it probably had to do with Obama fatigue. A lot of it was natural generational turnover. In hindsight the fact that she so truly represented the best of the Washington political class is exactly what made her vulnerable. But she was the best of them.
Bernie's primary challenge having legs was a surprise to everybody. It was probably even a surprise to Bernie, who can't have expected that after two generations in the political wilderness on the fringes that he was finally about to go mainstream. It was a lot closer than anyone would have expected in 2014. But it still wasn't really close.
Meanwhile the Republicans didn't have anybody of Hillary's stature. They had a lot of solid candidates by traditional Washington candidate standards and felt good that after 8 years of Obama it was finally their turn to win. But nobody was really ready for prime time. Jeb was theoretically the frontrunner and big hitter, but he had no strong public persona besides his Bush name. Ted Cruz was alienating and weird. Rubio was young and untested. Then there were all these governors and senators and winsome folk. In hindsight it's obvious that they were all weak and Trump tore through the field like wet tissue. But then it was assumed that Trump himself would lose, easily, and Hillary was the obvious favorite.
And so many things had to go right for Trump to win that it could be called divine intervention. 2016 was one of the most shocking things to ever happen in the lifetimes of everyone who lived through it. Those woke posters who called it the most shocking event since 9/11 were woke-more-correct. Nobody expected Trump to win. You had to be extremely weird to have considered it. Half the country thought Hillary was up by ten, the other half sanguinely thought it would be closer than that but she would probably win. It was genuinely shocking to the whole world, one of those events that makes people peer behind the veil and realize how arbitrary life can be and how you go along and there's a plan and the world is certainly on it and then suddenly everything changes and you can see history being made. TPP, Wikileaks, Comey, Obamacare rates, the border crisis, ISIS, Pokemon Go to the Polls.
And then she wasn't the strong horse any more. Strong horses don't lose to 1st-term senators. Hilary should have won the 2008 primary according to the establishment-left and MSM conventional wisdom. It was her first big electoral test - she ended up not facing a serious opponent in the NY senate election after Giuliani pulled out due to a cancer scare. She failed it. And the main reason was fairly obvious as well - she was the public face of the centre-left faction that supported the Iraq debacle (for which she never really repented - this was a key line taken against her by both Bernie and Trump in 2016). Anyone who updated on the 2008 primary knew that Hilary was less electable than the MSM insisted she was. I was around at the time and I remember the difference in tone between the two - the MSM glazing of Obama was (among other things) about him being a once-in-a-generation political talent who could connect with the American people/forge a new centre-left coalition/reconcile black and white Americans. The MSM glazing of Clinton in 2015-6 was about her CV, about how she deserved to win because she was a woman, and about how good a President she would be because of various personal qualities that were not visible to voters. Even Clinton's supporters couldn't say she was unusually popular with a straight face.
I will give you that - he was an underdog up to and including the eve of poll.
Trump beating Clinton in the general was a very obvious and visible possibility once he had the nomination. The pundit class refused to consider it, but opinion polls always showed Clinton as a beatable front-runner. Nate Silver had her around an 80-20 favourite for most of the campaign, and about 70-30 on the eve of poll. Hilary's poll lead in 2016 was never as big as Obama's (either time) or Biden's in 2020.
Trump as Republican nominee was obviously possible after New Hampshire, and the most likely outcome after the March 1st SEC primary.
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Agree on Hillary, you only become a weak candidate when you lose. On paper she may have been the strongest candidate to run for office in decades. First women, married to the only widely popular US President (since probably Kennedy?), Senator, Cabinet, educational bonafides.
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Nah, Trump is an exceptional candidate (in hindsight of course), the GOP will have trouble filling his shoes. It's just also true that the democrats fielded 3 terrible national candidates in a row. So if the trifecta is maintained despite no terrible democrat on the ballot (and the usual midterms reversals), then the republicans are still in good shape, so long as that wasn't dependent on Trump's charisma.
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Okay, that’s definitely more widely distributed than I was expecting. I know a lot of those counties already went heavily red but the New England stuff is really surprising.
I guess I really do put a lot of it down to Trump.
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It's possible this is a high-water mark and the GOP would be losing except that this redshift is all an effect of Harris. She came with a ton of baggage, and couldn't handle the most basic softball attempts to let her disclaim it. She did well enough among California voters, but when the Democrats actually last allowed her to lead a national candidacy she took 15th place, with (not a typo:) 844 votes.
In my incredibly biased opinion (registered Republican, but would have gotten drunk enough to vote Harris had I been in a swing state), a Republican party sans-Trump would be much better positioned to keep pulling national victories, but that's not really on the table. What we'll have is a Republican Party post-Trump, a party irrevocably changed by his performance (net approval rating now under -20%), with a back bench full of politicians who've often praised him and who won't be getting softball questions about that. I don't doubt that the Democratic Party can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here (there's a lot of baggage there too, and it's grimly hilarious that Harris is still #2 on that list by the odds, and their #1 still spends more time than not underwater in national approval ratings), but the ball will be theirs to fumble.
GOP politicians, like politicians in general, have plenty of practice threading the needle with polite non-answers about previous positions. It doesn't matter if they were tied to Trump(just like having denied Biden's senility after he pooped his pants and talked to dead people on live TV is not a liability for democrats in practice). The difference is republicans will select their nominee for being well-spoken and democrats will select their nominee for DEI points.
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That's the upper end of the polling for the Democrats, who are less favorable than anyone except Iran.
The reasons are different though: The people who hate Trump hate Trump for doing the things he promised he would do; the people who hate the Dems hate the Dems for not hating Republicans enough. If gruesome newsome came out on stage shirtless smeared in mud and declared he would bite the pancreases out of every republican in congress before drop kicking a goat into a woodchipper, his approval would go UP.
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