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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.
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.
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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.
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