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Can anyone explain to me this chain of Trump primary victories? Normally I find myself pretty in the loop and things make sense, but I'm having trouble here. Trump as we all know has approval ratings in the doldrums and that extends even to a decent amount of historical loyalist, electorally - recent surveys show his endorsement is a drag in general elections in battlefield states. He also has a mixed at best record of picking primary winners. Yet he's scored several notable wins recently.
He has endorsed former Texas AG Paxton (and dogged by significant simmering corruption allegations), endangering the Texas Senate seat and going against sitting incumbent Sen. Cornyn. His pick for Kentucky Senate seat won the primary despite opposition from both Rep. Massie and retiring incumbent Sen. McConnell (notably, opposite wings of the party despite being somewhat anti-Trump). Rep Massie himself, they are reporting, has lost a primary as well (the most expensive House primary in history, in fact, drawing both Trump and AIPAC opposition) despite drawing support from other somewhat Trump-skeptic but influential right-wingers such as Tucker Carlson, MTG, and Boebert. Trump-opposed incumbent Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy finished third and didn't even make the runoff. In Georgia, perennial enemy (of 2020 election fame) Brad Raffensperger lost the primary for governor. Trump even took out five state senators in Indiana merely over their refusal to jump in the redistricting fight!
So why amid generalized disaster is Trump scoring so many primary victories?
In case anyone missed Massie's opening remark at his concession speech:
The spending by AIPAC et al in the race seems to prove Massie correct in his claims:
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We don't have any numbers from yesterday yet, but one of the underreported stories about this primary cycle is how low Republican turnout has been. This isn't always a great metric, since it's dependent on whether there are any competitive races, but the numbers from Texas are illustrative. About 7% more Democrats voted in the Senate primary than Republicans, despite both parties having competitive elections. The last time Democrat turnout was higher in a Texas primary was 2020, but the Republicans weren't running any competitive statewide elections that year, while Democrats had Senate and President. I don't want to read too much into this, since local elections can skew the statewide totals, but there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters as compared to Democrats. One thing I've noticed in the races in my neck of the woods is that the Republicans have all been trying to out-MAGA each other.
Illustrative of this is a PA Senate race for a district in the southwestern corner of the state. Camera Bartolotta has been representing the district since 2014, and she's always come across as a moderate who was good at constituent service. In 2024 she responded to Trump's comments about Hatians in Charleroi by saying that she was disheartened because they were constituents and taxpayers. This was enough to get her a vote of no confidence from the Washington County Republican Committee, which vote was later voided by the state committee as the rules prohibit them from disparaging a sitting officeholder. Al Buchtan seized on this by mounting a primary challenge based on her alleged disloyalty to Trump. Bartolotta decided to head this off at the pass by running a series of early attack ads questioning Buchtan's credentials and his own loyalty to Trump. Buchtan didn't start running ads until later in the race, but yesterday was the first time in a while that you could watch television in the Pittsburgh area without seeing multiple commercials per ad break.
Bartolotta ended up winning, but that's not the real story. What I find more interesting is that in a district that favors Republicans by a 3 to 2 margin, a race this hard-fought didn't drive turnout at all. I can't offer any previous elections for turnout comparisons, since this is the first primary challenge Bartolotta faced, but one only needs to compare the Republican votes to the Democratic votes. A total of 17,000 and change voted in the GOP primary; 15,00 and change voted in the Democratic primary. That they managed fewer that 15% more votes despite a 25 point registration advantage would be enough of a story, but the Democratic candidate was running unopposed. This isn't due to other races, either; Democrats had one other competitive primary compared to three for the Republicans. A greater percentage of Democrats turned out to participate in a box-checking exercise than Republicans showed up to vote in at least two elections that actually mattered.
I don't want to read too much into this, but one explanation is that more moderate GOP voters simply aren't showing up to primaries. And it makes sense that they wouldn't, because these primaries offer the voter nothing. You have races where the candidates argue over who will be more loyal to Trump, and you have outliers like the Massey race where a contrarian offers a referendum on Trump. To nearly half of Republican voters in her district, the fact that Bartolotta had an impeccable record of ruthless effectiveness in doing uncontroversial things that benefited the district was irrelevant in the light of the comments she made defending her constituents. So who is left voting in these primaries? The dyed-in-the wool Trump supporters who would still consider him to be one of the greatest human beings who ever lived and for whom adherence to MAGA principles (as defined by him) are paramount above all else. The question may not be whether he has an iron grip on the Republican Party so much as whether he has one over what's left of it.
I don't want people defending foreigners, even if they are constituents. I don't want foreigners to be constituents in the first place. Bartolotta should watch herself, because parroting Democrat talking points is not the way to drive support in Republican primaries.
Also, it's not the uncontroversial things that are necessary. Any schmuck can vote for uncontroversial things. Republicans want fighters, and Bartolotta told voters that she doesn't think this is worth fighting for.
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I'm the Bartolatta case, were there any particularly spicy ballot measures this year? Democrat turnout was unusually high in my district, but it was due to local school board drama rather than anything related to the primaries.
There were no ballot measures. This is Pennsylvania and when we do get ballot measures, they're usually pretty boring. (Do you support the ability of the Bubb County Joint Authority to reduce the hearing notice period from 30 days to 20 days provided the notice is advertised in both print and digital media?)
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My on the ground experience of Republican primaries locally is this: Hardcore MAGA controls the Republican party in a holding company structure. Hardcore MAGA voters make up too much of the primary electorate to make any other path practically possible, if the MAGA vote is against you even where they don't make up a majority you'd have to run the table on the remaining electorate to possibly win, and you're not going to do that.
So even if the electorate as a whole turns against Trump, or the Republican primary electorate does, it doesn't matter if the 35% approval floor he still has is an insurmountable challenge to defeat in the primary.
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It isn't that much of a mystery; his support has been falling with nearly everyone except elderly Republicans, the dominant force in Republican primary elections (let alone midterm primary elections). You can be wildly unpopular and still dominate Republican primaries if you have an iron grip on the olds. At least for now.
You've got the valances backwards. "The olds" as you call them are generally either voting for Massie or they're voting for Democrats. Meanwhile Trump/MAGA's two strongest demographics remain "working age males" and "married couples with children".
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Trump is probably more popular than the polls show. Traditionally he overperforms the polls every time he has been on an election ballot.
Anti-Trump Republicans are unpopular because they won’t do what Trump wants them to do. Some of Trump’s unpopularity is caused by parts of the base who believe Trump isn’t doing what Trump promised to do.
I.e. (and I don’t agree with this), many think Trump has moderated and is pursuing Israel/Iran instead of mass deportations. But the base basically wants the same coherent things. It is now using its power to chase out Republicans who find reasons why the base can’t get what it wants. It’s the same story: Indiana can’t redistrict out Democratic seats because our principles; Massie can’t vote for funding ICE because his principles; Cornyn can’t get SAVE passed because his principles. In any other system this logic is very easily understood: voters hired Republicans to do a job they refuse to do, so they are being fired.
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The GOP primary voter doesn't really have any meaningful beliefs beyond "whatever Trump wants" anymore. This is partly because Trump himself turned many people into cultist followers, but also partly because Trump specifically activated and changed the very demographics involved in politics, like for example Trump appeals heavily to the lower/middle income white demographic and pushes away the higher earning ones whereas Republicans before him were the upper class doctors and lawyers type. These poor folk are people who were brought in because Trump. And that's why someone like Massie loses. He did the crime of opposing Trump in trying to expose the elite pedophile ring that Epstein ran, that meant opposing Trump and that meant he committed an unforgivable sin among the hardliners. Also of course he went after Israel, which sealed his doom even harder.
It's a big issue with the primary system in general, it pushes candidates towards the extremist and personality cults of their party and away from moderate centrist beliefs. But parties aren't gonna change it because the individual politicians in power don't care about if their party wins, they care about if they the individual wins.
This is what you say when you’ve failed to model someone’s views correctly.
The irony is that this doesn’t even need an explanation. Massie making Trump an enemy is the most obvious explanation for Trump working against Massie. That’s as basic as the friend-enemy distinction gets.
The irony in this is palpable, because I remembered you saying something that embodied the sentiment so perfectly.
"I guess I trust whatever Trump wants to do. He knows better than I do."
After all, you are his most loyal soldier.
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Well what did Massie do wrong with the GOP besides go against Trump on Epstein and Israel? It sure does seem like when it comes to exposing elite pedophiles vs doing what Trump says, the GOP primary voters value the latter more. And if that's the case then "they only care about Trump" is the answer, because what else could their concern be if pedophile rings aren't enough??
And why would that matter if I modeled it wrong and "what Trump wants" isn't clearly the main thing that appeals to the GOP primary voter now?
Massie refused to vote for BBB. BBB was the one-stop shop for Trump’s legislative agenda. Especially as far as the base was concerned, BBB meant funding for ICE and deportations. Massie knew this calculus and decided to vote against BBB anyways.
All this happened before there was much politicking about the Epstein Files. But if your theory is that American politics is run by a class of pedophiles I would ask why such evidence has yet to materialize.
Well, actually, putting it politely, at this point I regard most Epstein conspiracism as extremely unfounded. Worse than Russiagate. But I have many friends who believe things I find more plausible than stuff I’ve seen online. So if you wanted to argue, say, that there are a few Trump donors who are implicated of bad things and Trump is doing them a favor, I could agree to disagree. It’s all just a question of what we find plausible I guess. But when you say something like “exposing elite pedophiles” I really question what that means and suspect it leads to ideas I would deny in strong terms.
However in this case I think it’s a distinction without a difference. The animating force for the Republican voter is the Trump agenda, which is to say, immigration and economics. Trump for all his flaws is the best vehicle for this agenda. There is no one else promoting it. Massie’s agenda is worse to Republican voters because he is weak on immigration.
I have some good libertarian friends who insist that Massie is annoying over principled libertarian objections and that this could have been avoided. Maybe, I don’t think so.
It’s also worth wondering if Massie could have done the Epstein thing and been tough on immigration. It’s a hypothetical worth discussing. If Massie was a Trump critic perceived to be pushing the Trump agenda harder than Trump, and Trump endorsed anti-Massie, could Massie have won? To repeat the question, does the base just follow Trump’s orders slavishly or is there a logic being acted out? I think the former.
This is not about Massie but Cassidy. But I believe on The Bulwark, they did qualitative interviews of Republican primary voters and of the ones that voted against Cassidy all had the first reason being because he voted to impeach Trump. People will say different things and cite different reasons but at the end of the day, I do believe the Republican base, especially the primary base, like Trump more as a stand in figure for their hopes and dreams, than actually care about the actual results of the Trump political agenda.
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I think it is more what you say when you are trying to oversimplify the views of a group of people.
I agree with @magicalkittycat that if you try to merge these psychographics into a single "typical GOP primary voter", you get a Trump loyalist. But doing so is not necessarily a good idea.
This is too general. Think of a classic neocon-type voter who thinks McCain is the greatest president we never had. He doesn’t vote for Massie because he’s an isolationist / libertarian. Think of an Evangelical who thinks Trump is vulgar and would prefer a Romney type (even if he has a dim view of Mormonism) but dislikes Massie’s stance against Israel. These are all relevant in this election.
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In a very real sense, anyone running against a Trump-endorsed candidate is not a Republican. It makes all too much sense that Trump-endorsed candidates sweep Republican primaries. All of the Republican Party's political power (at least at the national level) comes from being willing to stand together behind Trump.
The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are fundamentally different in how power works internally. The Democrats are a collection of squabling interest groups, and the Republicans are a coalition of everyone who opposes these interests. The structure of the Republican base requires strong top-down discipline to hold the coalition together.
Excellent essay. It's essentially a long form explanation of the adage "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line". I suppose in some sense the GOP is a cult from the perspective of those against the typical Republican agenda.
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I think this is a really succinct way of putting it.
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Recent events have peeled off some of Trump's Republican support, but generally speaking Republicans still love him. He bestrides the Republican party like a colossus.
But why now, when during Trump I and even the Biden Interregnum he was dealt quite a few defeats? I mean I'm well aware of what Trump means to the GOP and how he's exerted sustained pressure over the last decade but typically you'd at least expect recent events to provide more of a counterbalance, right?
Take Massie. His most notable stances are anti-Israel and holding administration feet to the fire about budgets and Epstein stuff. These are all issues where Republicans are, theoretically, quintessentially sympathetic (small government, anti-secret liberal cabals, non-interventionism). All of which are basically more popular now than any time in the past 10 years, right? Well, maybe not small-government spending priorities, but you get the idea.
Massie was against funding ICE in the BBB. Immigration is still the most important issue to the conservative and Republican base. You can make some show of opposing the party on certain issues but Massie opposed the party on the issue it cared about most.
And ultimately the base cares more about deportations and immigration than Israel and Epstein. Those issues are still extremely online. Posters getting their ideas about MAGA from such ideas should probably recalibrate.
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For many, perhaps most Republicans, Woke demonstrated that the present crisis is existential. It is common to see arguments that "woke is over"; rarely do people making such arguments explain their understanding of exactly how "woke" "ended". The only remotely plausible answer I can see is that Trump was re-elected.
Arguments that Woke is over and therefore it's time to move on from Trump are self-defeating if Trump is the only coordination point powerful enough to actually deliver meaningful setbacks to the woke coalition. If we had compromised and not pushed Trump in this last election, even a non-Trump Republican victory would likely have resulted in unbroken Woke advances, simply because very few of the plausible Republican candidates are willing to do what is necessary to contest the culture war, and none to the degree Trump brings to the table.
And it should be emphasized that the sauce here isn't, for the most part, Trump himself or the choices he personally makes. It's Trump as a Schelling point for war rather than surrender. Sell him out, and the people coordinating our end of the sale will absolutely, obviously sell us next. Republicans like myself stick with Trump because we see no viable alternative.
[EDIT] - an amusing note for Massie in particular is that his campaign apparently sent out an advert today, using an old endorsement given by Trump in 2022 to try to fool voters into thinking that Trump was endorsing him now, rather than his opponent. One plays the cards one has, I suppose.
1990's PC ended because leftist activism shifted from social issues (and Palestine) to economic and environmental issues (and Palestine). After the Battle of Seattle in 1999, all the cool kids were trying to stop the WTO, and actually devoting your life to campaigning against domestic racism, sexism etc. was cringe. The same happens in reverse after the failure of Occupy around 2011. I am less aware of trends in lefty youth activism than I was when I was an active student Lib Dem, but with hindsight it seems plausible that there was another flippening driven by the failure of summer-of-Floyd BLM activism and the 2020 Democratic primary - the cool kids attacking the Biden administration from the left were doing so over economics or climate, not over insufficient wokeness.
So "woke is over", if it is, in the sense that the activist energy on the left has shifted elsewhere, which also means that people like Matthew Yglesias who were never entirely comfortable with wokeness are more able to express less-woke views while remaining lefties in good standing.
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I don't think that woke is over. However, I do think that woke has been dealt serious body blows in the last few years and is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point.
It's not just that Trump won despite being widely considered both by wokes and non-wokes to represent a repudiation of wokism.
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet. Non-wokes successfully created myriads of their own websites. Woke didn't even manage to destroy 4chan. Non-woke took over X. Race realism, actual racism, anti-immigration stances, and open misogyny are now common on mainstream social media. Even on Reddit a few non-woke positions can be seen: for example, being against mass immigration is common on /r/europe, even while the sub sticks to woke positions on all other major issues.
In addition to this, woke overreached on policing and affirmative action. It is now common to see Trump-hating Democratic Party voters on city subreddits support strong policing against street crime and vagrancy. City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
Even back in 2020, California Proposition 16, which would have made certain banned kinds of affirmative action legal, failed to pass. In San Francisco in 2021 a public backlash caused the school board to scrap a plan to rename a bunch of schools for woke reasons.
Woke also overreached on trans issues. Peak trans activism is over. Woke pronouns are starting to seem like a brief, now-dated fad. Still in use, but much less talked about these days, and they seem to be of a certain time period.
None of this is to say that woke has been defeated. It will probably rise again in some form, and relatively softer versions of woke continue to have strong influence in institutions. But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
To be fair, one of the reasons why woke is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point is precisely because many people all over the place who thought that it would become overwhelmingly powerful took action to try to stop it.
Case in point, I suspect this issue is still a bit of a kill-shot. Corner a congresscritter before midterms and ask them "Yes/No, should the government pay for sex changes for illegal immigrant rapists that we can't deport?" I think a lot of the (D)'s running for office still can't bring themselves to say no, even if it costs them.
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Woke did fantastic at censoring the internet. They silenced loads of people, they broke up organizations, they debanked people, the works. Elon bought X, and they went out of their way to try and ensure the purchase did as much damage to him as possible. And if Trump had lost the election, I'm quite confident they would be well into the process of destroying his businesses and personal fortune at this very moment, and the censorship would have returned at full strength. Likewise the other tech companies; they hedged when it looked like Trump had momentum, and when he won they bent the knee. Had he lost, the censorship would have simply continued to ratchet up.
None of this is guesswork. Europe is not shy about announcing their intentions for censorship of the internet, nor of providing practical demonstrations of how their system works. Democrats publicly announced their intention to create a similar regime in America, and were well on their way to doing so when Trump won.
This is true, and the massive violence spike that killed ~8,000 black Americans slacked off. And yet, the officials they voted for are largely still in place, and still executing as much of the decarceration agenda as they think they can get away with.
Woke owns the schools, and a large plurality, possibly an outright majority of those staffing the schools are either true believers in trans ideology or unwilling to impede the true believers in any way. Ditto the medical field, from what I've seen. The activists are somewhat quieter because they don't at this moment have the Federal Government as a megaphone. Nothing I have seen indicates to me that they or their coalition have moderated in any way, nor that Blue Tribe is any closer to cutting them loose. Instead, Blue Tribe will do what it did under Biden: claim woke is over and nothing's happening, while providing their movement limitless resources and the full backing of every major social instutition.
The problem is not woke overwhelming the country. The problem is whether, in the process of preventing such overwhelm, the country survives in any meaningful way.
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Woke via the UK Foreign Office and the JIDF have managed to enshittify /pol/ into an almost unusable state. Thankfully somewhat too late because the culture that spawned there and on 4chan in general has spread enough through the internet for this not to matter too much.
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That was a bit of a fluke though. It wouldn't have happened if a mentally unstable billionaire didn't start musing about buying it, and porgressives haven't committed unforced error of actually compelling him through court to buy it, because they thought that will own him somehow.
I'm also anxious about how long it will last. The EU is constantly seething over it. Right now Musk is safe because he's in the US, but if the administration changes, they'll likely go after him, and could easily cause twitter to fall back to friendly hands again.
Sure, but "peak trans activism" was an absolute blitzkrieg, were they could roll into any institution unopposed. Now they're finally getting pushback, but that doesn't mean they lost.
This is something that drives me crazy about the discourse about wokeness. In the blitzkrieg era we were met with denials that anything is happening to begin with, "Woke/SJW is just a boogeyman", etc. They took over essentially every major institution during that time, and now that they stumbled and had to slow down somewhat, the same people who were denying their existence are now declaring the fight to be over.
Seen this thread, out of curiosity?
No, somehow this one has not popped up on my feeds.
Not surprising, for my part I've seen an interview with a Ukrainian mother that moved to California because of the war, and had her daughter put into foster care and transed. Blue states are still full steam ahead with this stuff.
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Woke ended in 2019 after the presidential campaigns of Beto O'Rourke and Kirsten Gillebrand fizzled out before the primary season even started. The final nail was put in the coffin when the Democrats nominated Joe Biden, possibly the least woke candidate in the race apart from possibly Michael Bennett. After that, woke was no longer an identifiable phenomenon and a boogeyman that stood for whatever conservatives were opposing at the moment.
What definition of "woke" are you using that doesn't include the Great Uprising of 2020? Or that there's still not a single elected Democrat willing to say anything less than trans maximalism.
Eh, maybe Fetterman has. So there's one but also kind of a joke.
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...I understand that this place is corrosive to the angels of our better nature, and I freely admit to significant corrosion myself. Is this your genuine viewpoint, or are you trolling me?
It's my genuine viewpoint. I get the impression that most Republicans are stuck in a bubble where they don't pay attention to what rank and file Democrats actually do, or who they actually vote for. There were a few woke reps who managed to get elected in 2020, and a couple more from earlier, but a lot of them were primaried out before the Biden administration ended. The 2020 primary showed that beyond certain limited areas, there was no national appetite for woke politics. Black church ladies aren't woke. Neither are Hispanics, by and large. Suburban Democrats aren't. Rural granola types aren't. Wokeism only ever appealed to a certain segment of urban voter, who Republicans try to paint as being representative of the party, precisely because they're an easy target.
If woke had died in 2019, we wouldn't have have had Admiral Rachael, or the Nuclear crossdressing thief, or Jackson nominated for the supreme court. Woke lost its uncontested superiority, but that didn't diminish its hold over true believers.
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Your claim that woke ended in 2019 makes me think that our definitions of woke are completely different. You seem to be defining woke as a temporary electoral strategy used by a few Democratic candidates. So, once Biden won and the most aggressively progressive campaigns fizzled out you determined that woke politics died.
All it really showed was that kind of excessive campaigning was electorally toxic. It does not show that the underlying ideology disappeared. Democrats are smart enough now to lick their fingers and gauge which way the wind is blowing so they've backed off, but our elites have not. It means the Democrats rejected the most explicit version of it. Meanwhile, the institutional version continued spreading. What I see as woke did not peak in 2019. It peaked after 2019, especially around 2020–2022, when DEI, intersectionality, equity policies, and identity based moral grandstanding became much more popular across our mainstream.
You say suburban Democrats are not woke, yet suburban Democrats are mostly college educated, and higher education is one of the main providers of this worldview. Suburban Dems may not act like campus activists anymore (unless you're in Somaliapolis), but a lot of them still support the institutional assumptions like equity, disparate outcomes as proof of discrimination, etc.
Also, Black church ladies and Hispanics pursuing their own self-interests are not indicators that woke is dead. Most voters aren't ideologues. Again, it's the institutions, and that is where this worldview lives. Higher and general ed, HR departments, foundations, activist nonprofits, media organizations, school administrations, professional associations, entertainment companies, and bureaucratic agencies.
Public backlash eventually arrived and these institutions did not willingly abandon wokeism. Some backed off. Others have begun to repaint it. They rename things. "Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” becomes “Academic Culture and Community”, ideological screening can just be worded as “values alignment.” Their goal remains the same, it's just that the strategy just needs to be updated.
Woke became less useful for political campaigns, but that is very from it ending. What ended was the open branding. The institutional ideology remains, and it is adapting to embed itself more quietly.
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Nah, they are. The suburban Dem women get their politics from TikTok now, and they believe the septum piercings.
Their husbands secretly voted for Trump.
Suburbanites comprise a large portion of my social circle, ranging in age from 20s to 70s, and I can assure you that none of these things is true.
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BLM2 was in 2020 and there wasn't a single rank-and-file Democrat that opposed it. Every single Dem-sympathizing poster here expressed no objection to it, and the majority were outright sympathetic. Biden had age limits on gender reassignment procedures abolished. Then there's the question of if it even makes sense to judge thia by which politician gets elected. You can claim it was no specific politicians's fault that CRT got shoved into school curricula and mandatory corporate workshops, but that just shows your entire approach to this is flawed.
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More popular than before, but still not that popular among Republicans. I think that the average Republican is at least not anti-Israel (and even some of the ones who dislike Israel hate Muslims even more), does not actually care about the size of government at all but just occasionally mouths words about wanting small government, and believes that Trump was not involved with anything bad having to do with Epstein.
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