Why the GOP May Lose Everything

All of these Republicans need to be forced into retirement.

I try to not get overly optimistic, but the 2020 elections have the possibility of  dealing the Republican Party and Donald Trump a horrific defeat and loss of control of both houses of Congress and the White House.  If it comes to pass, it will be most deserved and a repudiation of an agenda that has benefited the very wealthy and in the final analysis little or nothing to the vast majority of Americans. Indeed, the entire GOP game plan has been to use racism and religious extremism to dupe working class and middle class Americans to vote against their own best interests. The gambit worked in 2016, but signs indicate that 2020 may prove to be a different ball game, especially with the coronavirus pandemics underscoring the need for the very programs and policies the GOP wants to destroy. A column in the Washington Post looks at the rapidly changing outlook for the GOP come December.  If the economy continues to suffer and there is a second wave of the virus, things could get even worse for Republicans - and deservedly so.  Here are excerpts:

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.

In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.

And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”

Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”

If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.

And they are not the only challengers with a decent shot at Republican seats. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has been running ahead of Republican Sen. Martha McSally, and Republicans face vulnerabilities in Iowa, Georgia, possibly Kansas and perhaps even in South Carolina. McConnell, though favored, faces a spirited opponent in Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. Only one Democratic incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is an underdog. Having disastrously bungled the pandemic, Trump is not only falling well behind former vice president Joe Biden in the polls; he could also be creating a tidal wave that would give Democrats unified control of the federal government’s elected branches.

Hickenlooper and Gideon are running in states Trump lost in 2016, and the president’s increasing vulnerability in Arizona and North Carolina could open the way for Kelly and Cunningham.

My conversations with four of the top Senate challengers suggested that the coronavirus crisis has reinforced core arguments that helped the Democrats win the House in 2018, particularly around access to health care, while also increasing the saliency of inequality — in both economic and health outcomes — as a mainstream concern.

At the same time, Trump’s brutal belligerence has turned Democratic candidates into missionaries of concord. This allows them to be implicitly critical of the president and reach out to his one-time supporters at the same time.

If the GOP does lose everything, it will be because the Trumpian circus-plus-horror-show is entirely off-key for an electorate that has so much to be serious about.