Voters to GOP: We Dislike MAGA Candidates and Their Agenda

With the projected win of Democrat Katie Hobbs over the delusional Kari Lake in the contest for governor of Arizona all of the worse 2020 election deniers and most extreme Trump backed candidates have gone down to defeat.   A rational political party would be quickly taking stock and adjusting its agenda in the face of such strong voter repudiation as suggested by a former Republican in  a column in The Atlantic.  Unfortunately, the Republican Party - especially its base which is dominated by "Christian" extremists, white supremacists and the least educated Americans - is anything but rational.  Thus, rather than select a moderate and sane individual for Speaker of the House should Republicans gain control of that chamber, we will likely see a Kevin McCarthy or other individual who will push MAGA priorities that will only further alienate a majority of voters.  In the Senate you have people like Josh Hawley calling for more extremism rather than moderation.   A majority of Americans want normalcy and stability and an end to the culture wars so dear to Christofascists.  Personally, I doubt the GOP will grasp that message and with luck for the rest of us, further weaken itself.   Here are column highlights from The Atlantic:

Liberals reacted to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 with dismay, horror—and curiosity. Reporters ventured to Trump counties to ask questions. Political scientists studied the voting effect of international trade. Hollywood made a movie out of J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

Liberals didn’t like what had happened—but for exactly that reason, they wanted to understand it. . . . . Survival depends upon adaptation. Adaptation depends upon learning.

The question after the 2022 midterms is: Can conservatives learn?

Through the Trump years, the Republican Party has organized itself as an anti-learning entity. Unwelcome information has been ignored or denied.  Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and by a worse margin than Mitt Romney had in 2012? Not interested: It was a historic landslide victory.

Trump never rose above 50 percent approval (in any credible poll) on any single day of his presidency? Not interested: All that matters is what his base thinks.

Republicans were crushed in 2018 in the highest midterm turnout of eligible voters since before the First World War? Not interested: The result showed only that voters wanted more Trump and more Trumpiness.

Trump got swamped by a margin of 8 million votes in 2020? . . . . No need to pay attention: After all, Rudy Giuliani and Dinesh D’Souza said the election was stolen! Besides, check out those Latino votes for Trump.

Democrats won two Senate seats in formerly bright-red Georgia after winning the state’s electoral votes in the presidential contest? Only a temporary setback; wait ’til next time. By then, Trump will have helped get elected a bunch of “America First” secretaries of state who will rewrite the rules so that a Democrat can never win again.

“Next time” is now. In every way you can measure, 2022 was a crushing repudiation—not only of Trump personally or of Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was corrupted, but of the larger Republican Party. For the first time since 1934, the party of the president lost not a single state legislature in a midterm year—and actually made gains in the Midwest: Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin [and Arizona]. Every last one of the candidates running for offices to control elections who endorsed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election went down in defeat . . .

A Democrat won a Trump district in Washington State from a MAGA Republican who, having primaried the moderate Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler out of the seat she won in 2020 by 13 points, drove away GOP voters by blaming the January 6 attack on the FBI and defending the attackers as “political prisoners.” Supporters of abortion rights won all six contests where the issue was on the ballot . . . .

So you’d think the time would be right for Fox News to organize some safaris of its own. Maybe the podcast hosts and newsletter writers who argued that “woke” politics was alienating former Democrats will ask why Republican authoritarianism and reactionary culture warring has even more offensively alienated their former voters.

Perhaps that soul-searching will happen—it’s early days. But if it does, it will be a break from past practice.

In their anti-learning culture, conservatives have come to view everything that happens, however unwelcome, as proof simply that the most extreme people were the most correct. . . . . Conservative pundits are gamely insisting that they did not really lose the 2022 elections but were once again cheated by a rigged system.

Should conservatives start noticing that they lag among unmarried women and the young? No, instead: Ridicule and insult unmarried women, especially the young. Having hooted and jeered Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush, and pushed Liz Cheney and other principled Republicans out of Congress, the right now expresses bafflement and outrage that those rejected leaders did not rally to help candidates who condoned the January 6 insurrection and opposed aid to Ukraine.

This year was one in which all the indicators seemed negative for the party of the president: right-track/wrong-track numbers, presidential approval ratings, and optimism about the future. Yet Biden’s party won and won and won again despite the negative indicators. Yes, for sure there were affirmative reasons to vote Democratic in 2022, but it’s hard to miss the strong smell here of a thorough repudiation, up and down the ballot, of the post-Trump Republican Party, of the January 6 insurrectionists, and of a cultural agenda that seems to many Americans regressive and repressive.

Amid the initial shock of these 2022 defeats, Senator Josh Hawley tweeted, “The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new.” He was right—but in exactly the opposite sense he intended. The Republican Party needs less of everything that authoritarian and reactionary Republicans such as Hawley champion, and more of the democracy and modernity that those Republicans have resisted.

The American electorate has been administering that lesson over and over. Republicans need at long last to open their ears to hear it, their mind to absorb it, and their heart to accept it.