Three More Signs Republicans Are in Trouble

Close to two decades ago I decided the Republican Party was headed towards moral bankruptcy as Christofascists were foolishly voted onto positions on city and county committees with many existing members foolishly/cynically believing they could control the science denying, religious extremists, many of whom descended from segregationists.  Time proved that the unwashed cavalierly voted onto these committees were beyond control and they cancer they represented has now spread across the Party and, perhaps belatedly, a majority of Americans are seemingly waking up to the reality of the incompetent, morally challenged horror show the GOP has become. I have long said that the GOP cannot be reformed from within - the members of the Lincoln Project seem to have come to a similar conclusion - and that only electoral disaster will force change on the Party. While Donald Trump has no doubt helped showcase the ugliness of today's GOP, the hopefully looming electoral debacle facing the GOP will impact many others in the Party who prostituted themselves to Trump and tossed aside the needs and wishes of the majority of Americans as they have pandered to Trump, white supremacists and religious extremists.  A column in the Washington Post looks at signs the GOP may be about to reap what it has sown.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans are in deep trouble. It is not simply President Trump’s atrocious national and state polling numbers. It is not merely the growing list of incumbent Senate Republicans facing difficult elections. (Five incumbents are in toss-up seats, according to the Cook Political Report; four are in the next-worst category of “Lean Republican.”) There are three new signs suggesting the Republicans’ grip on power is draining like sand out of an hourglass.

First, for all of Trump’s support among Republicans (not 94 percent as he claims, but generally in the high 80s), there is stunning evidence of what we suspected was underway in 2018. It is not so much that Republicans are abandoning Trump but that voters are abandoning the Republican Party, and now adding to the anti-Trump vote. Gallup reports:

Since January, Americans’ party preferences have shifted dramatically in the Democratic Party’s direction. What had been a two-percentage-point Republican advantage in U.S. party identification and leaning has become an 11-point Democratic advantage, . . . In June alone, there was a three-point increase in Democratic identification and leaning, and a corresponding five-point drop in Republican identification and leaning.

The flight from the GOP just in June, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, suggests millions of Americans may have decided it was unacceptable to identify as Republicans. The implications are ominous for Republicans up and down the ticket. Per Gallup: “Four months before Election Day, Democrats appear to be as strong politically now as they were in 2018 when they reclaimed the majority in the House of Representatives and gained seven governorships they previously did not hold,” . . . . “If the strong current Democratic positioning holds through Election Day, Democrats could build off those 2018 successes to possibly win the presidency and Senate in 2020.”

Second, without directly challenging Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is abandoning Trump’s stances emphatically and quickly. Over the past few weeks, he has become a poster-boy for mask-wearing, bemoaning those who have politicized the issue. He is also caving on the next stimulus bill. . . . She [Nancy Pelosi] also noted that McConnell knows how to read the polls and that he listens to his members. The momentum is with Democrats, and he better hop on board — quickly.

Third, Republicans are panicking over money, as well they should. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Democratic candidates in the 11 most competitive Senate races collectively raised $67.3 million in the second quarter of the year, $20.5 million more than their Republican counterparts, according to fundraising reports filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission. The total includes two Republicans who gave almost $6.5 million to their own campaigns.” At least one Republican operative is living in the real world, telling the Journal, “We’re scared to death by what we see.”

The House picture is no brighter. ABC News reports, “House Democrats are outpacing their own previous fundraising records, bringing in nearly $40 million in the second quarter — a signal of both the party’s enthusiasm in the final stretch of the cycle ahead of November and the difficult road ahead for the GOP seeking to take back the majority.” What’s more, reliable third-party groups that normally give big money to Republicans have not been opening their wallets.

Former vice president Joe Biden (never known as a prodigious fundraiser) has been raking it in. The New York Times reports: “Mr. Biden’s campaign announced on Thursday that he entered July with $242 million in the bank, up from less than $60 million at the beginning of April. He still has less money than Mr. Trump, who reported $295 million, but the cash gap is suddenly far less daunting.”

To recap: The GOP is shrinking, Republicans are scrambling to get on the right side of stimulus, and the fundraising numbers indicate donors are figuring out the party will lose big. At some point, all of this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — and a big blue wave.

Let's hope the trend continues and that the GOP suffers horrific electoral losses in November.  It's the only way there will be a chance for a remaking of the Party that will include jettisoning white supremacists and evangelical extremists.

Young Voters Keep Moving to the Left on Social Issues

In other good news - unless one is a Christofascist or an older Republican - are findings that among the younger generations, voters are moving to the left on social issues and rejecting the ignorance and bigotry that defines the political and social right.   Better yet, even young Republicans are moving away from the dogma of their elders making it increasingly difficult for Christofascists to inflict their hate and bigotry on society.  The other good news found by the Pew Research survey is that Donald Trump is accelerating the exodus of younger generations from the GOP.  For years I have been arguing that the GOP has placed short term gain ahead of a long term strategy, hoping that disenfranchising voters and gerrymandering districts would compensate for policies viewed as toxic by growing numbers of Americans, especially the younger generations. As the older racists and religious extremist so important to the GOP die off, there simply will not be enough voters to replace them.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on the survey findings:

As a self-described political conservative, Reagan Larson might seem to be a natural fit for the Republican Party. The 19-year-old college student from South Dakota grew up in a Catholic household that objected to same-sex marriage, and she remains firmly opposed to abortion.

But in many ways, that is where the ideological similarities end. Ms. Larson, a dual major in biology and Spanish at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., does not oppose the legalization of marriage equality. She views climate change as undeniable, believes “immigrants make our country richer,” and disagrees with her parents on the need for a border wall.

Ms. Larson is part of Generation Z, one of the most ethnically diverse and progressive age groups in American history. People born after 1996 tend to espouse similar views to the age cohort just ahead of them, the Millennials, but they are far more open to social change than older generations have been, according to the findings of a new report by the Pew Research Center. The findings mark a shift that could substantially reshape the nation’s political and economic landscape. [O]nly 30 percent of Generation Z respondents said they approved of President Trump’s performance; more than half believed humans were fueling climate change; and 70 percent said they wanted the government to do more to solve the nation’s problems. Those views roughly mirror attitudes held by Millennials, and together, the two age groups may add up to a powerful voting bloc at odds with Republican orthodoxy, political scientists say. “This should be an alert to the Republican Party as they think about generational replacement,” said Elizabeth Bennion, a professor of political science at Indiana University South Bend.

Each succeeding generation of Americans tends to be more progressive than those that came before, Ms. Bennion noted, a trend that potentially poses a long-term threat to the Republican Party’s power.

“If there isn’t a will to change within the party,” she said, “it could become permanently in the minority moving forward.”

Democrats of all ages tend to align fairly closely on major social and political issues, but the report highlights a sharp generational divide among Republicans. For example, more than half of the youngest Republicans surveyed said that racial and ethnic diversity was good for American society . . . . Young Republicans are also more likely to approve of same-sex marriage and accept transgender people.

Michael Schaefer, 18, a politically conservative college freshman from Youngstown, Ohio, said he was in the sixth grade when some classmates came out as gay, and had a number of transgender students as friends in high school.  “For over half my life, I’ve been shown the other side of sexuality and gender,” he said. “I don’t care about their sex or gender, I just care about the individual.”

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Americans’ political and social views do not tend to drift to the right as they age, according to Kim Parker, who oversees research into social demographic trends at the Pew Research Center.

“The differences we see across age groups have more to do with the unique historical circumstances in which they come of age,” she said, noting that demographers have not seen a generational pattern of growing more conservative or more Republican over time.

The Republican Party has lost younger Americans like Travis Gaither, though, as it has moved farther to the right on issues like immigration, gun control and climate change.

Mr. Gaither, who grew up in Tennessee, described his parents as “typical southern white Republicans” who belong to two country clubs and are active in the Chamber of Commerce. But Mr. Gaither, 20, was chairman of the High School Democrats of Tennessee during his senior year, a political transformation fueled by his liberal social views and cemented by his outrage over Mr. Trump’s hard-line policies.

The Pew study found that two-thirds of Mr. Gaither’s generation believe, as he does, that black people are treated less fairly than whites in the United States.

“I feel like I’ve moved toward the left, as the Republican Party has shifted toward the right,” he said.

Good!  Let's hope the phenomenon accelerates and that the GOP goes the way of the Whigs sooner as opposed to later.

Ex-GOP Chairman: Republicans Have Abandoned their Principles.

The exodus of traditional, moral, thinking Republicans from the Republican Party - which in my view has become a moral cesspool - continues.  One can only hope that as these individuals leave the GOP they will either (i) stay home on election day in November, 2018, or (ii) hold their noses and vote for Democrats.  As I have long argued, only through sustained electoral losses will today's Republican Party either wither away to permanent minority status or find the moral gumption to eject the Christofascists - who, in my view, triggered the party's descent into madness - and the white supremacists from the party ranks.  Under Trump/Pence, the Republican Party has become nothing less than evil and dangerous.  USA Today has an op-ed by a former Ohio POP county chairman who sums up why so many decent people are leaving the GOP.  Hate, bigotry and the open embrace of lies and ignorance are not the principles the GOP once stood for.  Here are column highlights: 

My tweet last month was simple enough:  “I remain a proud conservative and Republican, but I resigned today as Belmont County Ohio GOP Chairman. I did so as a matter of conscience, and my sense of duty.”

That was all I wrote. Little did I know 6.2 million people would view this otherwise innocuous tweet. Not Beyoncé-level worthy, admittedly. But it was nonetheless remarkable that so many souls cared that a Republican county chairman, from a rural county in southeastern Ohio, had resigned to protest President Donald Trump’s capitulation in Helsinki. Interview requests from Fox, CNN, MSNBC, BBC and NPR poured in, as did quotes in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was even mentioned in a Vanity Fair piece.

Amid the sudden notoriety, I quickly realized my resignation had become a political Rorschach test. To some, I was a patriot, standing tall in a true Profiles in Courage moment. To many others (i.e. most Republicans), I was traitor, a RINO or an obvious "Never Trumper." 

As the Twitter war raged, I saw my fellow Republicans, the heirs to Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution, repudiating the very foundational and aspirational principles he used to truly "Make America Great Again" in the 1980s.

I looked in the distance and thought I saw Reagan’s ‘Shining City on a Hill,’ so I headed that way. It shone in the early morning, glowing in freedom’s unmistakable light. It was fortified, not with a wall, but with the strength that comes from moral clarity, the rule of law and the unwavering demand for truth. It prospered from its embrace of free markets, equal opportunity for all and the celebration of human aspiration.

Sadly, today, President Trump would beat Ronald W. Reagan, head-to-head, in a Republican primary — and I’m not sure it would be close.

Republicans, do you care that Ronald Reagan would no longer be welcome in Donald Trump’s Republican Party? According to Gallup, 89% of my fellow Republicans are just fine with this reality, as they approve of the president's job performance. In the space of a generation, have 89% of Republicans really forgotten the powerful force for good that was the Reagan Revolution? Perhaps even more disheartening, this same 89% are content, if not intent, on driving away anyone not fully on board on the Trump Train, branding them traitors to America in the process.

Well,” as Reagan would begin, to my fellow Republicans, to those who hate me because of what I did, to those who consider me a RINO or worse, I say to you: You need me, and people like me. Proud conservatives. Proud Reagan Republicans. Even more so, President Trump and Congressional Republicans need people like me to survive both the midterms and in 2020. The electoral math is that simple. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” Or, has hate already won, and Reagan is lost?