Donald Trump’s GOP desperation move
Donald Trump boasted yet again on Twitter, without much evidence, that he’s facing record approval in the Republican Party, with a 95% approval rating. This seems a bit high because polls show around 10% of Republican voters supporting Trump’s impeachment. If his number was this high, at the very least, you’d expect his supporters to not worry about his chances of winning the primary in one of the states his campaign is focusing on for re-election, but that’s exactly what the Republican Party of Minnesota seems to fear.
Even though he has three primary challengers, the state’s party has all but declared Trump the winner. They haven’t cancelled the primary, but in a startlingly Orwellian turn of events, they’ve decided to only offer Trump’s name on the ballot as a choice for voters. This is something you typically see in autocracies who like to boast that they have ‘elections’ like everybody else.
Just so there’s no mistake about it, the state’s party chair Jennifer Carnahan announced her decision as a way to ensure Donald Trump takes Minnesota’s 10 electoral votes for president in 2020 in a statement to the The Star Tribune on Thursday. Voters won’t even have the option of writing in candidates and party delegates must pledge their votes to Donald Trump. Carnahan claims to be doing this because Trump is extremely popular in Minnesota, even though polls show him losing to every major Democratic frontrunner. This is largely wishful thinking on Carnahan’s part because Minnesota is one of the states the Trump campaign is targeting for re-election, and critically needs if Trump is to have any hope of making up for his overall sinking popularity nationwide.
This move will likely be challenged in the courts, and hopefully doesn’t have much chance of standing, but the problem is that it’s just one of many ways that the GOP has tarnished our democracy, and may not be so easy to repair after he leaves office, as a practice that would have struck us as downright un-American, is slowly happening here. Campaign officials have pressed for changes to the primaries in 37 states in order to secure a Trump win in the primary.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making