It’s like they’re not even trying anymore
Republicans lost so badly last night, in so many states, with such weak turnout, they don’t even have it in them to yell “rigged.” They’re just sulking, and rethinking their life choices after they followed Donald Trump into a pit of total failure.
It’s like their spirit has been broken upon realizing that when they hitched their wagons to this broken loser Trump, who was only ever in it for himself, they lost sight of things like strategy and viability. They became convinced they could just act like wackos while chanting Trump’s name all day, and it would make them more politically powerful than ever. And now they see that it predictably did the precise opposite.
Seriously, there’s no strategy here. We keep hearing about how the Republicans’ plan is to adopt unpopular extremist positions but then make up for it by cheating. But if so, how’s that working for them? Cheating didn’t help them last night, that’s for sure. Nor did it help them in 2022, or 2020 before that. To succeed at cheating, you first have to come close enough for cheating to be able to make up the difference. And the Republican’s “strategy” of chanting Trump’s name, while doing nothing to actually try to win, isn’t getting them within cheating distance.
Look at last night’s results. Andy Beshear won in Kentucky by more than five points. The Ohio referendum won by double digits. The Democrats won the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race by about seven points. These are the kinds of losing margins where 1) you can’t make up for it by cheating, and 2) you can’t fundraise off your idiot base by convincing them the Democrats were cheating. At these margins you just lose.
It really does feel like the Republicans – both the party itself and the voting base – aren’t even trying anymore. RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel loses election cycle after election cycle, but they don’t bother to replace her. The Republican Party’s positions on social issues are good for loss after loss, but they don’t even try to rein those positions in at all. And they’re still insisting upon making a fully broken down Trump the face of their party, even as he succumbs to dementia and is on his way to prison.
This isn’t going to stay like this forever. At some point the Republican Party – or whatever right wing party might end up replacing it – will find its way back to prioritizing things like strategy and viability. We have no way of predicting how or when that will happen, so we have to remain vigilant and keep putting in the work under the presumption that every election cycle will be a close one. But for the moment it’s remarkable how the Republicans just seem to have given up trying to win.
