| Bofferbrauer2 said: I do expect that if the Republican party embraces Trumpism in the future even if Donald won't be reelected, then a number of Republican politicians of all levels will switch to either Democrats or Libertarian party out of spite or disgust. A couple already did, but if the trend of the party moving further and further to the right continues, I expect this to accelerate. |
I agree. This definitely isn't a sustainable path for the Republican Party. BUT I also look at Mike Garcia's 10-point victory in that special election that took place in California the other month and see a model for a post-Trump Republican resurgence that will, in fact, likely happen. Mike Garcia's victory shows that the keys to this Republican resurgence will be...
1) Moderation. Embracing more diverse sorts of candidates and moving back toward neoconservatism instead of the current diehard isolationist nationalism of the Trump brand. That's the only way for Republicans to win back the suburbs that they traditionally have won but are on a losing trajectory with now, under Trump. They can't keep thinking of rural Americans as the only people worth appealing to. And when it comes to candidate diversity, I'm not just talking about race diversity, incidentally. I'm telling you that there will likely be an underappreciated opportunity for Republicans to regain their footing among female voters under a Joe Biden-run White House because the fact of the matter is that the Democrats really will go too far along certain trajectories (like gender identity and maybe even prostitution and these ever so cutesy "Karen" statutes you're starting to see and so forth) for many women.
AND...
2) A New Generation. The Democrats have made inroads in recent years, particularly in those key suburban parts of the country (53% of Americans live in suburban areas, so this isn't some small subset of the population we're talking about!) in no small part owing to the freshness of the faces the Democrats have been able to offer up during the Trump era. Against entrenched politicians, the Democrats have often fielded just ordinary Americans from backgrounds like teacher, nurse, flight attendant, pilot, local TV news reporter, scientist, doctor, small business owner, etc. -- average professionals with no background in politics. Inevitably, that whole dynamic just simply has a populist vibe to it. Mike Garcia's large victory on the Republican side the other month in that special election was rooted in that same basic dynamic. After this fall, I expect that most office-holders in this country will be Democrats. That reality is going to force the Republicans to recruit a new generation of talent, and that will tend to feed into this populist vibe of ordinary people challenging established office-holders I'm talking about. The GOP needs a new generation that's more in-touch with ordinary people's priorities too. I mean when I looked at the headlines Thursday evening and saw that we just added a record 63,400 new coronavirus infections in a single day in this country on Thursday and set a new record daily death toll from covid here in my state of Texas (a Republican stronghold...in theory!) and then saw what Trump and Republican office-holders were tweeting about instead over that same day -- the need to "preserve our history" by keeping Confederate statues up and something about the NBA and China or something -- I couldn't help thinking to myself that it's kind of stunning how completely divorced from the thought processes and priorities of average people the Republican Party has become over the course of the Trump era. They're living in a completely different mental universe that has absolutely nothing to do with what average people are concerned about right now. Their party needs new candidates who are capable of figuring out what real problems are.
These things are likely to happen for the 2022 midterm elections. The truth is that the party of a president almost always loses seats in midterm elections; especially that first one. One can plausibly expect Biden to have a roughly six-month "honeymoon" period where he and the governing Democrats are more popular than not, but the ideological trajectory of things will likely have already begun to shift by the time that Biden assumes office. (This is all assuming Biden wins, obviously!) This is just how the cycle works, and the Republicans can screw it up by not doing the two things I just went through. They're gonna have to learn something from all the defeats of the Trump years to regain their footing. They probably will...in the short run...like for a couple of years...but we'll see!
Last edited by Jaicee - on 11 July 2020
