Erick Erickson, as it happens, is located on the ground in Georgia. Yesterday, he predicted a Perdue victory, while the other race would be too close to call – based on what he was hearing up close and personal.
This seemed quite reasonable to me.
Late last night, though, with disaster beginning to peek over the hill for Republicans …
Over three-quarters of Republicans who voted said they think the November election was stolen. The President’s campaign actually went on the air in Georgia in the last few days to tell Republicans that November was stolen. The Georgia Republican Party Chairman has been all over TV and the internet telling voters the November election was stolen.
Turns out Republican voters took it all seriously, which I could not conceive would be so.
Erickson’s mistake is to think there are Republican voters, full stop. There are not. There are the standard Republican voters – many who rejected Trump – and there are the Trump Party voters. They may be counted as Republicans, but that’s the mistake of thinking Trump is, or was, a Republican. He’s not. His allegiance is to himself, not to the Party or its tenets. His voters know that.
And that means the speculation that, without Trump on the ballot, Trump voters might not show up, is turning out to be true.
Trump is a meteor. He attracts crowds wherever he goes, because he espouses positions which appeal to a certain part of the electorate. But, once he passes, they disappear from the elections. And, like any meteor encountering atmosphere, he’s decaying. His popularity within his own subculture is very slowly decaying; but within the Republican Party, who embraced him because he claimed to be Republican, it’ll continue to decay faster.
I expected two Republican victories from these runoff elections – close, perhaps, but not all that close. Instead, Warnock is projected to win, and Ossoff has a small lead. My suspicion is that enough Republican voters, turned off by Perdue and Loeffler’s allegiance to Trump, didn’t show up, or even voted Democratic. And the Trump contingent, convinced by their Leader’s incessant whining about non-existent cheating, chose not to come out.
And that leads to the toxicity of the Republican Party / Trump Party alliance. The old line Republican Party began disappearing back in the time of Gingrich – at least! – and, with the arrival of Ryan and his generation, came to the peak of ideological purity.
Their failure, which came from the team politics tenet of the Party, led to Trump. He promised results in line with conservative and far-right ideologies. But he’s a pathological narcissist, possibly the worst we’ve ever seen on the American political stage. A rare beastie, Republican politicos continually missed their predictions concerning his behavior, but found themselves constricted by their tenet of team politics to trundle along behind. Thus we have Senator Collins (R-ME), for example, proclaiming that President Trump had learned his lesson, following his impeachment.
She was so, so wrong.
As I wrote yesterday, we’re seeing the Republican Party fragmenting, although it may be more accurate to say that the moral depravity of the Republican Party has been exposed by the infiltration of the Trump voters, and those decent members of the Republican Party are now ex-members.
And I expect these two entities, a crippled Republican Party and a Trump Party, or “barstool blowhards” as I call them, to continue to flame out and diminish. The team politics tenet will serve to keep the Republican Party alive, much to the horror of true conservatives; but what is the fate of the Trump Party if he vamooses for a country without extradition, or dies (he’s quite old, after all)? Don Trump, Jr., is no Donald Trump, Sr.
We live in interesting times.
