Erick Erickson has been on a campaign to claim real people for the Republicans. For instance, today’s advance is against Twitter, a platform for which I have little sentiment:
Eric Adams won in New York City [this is premature, but I’ll stipulate to it as the polls had him in the lead going in to last night. -haw]. Had you followed along on social media, you’d have presumed he would lose. He had two percent of Andrew Yang’s Twitter support and Andrew Yang was the first candidate to drop out last night after the results started coming in. …
The data more and more shows Twitter is not real life. Election results are showing those who equate Twitter with reality will wake up to cold hard truths on Election Day. Journalists, if they have an ounce of self-reflective abilities, should realize they need to spend less time searching the thoughts of Mordor on Twitter and get out into real America.
He bases some of this on this:
Pew Research has done an in-depth report on Twitter. It turns out that Twitter is overwhelmingly not of the left, but of the very left. Were Twitter a state, it would be the most progressive state in the nation — further left than Hawaii or Vermont — and if it were a congressional district, it’d be the most Democratic congressional district in the country.
All of which ignores one little elephant: the Elephant named Trump. It’s indisputable that Trump, as much as anyone could, dominated Twitter until he was banned from the platform.
Shall we apply the Erickson’s judgment to the Twitter Trump followers, even Trump himself, and deem him and them as unrepresentative of conservatives?
Erickson can jump up and down as much as he likes, claiming that “real people” are Republicans, but the polls suggest otherwise: not many people like having insurrections happen to their country, and there’s no reasonable way to interpret the actions of most of the Congressional GOP as not being supportive of the insurrection, to which I’ll add denying the realities, as discovered by the FBI, of the insurrection amounts to supporting the insurrection.
Since I’m here, I’ll also note he takes a shot at ranked-choice voting (RCV):
Lastly, the popular wave of rank choice voting, which will cause New York City to spend weeks determining a winner of the Democrat primary and ultimately the mayor, got started by academics and was picked up by the horde of Mordor rushing across Twitter. Everyone on Twitter thinks it is a good idea. New York City embraced it because the nerds said everyone on Twitter liked it. Now the city realizes it probably should not have done it. Too late.
Minneapolis, just down the road for us, uses RCV, and I have yet to hear any complaints. Quite honestly, while this is not a hard and fast rule, my suspicion is that if you don’t like RCV, you may be an extremist. RCV is, I think, a path towards victories by moderates. The capture of a political party by extremists, along with the implementation of toxic team politics, a subject I’ve discussed too much, is not sufficient to capture an election in a vulnerable district where RCV is used. Let a moderate enter a race and get their name on the ballot – or even run a Murkowski-esqe write-in campaign – and they’re likely to capture the first votes of the moderates and the second votes of the extremists. But the moderates may not vote for the extremists at all, leaving the moderate with all the votes on that side of the spectrum.
And leave extremists, like Erickson and most of the GOP leadership, sitting on their ass at the bus station, thumb out, looking for that ride out of town.
Erickson is tasked with helping make the Republicans look good and win elections, and he has a long ways to go.
