The Hill delivers the view of a former Republican state party chair:
The new agitators, all elected to their posts after Trump won the White House, are a reflection of the priorities of a Republican base that is interested more in fealty to the deposed president than in standard conservative doctrine.
“State party chairs are elected by the grassroots. They are not accountable to the elected officials, they are accountable to the grassroots, and if they don’t do what the grassroots want them to do, they won’t be chair for very long,” said Chris Vance, a former chairman of the Washington State Republican Party who became an independent shortly after Trump won election. “Today’s base of the Republican Party is, are you loyal to Trump? This activism of Trumpist state party chairs is driven by the same thing that’s driving the entire party.”
Given the tendency of non-Trumpist Republicans to leave an increasingly toxic Party, I think we can expect to see this trend to continue, a trend that will terminate only when the Republican Party ceases to have national relevance, or some facet of the former President is revealed that completely discredits him in the eyes of his base – if that’s even possible.
Perhaps the only such revelation would be that Trump is a debtor and not a billionaire, nothing more than a grifter. And I have no certainty even that would convince more than a sliver of the Trumpist base to desert, as Trump has trained the base to dismiss any unsettling facts as mere fake news.
So I expect the state GOP parties to simply become more toxic in most cases. More cases of toxicity are provided by Steve Benen here.
