2020 Election

[John Galt]

[Saz]

[John Galt]

gop is terrified of trump. they are terrified he will jump ship and tell them to go f**k die because they are No True Americans. this is why the republicans have been mostly dodgy about the election (although some have been openly seditious, such as pompeo). they need him around to win georgia

i think it's more likely before the election trump will blow up the GOP, and they deserve it.

[exploited]

It's weird because at this point, arresting and prosecuting members of a political party seems sensible.

[exploited]

Yeah, the Republicans are done. They have gone full cultist. Unbelievable to watch.

[John Galt]

Yeah there was a good article on this. I think the idea that the trumpist GOP is postmodern and obsessed with feelings rather than outcomes is spot f**k on

https://newrepublic.com/article/160212/ ... p-cult-now

Hope for a different Republican Party invariably rests upon a few fundamental misunderstandings.

The first is that the Republican Party can be “reformed.” During the Obama years, there was a movement inside conservative think tanks to push for a version of conservatism that was more populist, more middle class, and less allied with big business and the Chamber of Commerce. This group, the Reformicons, hoped that the next generation of Republican leadership would be less like Mitt Romney and more like Marco Rubio.

They never imagined that the party and the movement they wanted to reform might turn into something closer to George Wallace and Father Coughlin than Liddle Marco. But that’s exactly what happened. Donald Trump is the reformed version of the GOP. There are still people at Washington think tanks who believe that the party can go back to what it was in 2014, just with a touch more populism around the edges. These people are living in a fantasy.

The second fallacy is that Trump would have been a passable president if not for “the tweets.” But Trump would not have been elected without them. “His people”—the ones at the boat parades and anti-mask rallies, the people shutting down the Garden State Parkway and shooting paintballs at protesters in Portland—voted for him and remain loyal to him even now because of the tweets.

If they cared about populism, or crushing Goldman Sachs, or building The Wall, these people would have been up in arms. But what they really cared about was that Trump was willing to stand up for the Very Fine People who marched in Charlottesville and tell the uppity congresswomen to go back to where they came from.

The final fallacy is that Donald Trump is a Republican. He is not.

He is, in a very powerful way, the owner of the Republican Party. Previous heads of our major political parties have been stewards of the institution. They had beliefs aligned with the ideological composition of the party, and they sought power in order to turn those beliefs into policy. When their time on the stage was done, they exited so that the next leader could shepherd the party. They might exert some lingering influence through donors or alumni, but they saw their work as completed, and they moved on.

Trump, on the other hand, has no ties to the Republican Party. He mounted a hostile takeover of the GOP because he alone understood what Republican voters wanted. They wanted the spirit that had animated his birtherism gambit: a politics devoted not to policies and ideologies, but to grievances and combativeness.

One of Trump’s insights was that these voters had become fully postmodern in that they no longer wanted outcomes. They wanted feelings. And when Trump offered them the pure, uncut catharsis they craved, they offered him their loyalty, and ensured that the party would remain his, no matter what.

he people waiting in the wings to try to take Trump’s place—Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, or even the hapless Ted Cruz—believe that they can succeed by offering populist policies without Trump’s cruelty and contempt for the rest of America. They think that if they can only convince Republican voters that they really will take on Big Tech, then the party faithful will rally to their banner. True Trumpism has never been tried!

Four years from now, these pikers will discover the truth: that the cruelty and contempt are not just the essential ingredients of Trumpism but exactly what Republican voters hunger for. They don’t want deregulation, or a lower marginal tax rate, or even The Wall. What they want is the liberation to talk freely about the people they hate.

[Kane]

Hoping that Abrams can take on the two GOP senators in Georgia by mobilizing all the voters again. That would be epic.

[John Galt]

Trump isn't on the ballot and while in general republicans outperformed Trump him being missing will depress turnout for the Trumper party. Those two seats are gettable, especially with Perdue being a giant gaping puasy

[Philly]

I highly doubt the Dems are winning those seats. With Trump off the ballot that's also a much tougher task for Dem turnout as well. And if things return to a more "normal" paradigm of not only an election with no Presidential race but a special election at that, you're likely to see higher GOP turnout than Dem.

[Kane]

My inclination is to agree with Philly on this - but I'll provide the caveat that these are not normal times. Maybe all of this bullshit that continues will motivate Georgians to turn out against it?