What if he doesn’t sink the party?
Now, I realize that neither Ossoff nor Handel mentioned the president much during the race — which, in itself, bolsters the theory that Trump might not be as consequential in these races as Dems hope. But the race was nationalized. Its implications were national. The coverage was national. The parties treated the race as one that would have national implications. Certainly, the money that poured into the race was national. One imagines that every Georgian Republican who went to the polls understood what this race meant for the future of the parties. When you nationalize races, Republicans will take more than the president into account.
We already know that an electorate can be happy with a president and dislike his party. Why can’t the reverse be true? Barack Obama, for example, carried healthy approval ratings for the majority of his presidency, yet voters decimated his party over six years. What if there’s a faction of Republican voters who don’t like Trump but still don’t like Obama’s policies?
What a concept. I find Trump detestable in many ways, and I’m not a big fan of Republicans, but know what’s worse than either? Democrats.
Oh, and you know about this brilliant electoral strategy of telling voters that they aren’t voting for you because they’re cruel and bigoted?
Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.
Another problem with Filipovic’s theory: Trump won educated white women over the first major party female nominee in history. ”
The otherization and dehumanization of large swaths of the voting public is a primary reason operatives like Filipovic have been reduced to tweeting from the havens of their Upper West and East Coast cities. These urban islands are where the party is forced to mine for talent to send into strange flyover districts. As Heat Street reported, Ossoff had nine times as many donors in California, as his home state of Georgia.
The key to winning, according to Filipovic, is to act contemptibly toward voters and put up candidates in districts where they don’t live, while simultaneously marching through their streets and blocking highways. Bold strategy.
Please keep that up.
Oh, and then there’s this:
The problem with Pfieffer’s direction are two-fold. While there are Republican voters disenchanted with Trump, they may not be disenchanted enough to close their eyes and pull the lever for Democrats. That’s an awfully big gamble for a party that just threw $30 million down the toilet.
This is a reinforcement of Harsanyi’s thesis above. The dynamic of the election, in which people like me hated that Trump was the nominee, but are sure as hell not going to vote for a Democrat in general, let alone Hillary Clinton, continues to play out.
[Update a while later]
Heh. “The only thing Democrats won recently was the congressional baseball game, while the only way Democrat voters can seem to get Republicans out of Congress is by shooting them. And they can’t even do that right.”
[Thursday-morning update]
Some people hate Trump; more people hate liberalsleftists [correction mine].
Me too. Everything since the election has reinforced my decision at the election. The other side is deranged and I can’t even be jollied into hating Trump anymore. Like him or not he represents the only force in American politics that can save it.
During the primaries it appeared that Trump was getting way too much airtime, more than a joke candidate deserved. Almost as is he was being promoted by CNN et. al. in order to not cover over a dozen more serious candidates. They made him the focus, forcing all the other candidates to react to what he did, when he didn’t deserve the attention. But as it turns out, if you over promote a joke candidate, and he ends up running against someone as detestable as Hillary!, the joke candidate can still win. And did.
So I have no sympathy to all the Dems having their tantrums. They inflicted that horrid choice on us, and got exactly what they deserved. (And so far, he’s actually been better than The Stupid Party deserves.)
I had to look at Jill Filipovic’s tweet to see the fuss. She’s getting absolutely smoked by the replies, even all the replies from women. Even all the replies from black women.
You might remember the media lied about Trump’s polls during the election. So why do you believe the same lying media that his polls are down now?
The people hate the republicans almost as much as the dems. Don’t fool yourself into thinking Trump is unpopular… most unpopular are the media.
Laura Ingraham got it right. She would have added 3 points to her win if she embraced Trump.
Ann Coulter has been saying for years that the repubs have been running away from conservatism for the media’s conservatism lite. She’s absolutely right. Many of the mistakes Trump has made has been to listen to his ‘more experienced’ advisors.
He should never have brought out Muslin ban 2. He should have fought for his first one in the courts.
Trump could concede to every last objection the rebel courts are making over the travel ban, and they’d find some new fabrication on which to object.
Exactly right because it has nothing to do with law. If the right doesn’t get a clue, hold their noses if they have to, and fully back up Trump to the limit… They might as well quit pretending they represent anyone but themselves.
Trumps “unpopularity”? He’s at 45% which is way higher than Congress or the media. I work inside the beltway, where government offices won’t even put up his official photograph. I live in Virginia, and it is solid Trump country. I think this popularity thing is a bunch of bullshit.
#ThatsHowYouGotTrump
Until the Democrats can learn to mask their hatred of the hoi polloi, ordinary people will hate them more than they hate Trump and the Republicans.
Something I have noticed with the young people is that after gamergate, the SJW ization of everything, and school indoctrination, they just hate the Democrats. They consider themselves liberal but they hate the bullies.
There are a lot of former lefties that largely believed the whole ideology but maybe not one or two things. They speak out and then the mob comes after them. The mob is supposed to be on their side and used against those deplorables. So the victims turn against the Democrats. YouTube is chock full of people like this; young people, men/women, black/white/Hispanic//Asian/whatever who turned against the identity politics.
Just go watch SomeBlackGuy, ShoeOnHead, Chris Ray Gun, Styxhexenhammer666 and then the channels google suggests. A lot of these youtubers get as many views as a cable news show has viewers.
Many of these people still lean toward the socialist message of the Democrats. I wonder how many of them, after seeing how wrong Democrats are with the SJW identity politics will then look at broader ideological concepts.
After reading this article I conclude Trump should just fire Mueller afterall and just take the political heat.
It’s the same heat either way, but letting Mueller make a case gives it the appearance of law. If Trump fires Mueller he has the law on his side and it gives the media more time to overplay their hand.
The fact that the media keeps gloating that Trump can’t fire him is proof enough of the opposite.