How Many Feet Can the GOP Shoot Itself In?

 

Since last week’s post was all about good news for Democrats, I thought it only fair and balanced that this week’s should be about bad news for Republicans.

This goes beyond mere schadenfreude, though my personal joy at their misfortune is boundless. It speaks more to a certain astonishment at the sheer ineptitude that permeates the GOP, from top to bottom. If they seem to be limping, it’s because they’ve repeatedly shot themselves in the foot.

In the runup to the 2022 midterms, Mitch McConnell famously complained about the lack of “candidate quality,” a polite way of saying his party was infested with MAGA clowns who were barely toilet trained, let alone fit for office. He can’t be much happier in this election.

Of course, the “candidate quality” problem starts at the top of the ticket, with perhaps the worst candidate — and one of the worst human beings — to ever walk the earth, or rather ride it in a golf cart. And Republicans, including McConnell, have no choice but to pretend to love him.

As the drivel spewing incessantly from Trump’s mouth turns ever more vile, spiteful, cruel, and nonsensical, one has to wonder what his blind followers still see in him. Is he still an emperor, even with no clothes? Do they still, after all these years, believe that only he tells the truth, and that the rest of the world just keeps making up hoaxes about him? How do they keep all those thousands of lies straight, when he clearly can’t?

Trump has reached the blithering stage of his idiocy, and it’s a big problem for his handlers. They’re the ones who know him best, and they’re only letting him off the leash for short periods of time. His precious rallies have devolved into incoherent snore fests. Even in the tiny sound bites the media lets us hear, you can tell there’s no longer any there there, if there ever was.

But after Trump, candidate quality goes sharply downhill, hard as that might be to imagine.

Take, for example, Mark Robinson, running for governor in North Carolina. Spectacularly malevolent, flamboyantly crude, when it comes to depravity, this is a guy who pushes the envelope. He has admitted to being, in his own words, a “perv,” and his sexual kinks alone would be cringeworthy, even if he didn’t mix them with overt Nazi rhetoric and a degree of racism you wouldn’t think possible in a Black man.

But Robinson’s real significance is not about his own election — he’s currently down 17 points — but rather about how he’s embarrassed his party, to the point where North Carolina is now considered in play. It’s no accident that both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have spent a disproportionate amount of time there — even before the hurricane — and that the polls keep leaning Democratic. Most analysts say that without North Carolina, Trump has no path to victory.

But let’s move on to fund-raising. MAGA voters may not be paying a lot of attention, but they’re certainly paying a lot of money. Their small-dollar donations are what keep Trump’s scam machine humming. What doesn’t go to his legal fees is meted out, in small doses, to all the other MAGA candidates.

Control of that money runs through Lara Trump’s RNC, so the skim is surely robust. And let’s stipulate that Trump couldn’t care less about anyone else’s candidacy. His only goal is to stay out of prison.

Meanwhile, the GOP is being vastly outspent by Democrats, not just in battleground states, but also in down-ballot races they never thought they’d have to defend. Which means they’re forced to divert resources that were meager to begin with.

The Trump-Vance ground game is almost non-existent. First they fired the career party strategists who knew what they were doing. Then they outsourced most of their get-out-the-vote effort to PACs run by the likes of Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk, organizations long on funding but short on competence.

Which is hardly surprising. Their task, after all, is to expand Trump’s base, a fool’s errand. But their sketchy strategy of pursuing “low propensity” voters — those least likely to actually vote — has left plenty of veteran Republican operatives scratching their heads. One of them has gone on record calling it “political malpractice.”

But what really keeps Republicans up at night is abortion. Even in the reddest states, GOP candidates are feverishly backpedalling, scrubbing their websites of all “pro-life” rhetoric, desperate to soften positions even they think are extreme.

What scares them most of all is the ballot initiatives. In at least four strategically important states, abortion rights will be on the same ballot as the Republicans who stole them.

It’s an unusual situation, completely of their own making. Support for abortion is so overwhelming, these ballot measures will likely have coattails at the polls. They’re certain to boost turnout, which almost always favors Democrats. In close races, they could even pull Democratic candidates over the finish line.

So in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, abortion measures will surely juice the Harris-Walz ticket, not to mention the Senate bids of Ruben Gallego and Jacky Rosen. In Montana, there’s a measure that might just be enough to get Sen. John Tester re-elected in a state that’s otherwise deep red.

But it’s the Florida initiative that gives Republicans the most indigestion. The last thing they wanted was to be forced into defending Rick Scott’s senate seat. He’s always been an unpopular creep, but now he’s facing a real challenge from Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. Now, the abortion initiative means he’ll be vulnerable on two fronts. If you see either Harris or Walz in Florida in the next few weeks, it’ll be because they think there’s a real shot at unseating Scott, regardless of their own chances in the state.

Here's yet another foot Republicans have shot themselves in: mail-in ballots. You may recall that absentee voting used to be mostly a Republican thing. It took COVID to convince Democrats that the convenience of voting from home was a no-brainer.

Then came the 2020 election, when Trump stupidly insisted that mail-in votes were fraudulent. His voters believed him, of course. Suddenly, Democrats were voting from the safety of their homes, while Republicans had to show up at the polls. This was before the vaccine.

The GOP has been trying to undo that damage ever since. It recently earmarked $10 million to convince Pennsylvania voters that Trump was just kidding, but it isn’t working. Republican requests for early ballots are running well under half those of Democrats, and there’s no time to turn that around.

It’s hard to overstate how early voting facilitates turnout, and how the ease of doing it now benefits Democrats. It also serves to mitigate any MAGA mischief occurring on Election Day itself. If you’re not voting in person, you can’t be intimidated.

But for the GOP, no bad news would be complete without the “Nikki Haley Effect.” Let’s savor the fact that 4.3 million Republicans voted for Haley in the primaries, and we all know it wasn’t about her.

True, roughly 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020, and that’s an ongoing stain on our national character. But I think we can probably lop a few million off the top this time around.

Because those Haley Republicans will really have only two choices: vote for Harris or stay home. I’m fine either way.