The other warning Republicans should heed from this year’s elections

jeffw@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 124 points –
The other warning Republicans should heed from this year’s elections
vox.com

Republicans don’t seem to know how to stop bleeding support from the suburbs.

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Have they tried removing more women's rights?

Maybe they should attack trans people more and ban even more books!

Maybe they should try spreading more medical disinformation about vaccines, killing their own voter base.

I remember when apologists said there's no way they would really endanger and kill off part of their voter base, therefore they must know what they're doing, and therefore the vaccine and masks must be bunk.

I remember a lot of dumb fucks saying that, actually.

I know, they can run on trade and the economy and then get themselves into a trade war with America's biggest trading partner. What could go wrong!

Or how about blatantly ignoring the will of the people because sky daddy said so?

Sky daddy never said these things because

  1. He doesn't exist
  2. All words "said" by sky daddy were written by racist and misogynist centuries after words were "said"
  3. Sky daddy's ultimate philosophy, is follow the golden rule.

You don't trust the men who claim to speak for sky daddy? But they said if we don't listen to them we will be tortured forever, and if we do what they say we'll get sky cake forever, but not until after we die. They said to trust them because belief without evidence is a virtue.

Sky daddy’s ultimate philosophy, is follow the golden rule.

Sometimes the men who speak for Sky daddy like the golden rule, sometimes they want you to kill heathens, it's just a matter of time before one becomes the other.

They could also try funding the cops with a marijuana tax as revenge for it being legalized despite home grow being legalized too

Hey - hey member that time after Obama won when the republicans got all concerned and made a super serious report about what was wrong with them? Member? And the report said they should be less hateful to Latinos and other people? And the next thing they did was quadruple down on hating everyone who wasn’t them? Member that?

That was awesome.

Trump straight up opened his campaign by calling them rapists.

Fucking fetid shit bag. I was like, "so that's it right? Dean whats-his-face said 'yeehaw' too loud and lost, this dumbass just noosed himself... Right?"

Ah the bodega was silent when I walked in for my breakfast sandwich that November morning. "What the fuck" was quickly uttered by all that day, peppering the air like the guy making my breakfast peppered the egg sandwich.

Growth & Opportunity Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_%26_Opportunity_Project "the perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years."

"emphasizing the increasing Hispanic population in the United States and urging the party to limit its rhetoric on immigration policy. It also recommended appealing to younger voters by reducing social conservatism in the party."

"The report emphasized the importance of appealing to African-American, Latino, Asian, women, gay, and young voters"

Yeah, about that...

"We've tried nothing, and we're out of ideas!"

Sorry, someone had to say it. But seriously, they don't even stand for anything. Everything is just culture-war bullshit and blaming Democrats for imagined evils, they have no desire or ability to actually lead. They can't even *fund the government or elect their own Speaker...

It's so clear that the GOP is flailing. They've only won a single presidential popular vote since 1988. Old white people are dying and brown kids are reaching voting age. Young people at large are overwhelmingly fed up with the GOP. They are losing the demographics game big time, and I think they know it.

And I think the GOP base knows it deep down, too, and I think Obama was really emblematic of it. Suddenly, they had to wake up to a country that was rapidly shifting, a black man was president, gay people were getting rights and becoming broadly accepted in society, people were starting to talk about racism as an actual problem again, movies and advertising were getting more diversity, trans people were getting rights... And I think this deeply unsettled a significant chunk of the population who felt like their control over America was waning, hence the Tea Party, hence the MAGA movement.

This fascistic movement we're seeing from the GOP isn't logical at all. It's losing them elections left and right, but if they don't pursue this, they lose all their primaries, because this movement is about the Republican base lashing out over them losing demographically.

The GOP is in a rough spot right now. Their whole thing for the past 40 years was about fighting boogymen to court the evangelical and fundamentalist sects, while relying on votes from the moderates who like the economic or foreign policy.

Then Obama proved the impossible by being a largely successful presidentwhile scandalously having a darker skin tone. From there, the party's culture shifted right and they started actually trying to change things that should've stayed as punching bags.

"Look, we're fighting for the rights of unborn children here but the evil leftists have too much support. You better keep voting for us or it's going to get worse"

A phrase like that will hook the far right into voting for you, and the moderates will basically ignore it and continue to vote for you because they want to keep immigration to a minimum or keep taxes where they are.

Now that the GOP started actually pushing for sweeping social change, the far right got a taste of blood and are screaming for more while the moderates are starting to look to the dems as they're now far more likely to keep things normal.

Mostly they're just neoliberals. They're in it for the pay, pension, insider trading and open bribes. The only thing they're interested in "leading" is other pigs to the trough.

But as a means to that end, they've spent decades pandering to every form of bigotry and idiocy they could wring a vote from and now it's starting to consume them from the inside out.

They're not worth any sympathy though. If their fascist faction started dragging black people from their homes and executing them, they'd only be upset that they couldn't use them as slaves to maximise profits.

We are witnessing the death throes of dying ideology. It turns out that opposing democracy, embracing Christofascism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, anti-intellectualism, boorishness, cruelty, conspiracy, crime, endless grievances, and lies, while forcing women to give birth against their will isn't a winning strategy.

Maybe they should have tried adopting popular evidence-based platforms instead.

Oh well, see you in the dust bin of history. May they be replaced with an actual conservative party.

It's why they are going install a christofascist dictatorship. We all saw they lost but we have a christo fascist as speaker who is second in line for president and Trump is leading Biden in swing states.

The fight isn't over they will not go quietly. We are about to watch the overthrow of our government. If we all think they going just lose then beat again.

They even captured the Supreme Court.

Act like Trump is actually leading Biden (he's not. The only people who answer rando numbers that call out of the blue are 55 and up.), and go vote. Get everyone you know to also vote. Make a day of it. Blow off work if you have to and vote out every republican on that ballot.

Polls haven't been remotely accurate in 5 years.

Polls also don't account for gerrymandering or voter suppression nearly as much as they need to

May they be replaced with an actual conservative party.

May they absolutely do no such thing. Actual conservatives just want things to stay the same forever, that's the original definition, to conserve the institutions and society of the present.

I'm not a conservative, but I think it's important to have people advocating for continuity with the past. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it isn't. People who think it isn't should have a political party that represents them. An actual conservative party, for example, would be defending democracy and not trying to usurp it.

Yeah you need people who are able to identify what from the past we should keep and what we should yeet. That is what a conservative should be. But aren't.

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I hope you're right, but looking at the attitudes of my conservative, evangelical friends, it seems more likely they'll just radicalize and try to incite violence and civil war as a kind of Christian Taliban

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This is the best summary I could come up with:


Ohio was a similar story: The “Yes” vote on Issue 1, which protects reproductive rights, saw its biggest support come from major urban centers and their suburbs, where it performed better than the Democratic Senate nominee in last year’s elections.

It’s a trend that’s been largely true since the dawn of the Trump era: Republicans have been consistently struggling to perform as well as they once did in the suburbs, giving Democrats an opening to persuade and turn out voters that are crucial to winning statewide races in battleground states.

There, Republicans performed well in local elections that largely centered on crime and migration concerns in the city and where abortion wasn’t a major issue, showing just how hard it is to disentangle the polarizing effect of the GOP’s anti-abortion rights brand in states where those protections are at risk.

And the suburban shift contributed much of the margin of support that buoyed Joe Biden to victory in battleground states in 2020 and helped Democratic candidates win in close midterm elections last year.

“In conjunction with abortion is the other layered-in kind of Republican social agenda that is just so repellent to the country,” a Democratic campaigner in suburban Bucks County told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

That general brand of MAGA Republicanism — socially conservative extremists who threaten basic freedoms — was toxic in swing suburban counties during last year’s midterms especially, and Democratic candidates from Nevada and Arizona to Georgia and Wisconsin seized on that messaging and were largely successful.


The original article contains 1,470 words, the summary contains 250 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

“The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein after Tuesday’s results.

Yeah. Precisely. Dems aren't offering anything other than, "look out, MAGA bad!"

We need more progressives and we aren't getting that.