The GOP is now a zombie so I suppose that there’s no real need for an autopsy. But get a load of the delusional cult-like thinking among Republican officials.
Democrats in Texas and New Hampshire are forming committees to examine the party’s failings in last month’s election. Less formal autopsies are underway in states across the country.
But the party that lost the presidential election isn’t soul-searching at all.
For the final act of his showman-like presidency, Donald Trump has convinced the Republican Party that despite losing the White House by 7 million votes — and despite seeing five states flip in 2020 — things could hardly be better inside the GOP.
Even as the Electoral College this week confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, interviews with more than two dozen GOP state and local chairs and Republican National Committee members reflect a party that, far from reassessing its embrace of Trumpism, is hell-bent on more of the same.
“Our president absolutely grew our party,” said Jennifer Carnahan, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, noting the GOP’s down-ballot victories and explosive turnout with Trump on the ticket. “He totally advanced our party … I think that as Republicans, we just need to continue to remain on the course.”
It hardly matters that Trump couldn’t beat Biden in the Rust Belt. Or that Trump ceded the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona to Democrats and, in defeat, became the first incumbent president since 1992 to fail to win a second term.
Six weeks after the election, Republicans are beginning to chart a multi-state effort to undo mail ballot expansions that disadvantaged the party in November. But that’s a mechanical concern. As it prepares for the midterm elections and 2024, the direction of the party is set.
“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s great,” said Stanley Grot, a district-level Republican Party chair in Michigan, a state Trump won four years ago but lost to Biden in November.
In one of the more surreal role reversals in modern post-presidential election history, the winning party nationally is poring over its congressional and legislative losses, while the party that lost the White House isn’t.
When Mitt Romney lost the national popular vote by 5 million votes in 2012, his defeat sparked a devastating, 100-page RNC post-mortem based on conversations with more than 2,600 people, in-depth focus groups and polling, a survey of pollsters, and an online survey featuring the participation of more than 36,000 individuals. Trump lost by 2 million more votes than Romney, and there is nary a peep.
To many Republicans, that makes total sense. After all, GOP turnout was up, and down-ballot Republicans over-performed, reducing Democrats’ House majority and positioning the GOP — depending on the result of two runoffs in Georgia — to hold the Senate. Even if the president did get swamped by Biden — an outcome most Republicans don’t accept — there is little belief among Republicans that it had anything to do with him.
“It wasn’t a matter of our candidate,” said Bill Pozzi, chair of the Republican Party in heavily Republican Victoria County, Texas. “It was a matter of the process.”
[…]
But in the Republican Party of 2020, second-guessing is heresy. Trump ignored the lessons of the 2012 post-mortem when he ran in 2016, and he won. And even in defeat this year, Trump received more votes than any presidential candidate in history except for Biden, dramatically expanding the Republican Party’s ranks and making some modest inroads with Latinos, a growing segment of the electorate. More important, he persuaded Republicans, without evidence, that the election was rigged.
It’s hard for a party to draw lessons from an election it doesn’t think it lost.
As a result, Republicans mostly aren’t reckoning with their erosion in the suburbs or their weakness with women. Instead, they’re turning Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud into a cause that will animate the party for years, spinning forward frustration with the November election’s administration to advance voter ID laws and measures to limit mail voting in future elections.
“Everything’s great!” Lol.
The truth is that many of these people see a YUGE opportunity to use Trump’s fraudulent “voter fraud” nonsense as an excuse to further suppress the vote in swing states run by Republicans. But there is real brainwashing going on there too. They seem to truly believe that Donald Trump is worth hitching their futures to, even though he is the worst sore loser in history and clearly has shrunk their party to nothing but the core cult members.
They are nuts, but they still represent tens of millions of Americans and they have clout in this antiquated, barely-democratic country of ours. They aren’t going away. And they eat brains. Obviously.
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