This report about how the Party is hiding negative information about Trump’s support even from their own members is fascinating. I have to imagine they are doing it because they know one of Dear Leader’s minions will run to tell him who mentioned it so they are simply putting their heads in the sand and pretending it isn’t true.
Rep. Liz Cheney had been arguing for months that Republicans had to face the truth about former president Donald Trump — that he had lied about the 2020 election result and bore responsibility for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — when the Wyoming Republican sat down at a party retreat in April to listen to a polling briefing.
The refusal to accept reality, she realized, went much deeper.
When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.
Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.
Cheney was alarmed, she later told others, in part because Republican campaign officials had also left out bad Trump polling news at a March retreat for ranking committee chairs. Both instances, she concluded, demonstrated that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid the truth about Trump and the possible damage he could do to Republican House members, even though the NRCC denied any such agenda.
Those behind-the-scenes episodes were part of a months-long dispute over Republican principles that has raged among House leaders and across the broader GOP landscape. That dispute is expected to culminate next week with a vote to remove Cheney from her position as the third-ranking House Republican.
At issue: Should the Republican Party continue to defend Trump’s actions and parrot his falsehoods, given his overwhelming support among GOP voters? Or does the party and its leaders need to directly confront the damage he has done?
“She just believes he’s disqualified himself by his conduct, more than it’s any kind of political analysis,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). “If you look at a political analysis, there’s no way this party is going to stay together without President Trump and his supporters. There is no construct where the party can be successful without him.”
Cheney and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had come down on opposite sides of the divide, undermining the party’s efforts to put on a united front. Even before the riot, when McCarthy was calling on Republicans to “not back down” after the election, Cheney had quietly organized an essay by 10 former defense secretaries declaring the election results settled and warning the military not to be involved in Trump’s election protest.
She was shocked when McCarthy signed on to an amicus brief in a Texas case seeking to overturn the election, after he’d told her in a private conversation that he did not plan to, according to a person familiar with the conversation. More recently, she has sought to undermine McCarthy’s efforts to dilute the potency of a congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 riot. McCarthy wants to broaden the inquiry’s scope to include antifa and Black Lives Matter violence, as well as the slaying of a Capitol Hill police officer in April.
McCarthy and many of his House colleagues, who don’t see a clear path to victory without Trump’s support in 2022, reached a breaking point in recent days.
Finally, someone acknowledges what I’ve been saying for weeks. This is Cheney’s political strategy. She’s playing a longer game than just being the number three leader in the House GOP minority. She sees this as a way to vault her into the national spotlight as the leader of the anti-Trump right. Is that a real constituency? Not by a long shot. But she’s betting that constituency will exist in the future and she will be there to reap the rewards:
At the root of the collapse in relations, according to interviews with more than a dozen people involved, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, was a fundamental misunderstanding of Cheney’s position. Her determination to name, shame and banish Trump — and her refusal to follow McCarthy’s pleas to move on and display unity — had become fundamental to her political purpose, not just a position she could compartmentalize.
Even if she is cast out of power in the House, she has made clear that she will not stop, promising to take her argument against Trump to the campaign trail in Wyoming, where he garnered 70 percent of the vote in 2020. She has told others that blocking Trump from leading the party is a fight she sees as just beginning, no matter how Wednesday’s vote goes.
“The Republican Party is at a turning point,” Cheney wrote Wednesday in a Washington Post op-ed, “and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”
That is a remarkable statement from a Republican conference chairwoman, whose job description requires her to develop, coordinate and elevate the party’s communications strategy against Democrats, which she has continued to do at times with far less fanfare. Cheney and McCarthy declined to speak for this story.
Even before the Jan. 6 riot, she had been working to stem the threat she saw in Trump.
“She called me and said, ‘You know, I’m really worried about this. What should we do?’ ” said former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman, who worked with her to write the essay by the former defense secretaries. “Liz was a prime mover of the whole thing, really.”https://dc4c7e684077180486f863f17df95b25.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Working closely with her father, former vice president Richard B. Cheney, the congresswoman volunteered to recruit Jim Mattis, the former Marine general who had served as Trump’s first defense secretary; Leon Panetta, who served as defense secretary in the Obama administration; and Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was defense secretary while her father was vice president, Edelman said.
The opinion piece also warned the military that any involvement in election disputes was dangerous. Richard B. Cheney’s role in organizing the defense secretaries soon became public, but the congresswoman’s role was kept quiet at the time.
She also bet that Trump would lose, which was also risky. But you’ll note she waited very, very late in the game. She could have been Justin Amash and stood up much earlier. It’s not as if that Ukraine mess was anything but Trump and Rudy’s clumsy attempt to corruptly rig the 2020 election. She certainly knew that.
Meanwhile, it’s reported that McCarthy’s main goal is to keep Trump from forming a 3rd party? That’s news to me, but I suppose he might have started out that way. Now, it’s clear that he is totally on board the Trump train. And what’s curious about that is this other information about that polling info they are hiding even from themselves:
[…]
Weeks later, Cheney traveled to Orlando for an event designed to showcase the party’s strategy for taking out Democrats in 2022, but the story soon shifted to internal division. Before the conference even began, she announced to laughter from reporters that she had not invited the former president, even though she did not plan the speaker slates.
That really brings home to me that Liz wanted to be pushed out of the leadership. That was gratuitous, designed to get attention without any larger purpose.
This stuff about the polling is fascinating, though. If their internals are true, it would appear that the party establishment has now morphed entirely into vacant Trump clones even if it means their own demise:
The debate over Trump’s potentially negative impact on swing districts is likely to escalate in the coming months, as vulnerable Republicans try to position themselves for reelection.
The internal NRCC poll partially shared with lawmakers in April found that President Biden was perilously popular in core battleground districts, with 54 percent favorability. Vice President Harris was also more popular than Trump, the poll showed. Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid stimulus plan and his $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure package both polled higher than the former president’s favorability, which was at 41 percent, compared to 42 percent in February.
A person familiar with the polling presentation said many details from the battleground poll did not make it into the NRCC’s 30-minute address in Orlando.
Go for it, Republicans. Suck up to the MAGA cult and its Dear Leader. Those numbers are lying. He’s telling the truth. Maybe it will work out for you.