Roy Edroso reminds us today that Trumpism was on the rise before Trump. And I had forgotten that there was quite a bit of chatter after 2012 that the Democrats had “stolen” the election and the pollsters had “skewed” the polls.
He notes that the base was primed after years of disappointment and had already turned on the GOP leadership. (I would remind everyone that the second in command, Congressman Eric Cantor was taken out in a primary by a guy who ruthlessly demagogued immigration.)
He takes us back to 2016:
I believe the Republican base was then as impatient with the old fuck-the-poor GOP strategies as everyone else. That wasn’t because they didn’t want to fuck the poor; the base was, then as now, mostly made up of smallholders and the would-be rich, and they hated the poor and all the disenfranchised, and any hint of their empowerment, because they thought anything that benefited such people would cost them respect and revenue.
But the base was impatient because, after the 2008 financial collapse, which had so rattled the nation that it agreed to elect a black Democrat president, the justifications for fucking the poor that the Party had been dishing out for decades had become worn out, insulting and, above all, ineffective.
They didn’t blame the message, though; they blamed the messengers.
At least their avatars on the Internet and on TV did. They were mad at the Romney people who’d lost what they thought was a sure shot to take the White House in 2012, and blamed his milquetoast, temporizing manner — just as they had previously blamed John McCain for not ripping the bark off Obama in 2008.
You and I might see why McCain and Romney thought yelling at Obama was a bad political strategy. But imagine how the conservative base, accustomed as it was to successful, full-throated assertions of their righteousness and superiority, felt about all that pussyfooting.
It helps if you actually know any Republicans (apart from the country-club types who have cocktails with their Democratic friends and think it’s all a great game). They’re not like the Democrats who, in the face of the Reagan Revolution, sniffed the winds and embraced DLC neoliberalism (or, for that matter, the New Labour types in Britain who later embraced Tony Blair). Those Democrats had lost their mid-century hubris, and felt they had to meet the voters where they imagined them to be, and once in power see what they could get away with. (That usually turns out to be not much, which annoys their situational allies like me.)
But everything in the modern history and temperament of the GOP had taught them that all the sweetness of victory was in domination. And yet here were their alleged champions playing patty-cake with a man they considered a black communist black Muslim black.
And they knew in their guts that they weren’t going to do any better next time with a “revenue-neutral flex fund.”
They were even more mad at the media than usual, and at the leftists with which they considered it allied. Most of you remember how Obama’s rust-belt-jobs policies clinched Ohio and thus the election for him, and think Romney was lucky to get as close as he did. But you may have forgotten Karl Rove on Fox News on election night 2012, demanding the network’s analytics team prove that Obama had won Ohio. That was unprecedented and deeply weird — Rove making a stink and confronting the number-crunchers, who looked at him as if he were simple-minded and said, essentially, no my dude, we do this for a living.
You may also have forgotten how excited many conservatives were then by Dean Chambers’ “unskewed” polls that showed Romney was on track to win — and who, when Romney lost, claimed it proved the election had been stolen.
Andy Kroll of Mother Jones, reporting on November 12, 2012:
Post-election, there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any of these states, and certainly nothing suggesting Obama’s wins in those four states depended on voter fraud. So Slate‘s Dave Weigel asked Chambers for evidence backing up his serious accusations. What followed was a collision between fact-based reporting and fact-free magical thinking:
“I’m getting credible information of evidence in those states that there [are] enough numbers that are questionable and could have swung the election,” he says. “I’m only putting good credible information on there, like the actual vote counts, reports, and mainstream publications reporting voter fraud. There’s a lot of chatter, though. There are articles people have sent me that don’t hold up. Crazy stuff.”
What’s not crazy? “Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes,” says Chambers. “Even Larry Sabato said that should be looked into.” (I’ve looked into this: 57 precincts gave McCain no votes in 2008)…
The main thrust of the piece is to take on the so-called “reformicons” like Ross Douthat who thought they could finesse their way out of the bigotry and authoritarianism of the modern GOP. As he points out, unlike Democrats who are constantly trying to recalibrate when they lose elections, almost to the point of obsession, the Republicans just don’t roll that way. The reformicon attempts were bound to fail. And let’s face it, they didn’t really believe it anyway…