MAGA primaries produce less-viable candidates for November
David Corn’s “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy” tracks GOP candidates’ reflex for appealing to the party’s extremist fringe during primaries. But the party’s center of gravity has moved off the right end of the scale. Candidates find it difficult to move back to the middle in the general election to attract non-zealots.
Greg Sargent confirms how extremist positioning backed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel has hurt GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate from Arizona (Washington Post):
To activate the Trumpist core, Masters ran lurid ads featuring machine gun fire at the border, swarthy hordes invading the country, and absurdly hyperbolic warnings that the country is sliding into cultural and demographic armageddon, in no small part because, he said, the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Though this sort of rhetoric has long been standard GOP fare, the Masters-Vance-Thiel approach laces it with overtly authoritarian appeals. As Vanity Fair’s James Pogue reports, Masters and Thiel belong to a New Right movement that believes the United States is already sliding into cultural and demographic catastrophe and our institutions are corrupted beyond repair, requiring the robust use of state power as a corrective against enemies who are engineering U.S. decline.
This bleak view does not sell with mainstream voters whose support Republicans need in November.
“I don’t think that necessarily flies with a lot of normal people,” Joshua Tait, a scholar of conservatism, tells Sargent.
Die-hard believers are “absolutely convinced of their own apocalyptic rhetoric,” Tait continued, but “are we right at the verge of a collapse? I don’t know if that resonates.”
Masters is struggling with independents, the Times report suggests, in part because he plunged down a rabbit hole of deranged apocalypticism — that perpetual hunt for leftist enemies everywhere — and is now furiously trying to pretty it all up. But once you go down that rabbit hole, it’s hard to find your way out again.
Masters has scrubbed the darkest material from his website and backed off the catastrophism. But voters just see him as “inauthentic, slippery on the issues and not truly dedicated to Arizona” (New York Times):
“I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” said Thomas Budinger, 26, an assistant manager at a store in a Tucson mall. A few other independents scrunched their noses or rolled their eyes at the mention of the candidate’s name.
Masters trails by 15 points with independents. A new Suffolk University poll shows Democrat incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly “leading Masters by 49 percent to 42 percent among likely voters,” Sargent writes.
“The Putin-allied right here and around the world is a perpetual negative sentiment machine. Everything is horrible all the time,” tweets New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg. “They want people in the West/US to feel terrible about our project so we abandon it.”
Republicans supporting gun shop owner Tedd Budd for Senate in North Carolina are running attack ads against Democrat Cheri Beasley that are flush with deranged apocalypticism. The first Black woman to serve as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court has never been a legislator. Yet laughably hair-on-fire GOP ads attack Beasley for supporting legislation she’s never voted on. And lying about those.
Budd is an election denier, the Charlotte Observer’s Editorial Board concludes, after Budd’s refusal to say whether he’ll accept the election results if he loses. Another GOP candidate is also having trouble moving to the center after going hard right in his primary:
Budd’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Editorial Board. Representatives for Bo Hines, another Trump-backed election denier running in North Carolina’s competitive 13th Congressional District, also did not respond when asked if Hines would support the upcoming election’s results. Hines recently scrubbed Trump’s name and endorsement from his website and hung up on a New York Times reporter who asked whether he planned to appear at Trump’s rally in Wilmington this weekend.
The GOP’s radical stances, Democrats hope, will hurt Budd with independents, now the largest tranche of voters in the state. Democrats’ problem is that my analysis shows that only 42 percent of unaffiliated voters in North Carolina cast ballots for Joe Biden in 2020. Beasley will need to improve on that this November.
Once considered on Joe Biden’s list of Supreme Court candidates, Beasley is unaccustomed to running aggressive, partisan campaigns. And while the Dobbs decision has given her an issue in her wheelhouse (and it’s helped her find her voice), she’s not exactly setting state Democrats on fire with her low-key style.
“The judge is clearly betting that her calm, reserved demeanor will be the ticket to victory in November,” reports Politico.
It will not help Republicans that their own base, especially MAGA extremists, are unhappy with them, writes the Washington Post’s David Byler. The part is at war with itself. Republican primary voters voted against sitting senators from their own party. Extremists’ upset with politicians they see as not far-right enough has led them to nominate inexperienced candidates more mainstream voters see as whack jobs. “And they’re struggling,” Byler reports:
Pennsylvania and Arizona stand out. Both are purple states — and, in a close election like 2022, they should be more competitive. But Blake Masters, the Arizona candidate for U.S. Senate, has struggled to raise funds, and Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor running for the same office in Pennsylvania, can’t sustain an attack on Democrat John Fetterman. More skilled candidates would overcome these problems.
And if Herschel Walker — a former NFL star plagued by personal scandal — is within striking distance of Democratic Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in Georgia, a more experienced campaigner might enjoy a comfortable lead by now (as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a conventional politician, does in his 2022 reelection bid). In New Hampshire, Republican Don Bolduc trails as he tries to walk back the conspiracy theories that won him the nomination.
Lay down with dogs, the expression goes.
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