This is from Charlie Sykes who has until now been holding out that there were still some good Republicans who are just being dominated by the bad ones. He was wrong:
Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, is one of the saner people in today’s Republican party. He concedes that the 2020 election was free and fair. He acknowledges climate change. He has criticized Republican leaders for ostracizing Rep. Liz Cheney and other principled dissidents while protecting the party’s worst extremists.
That’s why Sununu’s decision in the final weeks of the 2022 campaign to embrace election deniers is a particularly bad sign. Like other Republican officials, he has decided that sabotage of public faith in democracy doesn’t matter, as long as the saboteurs are Republicans. And he’s defending their reckless behavior with pernicious excuses.
On Sep. 13, election deniers won the Republican primaries for two of New Hampshire’s three federal offices. Don Bolduc, who has insisted that “Trump won the election” in 2020, captured the GOP nomination to face off against incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. And Karoline Leavitt, who has said Trump “absolutely” won, got the nomination for one of the state’s two congressional seats.
Sununu could have said that he considered these nominees unfit for office. At a minimum, he could have kept his distance. Instead, he has endorsed Leavitt and praised Bolduc.
Last Tuesday, in a gubernatorial debate, Sununu was asked why he supported candidates who claimed “without evidence that elections were stolen.” He didn’t dispute that characterization of their views. Instead, he said endorsement decisions should be based on more than just “one issue,” as though election denial were no different from energy subsidies or water management.
Two days after Sununu’s comment, Bolduc—who had indicated after the primaries that he would tone down his allegations of fraud—again insinuated that elections were being stolen. In a Senate debate, he said the people of New Hampshire “don’t like the fact that they can’t trust the mail-in ballot system,” that there were “proven irregularities with voting machines,” and that “same-day voter-registration causes fraud.” He added: “We need to make sure that school buses loaded with people at the polls don’t come in and vote.”
The debate’s moderator, apparently taken aback, asked Bolduc whether he was “claiming that buses full of voters who are not permitted to vote here” were, in fact, showing up at polls in New Hampshire. Bolduc replied: “This is what Granite Staters are telling me. And I think it’s valid.”
Bolduc’s answer reflected a common tactic in today’s GOP. Investigations and fact checks have found no evidence to support the allegation about buses (which has been around for years) or claims of fraud in New Hampshire’s 2020 election. So instead of evidence, Bolduc invokes the misinformed opinions of ordinary people. These opinions, he insists, are inherently “valid.” Like liberals who pretend that every opinion on moral questions is equally sound—for example, that single-parent families are just as good for kids as two-parent families—many of today’s so-called conservatives are subjectivists about election fraud.
It’s bad enough that quacks like Bolduc peddle this nonsense. But now there’s a second tier of Republicans—Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis, for example—who, while not affirming the lies about massive fraud, proudly campaign for election deniers. Sununu, like others, has joined this tier.
There’s no distinction, I’m afraid. If you walk with fascists ….
There was always a lot of talk about the so-called Team Normal in the White House saving us all from Trump’s excesses. To the extent there ever was such a thing, and from the accounting in various books they never had any power, it’s gone now. Once these people cross over into conspiracy-land they don’t come back. They get push-back from the libs and Never Trumpers, their feelings are hurt and that’s all it takes for them to jump onboard the Trump train. It’s where they wanted to be anyway. It’s where the “winners” are, at least in their own circles. And, at this point, you can’t argue that it’s a good career move for any Republican.