Why anyone voted for that weirdo in the first place and then voted for him again I’ll never understand but they seem to have finally sobered up and realized that the party really is batshit crazy:
Lisa Ghelfi, a 58-year-old registered Republican in Arizona, voted for Donald Trump for president two years ago but has grown tired of his election-fraud claims. It is the main reason she voted for Democrats for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general this fall and plans to change her registration to independent.
“Not allowing the election to be settled, it’s very divisive,” Ms. Ghelfi, a semiretired attorney from Paradise Valley, said of the 2020 race. “I think the election spoke for itself.” She said she voted for Republicans down-ballot who weren’t as vocal about election fraud or as closely tied to Mr. Trump, yet couldn’t support Arizona’s four major Republican candidates because they echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims.
Republicans succeeded in one of their top goals this year: They brought more of their party’s voters to the polls than did Democrats. But in the course of energizing their core voters, Republicans in many states lost voters in the political center—both independents and many Republicans who are uneasy with elements of the party’s focus under Mr. Trump.
Control of the House and Senate, which had seemed poised to land with the Republican Party, is coming down to a handful of races that so far are too close to call, though the GOP remains on track to winning a narrow majority in the House. Republicans have won nearly 5.5 million more votes in House races than have Democrats, a tally by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds, as many voters were motivated by anxiety over high inflation and a low opinion of President Biden’s response.
At the same time, Republican analysts said their unexpectedly weak showing in the election indicated that they had failed to press hard enough on those issues. In Michigan, the Republican Party’s state committee said a failure to talk to voters in the political center was a central reason that Tudor Dixon, the party’s Trump-endorsed nominee for governor, was crushed in a 10 percentage point defeat by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Actually, it sounds like they still aren’t listening to the voters. They weren’t clamoring for more talk about inflation and the deficit. They voted against the lunatics the party had on offer as an alternative to the Democrats. I am pretty sure they know this but they are still afraid to admit it.
And there was the hardcore extremism on abortion:
“It’s picking the lesser of two evils sometimes,” said Micki LePla, 65, a retired respiratory therapist near Port Huron, Mich., who backed Ms. Whitmer for governor.
“I voted for her because I just didn’t want Tudor Dixon to be the governor,” she said. She opposed Ms. Dixon, she said, “because of her viewpoint on abortion, and also she’s a Trump supporter and an election denier. She’s a ‘no’ on so many levels.” Ms. Dixon opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest.
For many voters, support for legalized abortion changed the election from a referendum on Democratic control of Washington into more of a choice between the two parties.
James VanSteel, 29, an independent voter and transportation planner in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, said he would have considered a Republican candidate for governor in the mold of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. He doesn’t agree with Mr. Romney’s restrictive view of abortion rights, but he sees the senator as a moderating force in government and open to working with both parties. In Michigan, however, the primary season only drew more ideologically driven Republicans, he said, eventually yielding Ms. Dixon as the nominee.
Results of survey of about 115,000 registered votersSee more…
Ms. Dixon’s position on abortion was a nonstarter with him. “If they had talked about some kind of middle ground for regulation but keeping abortion legal in our state, I might have considered her more openly. But that was a very hard line she took,” he said.
Jennifer Borzone, 52, a stay-at-home mother in Phoenix, said she voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and couldn’t remember whom she voted for in 2020. She said she supported Democrats for every office this year because of their support of access to abortion.
“I don’t think the government should tell women what to do with their body,” she said, adding that her votes were solely decided on that issue.
So how are they going to square this with their huge dependence on the Christian Right? It sure looks as though the Supreme’s screwed things up for the GOP. If they had just gone with the 15 week ban they probably would have gotten away with it. A lot of these people don’t really understand what that means and they would have accepted it. But by opening the floodgates for the Handmaid’s Tale they emboldened the fanatics and now they’ll have to pay the price. This battle is going to continue.
As far as purging the nuts — I’ll believe it when I see it. They’ve set up an entire media apparatus to empower them and Donald Trump is still the Dear Leader with veto power whether they like it or not. Good luck.