Election deniers lost big
“Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?” President George W. Bush asked famously. Like many statements originating with his party, it says more about the speaker than external reality.*
What will Republicans learn from 2022? The wrong lessons, if any.
Numbers don’t lie, Digby pointed out Monday. Trumpism has not served Republicans well. Or the United States. But for a party enamored of martinets posing as patriots, doubling down on mistakes is now muscle memory (ABC News):
Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce Tuesday night that he is running for president in 2024, marking his third bid for the White House.
Speaking at a rally in Ohio last week, Trump told supporters, “I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.”
The announcement, which Trump has been hinting at for months, would come as the embattled former president faces multiple criminal and civil investigations and as his party is grappling with a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, raising questions about the former president’s power over the GOP.
Election denier, former news anchor, and “new face of the MAGA movement” Kari Lake lost her bid for the Arizona governorship Monday to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Trump viewed a Gov. Kari Lake as a “straight out of Central Casting‘” pick for a 2024 running mate. “Now he is stuck with Stefanik or Noem as a running mate,” former Republican state official Ron Filipkowski tweeted after the announcement of Lake’s defeat.
Jeremy Stahl ‘s (Slate) post-mortem on the election rejects the notion that Jan. 6 was atop voters’ concerns going into Nov. 8. Instead, it was “the overall sense that MAGA candidates from coast-to-coast could destroy future elections and American democracy itself if given the chance.” Lake lost, as well as “the entire election-denying slate of secretary of state candidates in swing states across the country.”
That is not likely to stop Trump from announcing another run for the presidency. Nor will it stop a MAGA-whipped Republican leadership class from dutifully genuflecting, at least in public. Trumpism may not be dead. But its adherents may be political dead men walking.
What the punditocracy and pols across the spectrum were blind to going into this election was their own perceptual bubbles, suggests Christopher Federico, Professor of Political Science and Psychology and Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. All is not culture war for “normies,” i.e., not us:
This is crucial: the average person does not like weird ideological shit. Commentators have become so invested in the polarization narrative and their own sense of difference from middle America that they have missed the possibility that lots of GOP stuff is weird.
Perseverating on stuff that is hyper-salient to the engaged (quickly changing gender norms, debates over how to talk about race), they have missed how little of this language-virus stuff trickles down or registers at the mass level at all.
Federico notes that “much or more right-wing as liberal stuff comes off as scary or weird to normies.” Pundits, pollsters, and Republican leaders missed that. Election denialism was on the ballot.
Jan 6 was scary. Election denial is a few steps removed from thinking the moon landing was faked. The idea that school administrators are putting out litterboxes for cat-identifying kids is tinfoil hat shit to normal people.
NOPE, said normies across the country. Especially in races where candidates ran expressly on election denialism. A distressed Republican, a Democrat, and an independent speaking to one of our poll greeters all said they were, for the first time in their lives, voting against every Republican on the ballot more than for Democrats.
Election law expert Rick Hasen is “a bit less terrified” than he was earlier in the cycle. Why?
“The same election deniers that pleased Trump and the Republican base repelled enough sane Republicans who oppose stolen elections to hold back their votes,” Hasen writes at Slate:
Across the ballot, in the places where it mattered, Democrats, Republicans, and others poured money into defeating election-denying candidates. The message was that if these people were willing to say, against all reliable evidence, that the last election was stolen, how could you trust them to run the next one? Democracy was on the line. This time, the line held.
The Republican Party may not. They have not simply propagandized themselves, Trumpized themselves, into a corner. They’ve gerrymandered themselves into one. For now, gerrymandering in multiple states appears to have handed them a Republican House. If they can keep it.
They’ll have help from Republican judges in keeping their gerrymanders. But last week they were supposed to have help from historical trends in easily flipping both houses of Congress. Losing narrowly will not have the salutary effect to affect a change in attitude.
Party zealots are most likely to vote in primaries in those safe districts Republicans have drawn for themselves. Incumbents who get even a bit squishy on the MAGA faith may draw a primary challenge that unseats them. Normies may reject election denialism, but it’s not them Republican incumbents must placate during primary season. In the general election, however, normies have more sway.
Last week, normies of all political persuasions told them no.
Hasen is not popping a champagne cork. Republicans are not likely to respond to rejection by reinforcing democratic norms. “So long as election denialism spreads, our democracy is not safe,” Hasen adds. Finally, whatever Trump announces, MAGAism is not subsiding quite yet. “We cannot exclude the possibility of more extreme tactics next time around.” As I already observed, whenever I think the GOP has run out of angles for suppressing Democratic votes and rigging elections, they find another. Republicans put more energy into that than into improving their voters’ lives.
The Republican Party may be dead, but it’s still walking.
* Democrats have their own issues with learning, but that’s for another day.