Trump's Big Lie is alienating to voters — Republicans just don't care Republicans are cementing their new strategy: Pander to the Trump base, then cheat and steal your way to power https://www.salon.com/2021/05/10/trumps-big-lie-is-alienating-to-voters--republicans-just-dont-care/ It's increasingly certain that Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is going to get the big ol' boot from her leadership positions in the House by a Republican caucus increasingly furious with her for refusing to cosign to Donald Trump's Big Lie, that he is the "real" winner of the election and that the insurrection was a good thing. No one should cry for Cheney, who is sleeping in a bed she carefully made for herself, but the whole situation is nonetheless extremely concerning. It's a sign that Republicans are going on all-in on Trump and the Big Lie, to the point where anyone who even shows signs of even feeling pangs of dissent is being subject to vicious smears and other tactics to bring them into line. To add to the concerns for democracy, the unspooling fake "audit" of votes in Arizona is continuing to feed a steady stream of pro-insurrection propaganda to the GOP base, continuing to reinforce the idea that they're entitled to steal elections because imaginary Democrats in outlandish conspiracy theories did it first. But it's not just liberals who are worried for our democracy who are expressing concerns. According to Allan Smith and Sahil Kapur of NBC News, many Republican political strategists are worried, too, because they see these pro-insurrection antics as alienating to some segments of voters. "Removing Liz Cheney from leadership will give a boatload of ammunition to the GOP's critics," Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told NBC News. Ayers' worry, Smith and Kapur wrote, is that such actions "could further antagonize suburban voters, particularly college-educated women, who ditched the party because of their opposition to Trump." Similarly, some Republicans in Arizona are having second thoughts about the clown show that is the Maricopa County vote "audit" being conducted to please Trump and bolster right-wing conspiracy theories. "It makes us look like idiots," Republican state Sen. Paul Boyer, who represents the kind of suburban district Ayres is afraid of losing, told the New York Times. "Looking back, I didn't think it would be this ridiculous. It's embarrassing to be a state senator at this point." Trump and the Big Lie are both, to be clear, quite popular with the GOP base. Polling shows that 70% of Republican voters still refuse to accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and the majority of Republican voters cling to one kind of conspiracy theory or another to justify the insurrection Trump incited on January 6. But there's good reason to believe those voters could be persuaded to move on to some other shiny object of white grievance, if the leadership just quietly cut Trump loose to rave by himself on his fake "social media" site. These folks are addicted to grievance more than they are to Trump, and if Republicans just gave them something else to focus on — Disneyland getting rid of rape jokes or the term "birthing people" are some recent Fox News-generated contenders — they would move on surprisingly quickly. So it's the roughly quarter of Republicans who admit Biden won the election that Republican strategists are worried about. And those are just the ones who still admit they are Republican. As post-election analysis shows, in addition to suburban women, independent voters and even some male voters are getting fed up with the Trump circus. For those people, the insurrection was another inflection point proving Trump has gone too far. Republicans increasingly siding with the insurrection yahoos over ordinary Americans is not going to improve their standing with such voters. So why are House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and the rest of GOP leadership going along with a plan to fully rebrand themselves as the party of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists? It's not just fear of Tucker Carlson making gay jokes. It's that the GOP's strategy for "winning" elections is no longer the traditional democratic one of trying to attract and retain voters. Instead, the focus is shifting, quite rapidly, to making sure that Republicans "win" even when they lose. Voter suppression gets the lion's share of the attention, but as Heather "Digby" Parton noted at Salon on Monday, outright theft is now on the table for most Republicans. "Trump made a serious run at getting the election overturned," she writes, noting that he was stopped, in part, because "local officials and judges around the country refused to cooperate." But now those folks are getting purged and Cheney is merely the most prominent example. As Parton notes, Republican leadership has set aside "misgivings" about openly trying to steal elections and next time it happens, they're fully on board. Law professor Joshua A. Douglas concurs in a piece in the Washington Post, noting that a combination of harassment and new laws that make it easier to threaten election officials with prison are being leveraged to squeeze out those who still defend the integrity of elections on a local and state level. Next time Trump — or other Republicans running for any office — makes a run at stealing an election, they'll find a whole new cast of officials who think illegally throwing out votes or otherwise helping a fascist insurrectionist is very much to their liking. That's why Republicans are way more focused on serving the MAGA faithful than they are serving more moderate voters who think democracy is a good thing. As the Capitol riot showed, while the red hats are a minority of Americans, they are one that's prepared to use whatever means necessary — including violence — to force their will on the rest of the country. That's a bad thing for democracy, but, as Trump believed, a good thing to have on your side if your desire is to take power by force instead of winning elections. Which isn't to say things are hopeless. What Republicans forget about Trump's coup is that it didn't just fail because Trump hit a firewall of election officials who still had integrity. It failed because progressives saw the coup coming, took it seriously, and fought back. After witnessing a mob literally storm the Capitol, even more moderates and liberals are ready to admit that we're in danger of a fascist takeover and will step up again to stop it. The bad news, however, is pro-democracy forces are not finding the support they need in the Democratic Party. To be certain, both President Biden and the majority of congressional Democrats whole-heartedly support bills that would reform our electoral systems to shield them against the kinds of theft Republicans are gearing up to perform. Unfortunately, those Democrats are still stymied by a couple of blinkered, obstructionist Democrats in the Senate — namely, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who would rather keep the filibuster in place than pass bills necessary to keep Republicans from outright stealing elections. Without that support, even the best efforts of ordinary progressives on the ground to save our democracy could very likely fail next time.
"Stop the Steal" is becoming the GOP's permanent rallying cry The Trump cult is convinced that it is literally impossible for them to legitimately lose elections https://www.salon.com/2021/05/10/stop-the-steal-is-becoming-the-gops-permanent-rallying-cry/ Over the weekend, the Virginia Republican Party held its convention at which it was supposed to choose its candidates for the off-year election this fall. The three top candidates for governor have been described as "Trumpy, Trumpier and Trumpiest," so you can easily see where Virginia Republicans are positioning themselves in the GOP circular firing squad. In their zeal to model their allegiance to their Ultimate Leader, Republicans went out of their way to restrict the voting process to assure "the integrity" of the vote. According to NBC News' Alex Seitz-Wald, it didn't go very well: At issue is a decision to quietly allow voters to participate in their complicated primary process even if they left blank parts of the application, including required fields that asked for their state-issued voter ID number and a signature, according to documents and an audio recording of a call obtained exclusively by NBC News. Republicans in the state say the nominating contest has been a logistical nightmare. Their own activists couldn't traverse all of the GOP's newly-imposed "voter integrity" verifications. Evidently, a whole bunch of people didn't know how to do fill out the necessary paperwork so they left whole portions blank, which, under the new strict vote-counting rules the Republicans are pushing, should result in throwing out the ballot or registration form. The right-wing gubernatorial candidate who calls herself "Trump in heels," (and is widely considered the Trumpiest of the lot) Amanda Chase is not standing for it. She wrote this to her supporters: "DO NOT TRUST THE PARTY TO DELIVER ACCURATE RESULTS. Who should you go to for the proper results? Me and my campaign! My campaign will be monitoring the voting and data entry on election night. If they are accurate, we will tell you. If they are not, I will be prepared to sue in court to force a public count." She means it: They don't expect the vote to be fully tabulated for some time and since it's a ranked-choice voting process, there will undoubtedly be a runoff. Is there any doubt that Chase will deny the validity of the vote count if she doesn't make the runoff? After all, she is the Trumpiest and we know what that means: He won that year. And we all know what happened when, four years later, he didn't. So judging from what's going on with election laws around the country and the lockstep belief among the faithful, I think it's fair to assume that we can expect more of it. As you can see from the Virginia example, one problem with these draconian voting restrictions is that they will affect Republican voters the same way they will affect the Democrats. It's possible they'll affect them even more since the GOP has been pushing absentee voting for years for their older constituents, the very people who may be most confused by the changes. Perversely, that will provide even more fodder for the losers to contest the election results and further degrade their own voters' faith in the system. After all, the last election results were certified by Republican officials and Republican judges all over the country, yet Republican voters still believe it was fraudulent. It won't matter in 2022 and 2024 that it was Republicans who instituted the rules that disadvantage their own voters. Keep in mind that the new voting restrictions are not where this ends. Republicans are also doing their usual tricks of "purging" voters from the rolls and "caging." But there are some newer very troubling moves, starting with the new expansive rules in 20 states for "poll watchers" which basically means that fanatical Republican extremists will be free to harass and intimidate voters as they are trying to cast a vote. This technique is thought to be more effective in precincts with more minority voters but Republicans may be surprised. Everyone knows what they're up to now so Democrats are highly unlikely to be intimidated by MAGA yahoos at the ballot box. Because we are also seeing the entire party from Ted Cruz, R-Tx., and Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga, to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., all buying into the notion that Trump's Jan. 6th gambit to overturn the election was legitimate, it's clear that's become conventional wisdom in the GOP as well. At this point, it appears that they have all decided to treat the insurrection itself as a somewhat overzealous but nonetheless valid response to having had the election "stolen." Trump made a serious run at getting the election overturned. He cared nothing for legitimacy, openly and blatantly threatened, cajoled and intimidated state and local elections officials to refuse to certify the results based upon sloppily made-up evidence and conspiracy theories. For months he bellowed that mail-in votes were fraudulent and 6 weeks before the election he stated outright that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett confirmed because he expected the court to decide the election and he needed that extra vote just in case. As it happened those local officials and judges around the country refused to cooperate. Today those officials are all being purged from the party. All these voter "integrity" bills will eventually be challenged and we'll see if the courts are still independent or if conservative jurists are now on the Trump train as well. After all, it all seemed like a stunning assault on our tradition of a peaceful transfer of power at the time. Something like this had never happened before. Will they feel the same way if it happens again? Even more unnerving is the growing perception that all this supposed "rigging" leaves the GOP with no choice but to refuse to vote to certify any more presidential elections if they have the power to do it. There is unfortunately a decent chance that McCarthy might just be the Speaker of the House in 2025 and if Trump is on the ballot, as he probably will be, does anyone believe he would dare defy him again? It is almost inevitable that "stop the steal" will be an ongoing GOP rallying cry. Whatever misgivings the Republican establishment may have had about Donald Trump's strategy to usurp democracy, they have rapidly come around to being his servile minions once again. With three more years of banging this drum, the Trump cult will be thoroughly convinced that it is literally impossible for them to legitimately lose elections. And GOP officials will be happy to let them believe that as long it means they can stay in power.
Of course, we have Trump pushing his latest election fraud nonsense... 'If a thief robs a jewelry store, the diamonds must be returned': Donald Trump stokes anticipation among his supporters over a 'bombshell' Michigan election fraud case Trump on Monday said there had been a 'bombshell' development in Michigan He appeared to be referring to a case in Antrim County, in the rural north The case is among the last in the United States going through the courts Antrim County was won by Trump so altering results would not help his cause The plaintiff in the case wants to use it to 'expose' the 'fraud' in the election The local officials argue it is a waste of time and will not change anything Trump on Monday said: 'The number of votes is MASSIVE and determinative' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...s-bombshell-Michigan-election-fraud-case.html
I think it is sad to see any party cling to the guy who is no longer in office... like does the GOP have no balls to move forward with its own people who are actually still in power? Are they all cucks like Cruz?
They're not. ------They are rebranding themselves as the party of Pro-Americanism, Capitalism, Law and Order, Rugged Individualism and Anti-Marxism.