The political right wing in America is in the “find out” stage of their recent existence. Here’s how things are going for them:
TFG was formally indicted in Manhattan this week, with other indictments almost certain in Washington, DC, and Atlanta. Instead of abandoning TFG when he made his “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” or his “Mexicans are rapists and murderers), they stuck with him through the numerous scandals and assaults on democracy associated with his four years in the Presidency. They continue to stick with him – apparently seeing no off-ramp that doesn’t lose them the support of his almighty “voter base.”
Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA), the biggest supporter of TFG in the US Congress, was able to gather only a few MAGA supporters at a rally in support of TFG on the day of his arraignment in Manhattan. After speaking to a crowd that only marginally outnumbered the reporters, cameramen, and counter-protesters (and after being drowned out by whistles provided by a MAGA individual in the crowd who apparently never knew that the person he was intent on muting was the Queen of MAGA herself), Marje went home after casting parting shots as the “hell-hole” she endured during her brief visit. Fellow shining star of the GOP, George Santos (R-Bogota) was her companion at the rally, apparently finding solace with the only member of Congress who is not openly laughing at him.
The official MAGA news amplifier, The Fox Corporation, is being held accountable for its lack of journalistic integrity over the past few years, as their “news” anchors knowingly lied to their viewers about all things related to the 2016 and 2020 elections – including the fact that they knew that TFG had lost the election despite their on-air claims in support of the Big Lie. Their accountability for the events that led up to the January 6 insurrection, and for their subsequent dismissal of the significance of the events of that day, will result in fines amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. It may force them into bankruptcy. As you would suspect, they are not reporting about this case in their own programming.
A variety of witnesses who have thus far evaded invitations to testify about what they know about the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection – most notably, Mark Meadows and former VP Mike Pence – are now expected to respond to subpoenas to testify before a grand jury in DC. The courts have systematically denied either “attorney-client” and “speech-and-debate clause” privilege against testifying in court to these, witnesses who have knowledge that would clarify the role played by various important actors – including TFG – in the events surrounding this insurrection. Judges have employed the “crime/fraud” exception to these privileges, apparently having been convinced that the resistance to testifying is in furtherance of an ongoing crime or fraud and thus not protected.
The GOP decades-long effort to stack SCOTUS with conservative justices – led and financed by the Federalist Society – has been successful. A predictably conservative super-majority on the Court is systematically and quietly dismantling the progress in voting and abortion rights achieved since the 1960s. They destroyed campaign finance regulations in the 2010 Citizens United case and dismantled important parts of the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder. The resulting corruption and gerrymandering have made it more likely that the following situations would emerge.
Despite having gerrymandered a grossly unrepresentative state legislature in Wisconsin, they have so alienated Wisconsin voters that a progressive candidate won an election to the state Supreme Court this week, thus making it likely that an anti-choice law taking effect in the state will be overturned by the state Supreme Court.
Instead of building on the Dobbs decision to pass marginally “acceptable” (I use that term reluctantly) limitations of access to abortion, state legislatures across the country are passing draconian restrictions on this medical procedure, forcing women in need of care to go to another state to get the help they need. In the face of this, these legislatures are now considering (and some are in the middle of passing) legislation that would restrict the rights of pregnant women even to travel to other states. Not surprisingly, this is energizing voters who oppose these moves.
The current conservative SCOTUS super-majority has come at a cost. In addition to alienating large numbers of young voters and women through their decision in Dobbs, public perception of the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is at its lowest point in history. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, appears to have been at the heart of the planning and implementation of the January 6 attack. She has not been the focus of investigations because of concerns about involving SCOTUS in connection with a political controversy. Meanwhile, it was revealed yesterday that Clarence and Ginni have been the beneficiary of a number of luxury trips provided by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow – including lavish excursions to Indonesia and New Zealand, in addition to travel on Crow’s super yacht or stays at properties owned by Crow or his company in California, Texas, or Georgia. Initial reports indicate that this hospitality was not disclosed on the Thomas family’s public financial filings with the Supreme Court. These disclosures have led to greater support for the efforts by Congressional Democrats to create stronger ethics regulations surrounding the Supreme Court. It hasn’t passed yet but it will.
Instead of considering common-sense restrictions on firearms (like banning the possession of AR-15s and enacting licensing and “red flag” orders), they are doubling down on their wild (and knowing) mischaracterization of the original intent of the 2nd amendment, proposing unlicensed open carry and arming teachers as a solution to mass shootings.
They kicked out two Black representatives in the Tennessee state legislature while not kicking out the white representative who engaged in disruptive behavior (protesting the legislatures inaction on gun safety legislation) with them. Rather than use their gerrymander-generated “super-majority” to pass positive legislation, they have used it to remind people that Tennessee is the home of the Ku Klux Klan and also the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated over 50 years ago. The Tennessee GOP may have just anointed a successor to Barack Obama. They really don’t want to do that. Justin Jones is expected to be appointed by the Nashville City Council to return to the legislature on Monday night; I haven’t read about the immediate future of Justin Pearson (from Memphis) but I’m pretty sure we haven’t heard the last of him.
In Washington, a GOP-led committee (chaired by stalwart upright citizen Jim Jordan) is currently investigating the “weaponization of the system of justice” in the United States. They are interviewing whistle-blowers (who never fit the legal definition of whistle-blowers) and have their eyes focused on Hunter Biden’s laptop. They are holding public hearings that backfire on them because their members (like the aforementioned MTG) are attention hogs that think they are AOC or Katie Porter but don’t do the work that these representatives do. Things the Congress could actually be accomplishing – a conservative policy agenda – are languishing while the MAGA GOP chases phantoms.
I don’t know how the political right (and its flailing party, the GOP) withstands this battering. They are losing young voters daily. Suburban women (the hoped-for bloc of GOP voters) are leaving this coalition in droves as they recognize that their children and grandchildren will be denied the rights that they fought for when they were younger.
Political scientists tell us that the best way to predict how voters will vote in an upcoming election is to look at how they voted in the previous election. They also tell us that the second best predictor is how they voted the first time they voted. The GOP is creating a ground-swell of voters whose first vote will be for a Democrat – thus setting a pattern that may last for their entire lives. They are also enticing former GOP voters to vote for a Democrat – thus setting a pattern that they may follow from this vote forward.
To understand this, all you have to do is look at the results of the election of FDR in 1932 and the subsequent popularity of the Democratic Party.
Every few decades, the United States experiences what is called a “Realigning Election” – when voting blocks adjust to identify with a different set of principles within the existing political parties. Sometimes (as in the 1850s), one of the existing parties goes away and a new party emerges. No one knows that a political realignment is happening while it’s going on; it’s only identifiable in the rearview mirror.
The GOP was born from a political realignment in the 1850s. It may disappear with a political realignment in the 2020s. Instead of adapting to either forestall or embrace such a realignment, the GOP is doubling down on the policies that have chased voters away over the past two decades. They are the Federalists in the 1820s or the Whigs in the 1850s. The GOP has won the popular vote in a Presidential election only once since the 1990s: in 2004, when incumbent George Bush defeated Democratic challenger John Kerry by a popular vote margin of 50.7% to 48.3%. Check it out:
1992 – Clinton (43%) defeats Bush (37.5%) and Perot (18.9%)
1996 – Clinton (49.2%) defeats Dole (40.7%) and Perot (8.4%)
2000 – Gore (48.4%) gets more popular votes than Bush II) (47.9%) but loses the election when SCOTUS orders Florida to stop counting votes in that state, giving Bush an Electoral County majority 271-266.
2004 – Bush II (50.7%) defeats Kerry (48.3%)
2008 – Obama (52.9) defeats McCain (45.7%)
2012 – Obama (51.1%) defeats Romney (47.2%
2016 – HRC (48.2%) gets more popular votes than TFG (46.1%), but loses in the Electoral College 304-227
2020 – Biden (51.3%) defeats TFG (46.8%)
The disparity between the popular vote and Electoral Vote is the result of an intrinsic gerrymander embodied in the Constitution: the reliance of the allocation of Electoral Votes among states on the combination of house and senate members in each state. This rewards smaller states, whose EV numbers are enlarged by this disparity. And for those who say that “this is what the founders intended” — no, it’s not. At the time of Independence, the population of the largest state (Virginia) was about 10x the size of the smallest state (Georgia). In 2020, the population of the largest state (California) was almost 80 times the size of the smallest state (Wyoming). The framers of the Constitution did not anticipate this disparity. And for those who say that the framers wanted the minority to have enough power to counterbalance the majority — no, that’s not what they wanted either. They would not have supported either the filibuster or an election process where the minority could overturn the will of the majority. That’s simply a (probably deliberate) misreading of original intent. But they figure that only an insignificant (to them) number of voters would figure this out and call them on it.
Despite what some on the political right claim, these Dem popular vote victories are not the result of massive voter fraud or deception. Such voter fraud is almost vanishingly rare, and efforts to claim that someone else “actually” won these elections are simply either ignorant or fraudulent. No court anywhere in the country has come even close to identifying any kind of fraud that would overturn these margins of victory.
It’s not hard to explain the fact that more voters have chosen Democrats than Republicans in recent years: the Democrats have broadened their appeal to attract women, young people, racial minorities, immigrants, and other folks marginalized by the political mainstream. The GOP, on the other hand, has gone out of its way to avoid attracting this growing voter base in any useful numbers. Their policies – proposed by mostly affluent, mostly white, mostly men – are “sold” to other voters as part of a claim of a culture war that is being won by “woke” America – which no one can actually identify except to claim that a policy is “woke” if they don’t like it.
Even mainstream GOP voters — those who don’t like TFG but did like some of his policies — are finding less reason to vote for their party. It’s hard for them to identify exactly what “policies” of TFG they liked — because his “policy” statements are always self-centered, and change as his moods change. It’s not clear yet if the GOP even exists outside of TFG; he is leading in the (notoriously weak) early polls of GOP contenders for 2024, and only one (the recently declared Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas) has stated publicly that he is opposed to the TFG. Candidates like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are floundering around, trying to distance themselves from TFG while simultaneously trying to appeal to his MAGA voter base — which, at about 28% of the party, is not large enough to win the primary (unless multiple candidates fragment the electorate) or popular elections. It is enough to deny a victory to anyone else, however — thus the quandary.
My governor, Glenn Youngkin, has floated his name as a potential 2024 candidate — mainly because Virginia doesn’t allow governors to serve two consecutive terms and because both US Senate seats (a common off-ramp for former governors) are currently occupied by other former governors — Tim Kaine (who is running for reelection in 2024) and Mark Warner (whose seat is not up until 2026). Youngkin is balancing being MAGA enough to keep the loyalty of GOP voters in the state while not being so MAGA that he loses control of the General Assembly in state elections this November. The result of this pandering and balancing is that he doesn’t appear to actually believe in anything — which puts him squarely in line with TFG, so it may be working for him.
They are “finding out” that they will not win in the long run. Anyone who has worked with women in abusive relationships knows that the most dangerous time for them is when they actually try to leave. That’s when they are most likely to be killed. In the current situation, the abusers are the right wing of the GOP, who have begun to recognize that the targets of their abuse – minorities, women, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, high-tech workers, urban voters – have developed a plan to leave. Before they leave, their abusers continue to attack them – forcing their children to undergo genital inspections before they can play sports, criminalizing their amusements, disparaging their cities, criminalizing elements of the immigration process, separating them from their children, denying them workplace protections, and the like. They’ll continue to wonder why no one loves them anymore – unable to recognize that they have made themselves toxic.
For those who like to use math to understand things, this is for you.
You’re welcome.
Excellent. Love your sense of humor and irony!
Penny is So right. Those of us old enough to remember the "bad old days" pre-Roe can tell plenty of stories of things we do not want the women of today to have to experience. We can only hope that you are right (and recent local/state elections appear to support you) that the electorate will rise up in 2024 and vote their own interests and not the dog-whistles of TFG. I personally hope that the (some say) 20-ish investigations and law suits currently dogging his steps will keep him busy not campaigning, and paying out most (is all too much of an ask?) of his millions in fines and penalties. And, then there's E. Jean Carroll. Some years in jail for rape wouldn't bother me a bit! Great research, as always. I love that chart!!