I stumbled on a piece at the Never-Trump site The Bulwark, and it stunned me enough to write it up at New York.
You may have heard about the 45th president’s reported rant at a Republican donor conference near his Florida home over the weekend. Trump is apparently still furious at Brian Kemp for impeding his election coup, and Mike Pence for failing to steal a second term for him anyway, and at Mitch McConnell for refusing to back his electoral vote challenge and then criticizing him for inciting a riot.
To Republicans who aren’t deep in the fever swamps of MAGA-land, this is just Trump continuing his narcissistic and destructive post-election behavior. Just as he blew up those crucial Georgia Senate runoffs in January because he couldn’t let go of his own lies about the presidential election, he’s blowing up the party at a time when the GOP needs to stay unified in the fight against Biden.
And to those of us without a betting interest in Republican success, Trump’s intra-party vendetta and purge threats are bizarre and laughable, and only understandable as a way for him to keep his thumb on the party he conquered in 2016 with no concern for its future.
But what if Trump’s attacks on those who “betrayed” him in 2020 aren’t just narcissistic or backward-looking? What if it’s part of a forward-looking plan to rerun 2020 and get it right this time?
That’s the question Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark appears to have asked himself, and he’s answered it with a hair-raising hypothesis that is as plausible as the assumption that Trump is just throwing temper tantrums. He presents his theory as the likely product of an implicit Republican 2020 “autopsy” that has turned defeat into a near-victory:
“It is likely Republicans will have majorities in the congressional delegations of at least 26 states for the foreseeable future. They have a >50 percent chance of winning the House in 2022 and a pretty good shot at flipping the Senate.
“So the first two preconditions for winning the presidency while losing the election are very much on the table.
“Which leaves just one project: Mustering the political will to move past both the popular vote and the Electoral College.”
If you begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to steal the election was absurd, but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the broken parts makes sense:
“[T]he key parts of the Republican autopsy have been (1) building the political will to use raw power next time and (2) removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply last time.
“That’s why Republican state parties have censured nearly every Republican who did not participate in Trump’s attempted coup.”
And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth:
“The Big Lie is actually the biggest insight to come from the Republican autopsy. Republicans and their enablers discovered that if they make false, evidence-free claims often and loudly enough, then the vast majority of their voters will believe them.
“And then, once Republican voters were onboard, they found that the rest of the party elites would either join them or stay silent. Only a handful of Republicans dared to object. And those figures are in the process of being either defeated or coopted.”
So why not play it again with a prepared and united party that won’t hesitate to seize on bogus “voter fraud” claims and either steal electoral votes before they can be certified by the states, or refuse to certify a Democratic victory and throw the election into Congress?
“[E]ven though the success of such a gambit is a longshot given all of the various failure points, since political power is derived from their voters, many Republicans politicians will be incentivized to embrace the challenge anyway, since they will gain power within the party from the voters who have been primed to demand such a fight.”
But it’s not any more implausible than the election coup hypothesis sounded when some of us began predicting it in the spring of 2020. And in retrospect, it was spot-on except for a few crucial mistakes Team Trump made after Election Night.
From Last’s perspective, in ranting about disloyal Republicans Trump isn’t engaged in hindsight or vengeance, but is following an ambitious schedule for success in 2024 by getting rid of potential troublemakers within his party. And here’s the thing: it’s a strategy that doesn’t necessarily depend on Trump running for president again. It’s available to anyone determined to do whatever it takes to reconquer Washington at a time when Republicans look to be a minority of the electorate for the foreseeable future. Trump has prepared the way with a dress rehearsal.
It’s a chilling thought, and one to revisit if Trump’s Republican enemies go down to primary challenges next year.
>This CBS poll appears to use a weighting that includes MORE Dems than Reps (See the end of the file), so I’m confused by all the Lib spin that suggests this poll is biased in favor of GWB because it oversamples Reps.
>Of course, if the poll does not toe the Lib line that the race is a dead heat, then the poll is to be discarded – Sheeeeesh!!
Hmm, looks to me like, unweighted at least, it still favors the Republicans (by one). I’m still not versed enough in polling techniques to understand what they mean by “weighted” vs. “unweighted” — are the “weighted” responses the Likely Voters? How do they determine which responses are discounted? In any case, if the unweighted is Registered Voters, they’re still oversampling Republicans.
The increase in voter registration is great, but I fear it will be essentially defeated by partisan secretary’s of state in these various battleground states like OH and FL. There are many new legal technicalities which the (ironically named) Help America Vote Act of 2002 (“HAVA”) introduced into federal elections law. For example, there are numerous byzantine technicalities contained in HAVA concerning the proper form of identification to be used on a state voter registration form. I assure you that it is not the goal of Republican secretaries of state in states with large numbers of minority voters to increase the rolls of registered voters! I predict enormous election difficulties in these states on Nov 2, with thousands of new voters who thought they had registered finding out that their registration form was thrown out on a technicality, with no notice to them by the helpful secretary of state—–those are the kind of tactics that our friendly Republican Party will be using in this election, and all future ones.
This CBS poll appears to use a weighting that includes MORE Dems than Reps (See the end of the file), so I’m confused by all the Lib spin that suggests this poll is biased in favor of GWB because it oversamples Reps.
Of course, if the poll does not toe the Lib line that the race is a dead heat, then the poll is to be discarded – Sheeeeesh!!
If there is one thing history has taught us, it is that modern technologic changes often catch old disciplines with their pants down.
Polling is seeing one such blind spot come to fruition.
The data appear to show a major disconnect between what is really happening versus what is being sampled. A poll is a sample, and it matters WHAT it is a sample of.
The faulty premise is that pollsters are constructing valid models and carrying them out flawlessly. They are not even getting close in many instances.
The practice of calling voters and talking to those who will talk to you is inherently unreliable. It can only be made more reliable by sound methodology, and it isn’t there for Gallup and others, whose strategies are as outdated as the French post WWI planning.
This modern day polling Maginot line will fail as surely as did the original. Campaign Kerry is coming through. We have the numbers, and the registrations in key battleground states prove it.
The fact is we lost in 2000 because too many Dems didn’t register, didn’t vote, didn’t care enough. That is not happening this time, and any way you slice, we have at least 5 million more voters than they do.
We will win by 5 million.
I got to say that the CBS poll of registered voters makes zero sense given the NY Times article about the trend with registered voters at least in the battelground states. I mean seriously a 250 percent increase in Democrats to 25 percent increase in Republicans (which amounts to tens of thousands and maybe 100,000 new voters in Democrat heavy portions of these battleground states- remember most elections in these states with close margins will not be decided by more than a few ten thousand votes, and not several hundred thousand), and their numbers are at 8 percent more registered (not even likely voters) in favor of Bush. Does this sound off to anyone else? I know they say that polls undercount new registrants, but this seems out of wack with whats happening on the ground. Can someone explain the difference?