“The Party Is Completely Gone”
“The Party Is Completely Gone”
Also: “Election Integrity” no longer means what it used to mean.
Consolidation continues: Ed McBroom took apart Trump’s “stolen election” lies brick by brick in Michigan. Now he’s endorsed Trump. And billionaire investor Nelson Peltz threw in his lot with Trump yesterday because he thinks Biden is too old. (Peltz and Biden are the same age.) But half of the Haley voters in yesterday’s primaries said they plan on voting for Biden. Meanwhile, Trump is already saying that this election will be rigged and the WSJ is very concerned about this rhetoric—because it might depress Republican turnout.
Happy Wednesday.
In an excellent report on the eve of yesterday’s Ohio Republican Senate primary, Jonathan Martin noted that it represented “the best, and perhaps last, opening for the Republican old guard to sneak one of their own through a contested primary, secure a reliable vote for Ukraine, and hand former President Donald Trump an embarrassing defeat.”
“It is hard,” Martin continued, “to conjure a better set of circumstances for Matt Dolan, the state senator . . . and would-be last gasp of the pre-Trump establishment.”
After all,
Dolan has lingering statewide name identification from his failed 2022 Senate bid and has been up on Ohio television since last fall, using his fortune to outspend his two Republican rivals. He doesn’t have to beat the Trump-backed candidate, Cleveland-area car dealer Bernie Moreno, head to head because there’s a third, fading candidate in the race siphoning votes, Secretary of State Frank LaRose. And with Trump having made quick work of his third consecutive GOP nomination, his working-class devotees don’t have the same urgency to rally to the MAGA flag when polls open here Tuesday.
Oh, and the Associated Press dropped a bombshell story last week reporting that somebody with access to Moreno’s email account in 2008 signed up on Adult Friend Finder in search of “young guys to have fun with while traveling.”
Dolan was also expected to benefit from a late endorsement by the popular governor, Mike DeWine.
Martin concluded his piece with a remark from Steve Stivers, the former Republican congressman who now runs the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which supported Dolan. Stivers said, “with a gallows laugh”: “If we can’t win under these circumstances, we have to acknowledge the party is completely gone.”
Yesterday, the Trump-backed Moreno crushed Dolan by almost 20 points. Trump-backed candidates also won contested House primaries in Ohio and Illinois. Meaning that we wake up this morning to the latest episode in the longest-running program in contemporary American politics: It’s Trump’s party.
Today’s Republican voters want Trump. And they want Trump-backed candidates.
The party is completely gone.
Will this outcome hurt Republicans’ chances to pick up the Senate seat currently held by Sherrod Brown in the general election? It could. Democrats spent about $2 million to boost Moreno, figuring he’d be a weaker opponent. Still, in a presidential year, with Trump expected to win the state, Moreno probably starts off with a 50-50 chance to win.
In yesterday’s presidential primaries in Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, and Florida, Nikki Haley got somewhere between 14 percent and 19 percent of the vote. Does that suggest there’s some resistance to Trump in the GOP electorate?
It does.
Can those voters be kept from Trump in November, and pushed toward Biden?
Perhaps. They represent Biden’s path to victory.
Can one take hope from Trump’s money troubles, his legal troubles, and his troublesome remarks and statements?
Sure. But it would be folly to count on these accumulated problems to do Trump in.
If we have a “normal” presidential election in November, with Biden as an incumbent with low approval running against a challenger who has a bunch of problems, the challenger would be favored to win—as troubled challengers did in 1980 and 1992, and (acknowledging of course that Hillary Clinton wasn’t an actual incumbent) in 2016.
If, on the other hand, voters come to understand that November’s election is an exceptional one, with the prospect of a truly scary Trump second term before them, and the rule of law, the liberal international order, and the future of American democracy on the ballot, then Trump is, I think, likely to lose.
But the more “natural” outcome at this point is a Trump victory.
The task is to prevent it.
As the priestess Sybil tell Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid,
The gates of Hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
—William Kristol
Cheap Shots
Why should the Democrats rescue MAGA Mike?
It was gone in 2016, but no one wanted to talk about Bruno. TBH, they still don't.