The Comparison That Will Kill The GOP In 2022

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We are still more than 18 months from the 2022 midterm elections, and already we can see the outlines of the campaign strategy starting to come clear, at least on the GOP side. The outlines of the Democratic side will likely start to become a wee more clear over the next 3 months or so.

Thanks to his obsession with financially draining his gullible GOP base by whatever means necessary, El Pendejo Presidente is still the titular head of the GOP. But that doesn’t mean that Trump is the presumptive front runner for the GOP in 2024. In fact, in the straw poll from CPAC, a Trump fortress, almost 2/3 of respondents didn’t want Trump to run in 2024, although they wanted him active in the party.

It gets worse. In a recent poll, 55% of independents would not vote for Trump again, while 37% would at least consider it. This at a time when the GOP consists of 29% of registered voters, while the Democrats comprise 40%. That leaves a whole lot of independent voters that Trump can’t convert.

But forget for a moment whether or not the GOP is stuck with Trump in 2024. There is one thing that the GOP is already irrevocably saddled with, and that’s the Trump base. In fact, that’s all they have, and they damn well know that too, since nobody else will touch them with fire tongs.

Which means that the GOP 2022 strategy in messaging will be white privilege, white victimization, stoking fear of the others, and a healthy dose of vote theft stopping poll monitors! And GOP legislatures nationwide are already peddling the snake oil juice, but because they’re Republicans, they’re doing it stupidly.

Georgia has had no excuse absentee voting for something like 15 years now. But it’s only after masses of Democrats and minorities used it to flip Georgia blue for Biden, and take the Senate that it needed to be reformed. It was only after local merchants started showing up at polling places with slices, sammies, and bottled water that it became a crime. Jesus Christ! The point of the line is to scare them away, not give them a Golden Corral buffet! And in Arizona, after multiple court battles, and at least three recounts, including a hand recount, the GOP state Senate has turned the whole mess over to a Q-Anon conspiracy nut to finally get the damn thing done right!

And they’re just getting warmed up. Following the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict this week, with white paranoia at a fever pitch, GOP legislatures are rushing into the breach, to protect racists from civil damages from driving over protesters in their cars. Allowing peaceful protesters to be jailed, at least overnight until their first court appearance, and redefining what constitutes a riot.

For one thing, the proposals being offered and passed are so off the chart that they border on bat shit insane. And second, somewhere around 90% of it is blatantly unconstitutional! And the funny thing is that the GOP knows it! And they don’t care. Because their base has the memory span of a three week old puppy. Make the headlines show you’re fighting for them, and they won’t even notice weeks, months, or years from now when the laws are thrown out by the court. It’s all about the messaging.

Because the GOP is going with the old, established playbook. You know, the one that says that the party in power, especially total power takes a bath in the new President’s first midterm elections? People decide they want to restore balance to governance. But the whole problem with that is that that playbook is dependent on the party out of power having a coherent, competing method of governance for people to choose from! And the GOP doesn’t have one. Their only message is a floating whack-a-mole message aimed at their pure base. Their 2022 strategy is to keep coming up with whatever wild, sadistic, racist rants they can come up with in order to scrape out every last man-jackin’ Trump voter in 2022. While they do everything in their power to suppress the vote.

And there’s the Achilles heel. Because while the GOP can try as hard as possible to restrict the vote, the one thing that they can’t do is to restrict voters! And brain dead Trombies set aside, the vast majority of voters in America still vote their pocketbook, and their values. And what’s the comparison?

This is the challenge to the Democrats in the next six months. Biden is riding high on his Covid relief bill, he’s acing it on the economy, and the majority like his infrastructure bill. Get the infrastructure bill passed, as massive as possible, and by whatever means necessary. Get that money flowing to individual states and cities by spring, and Biden will be King Kahuna in November. Get Joe Manchin’s head out of his ass long enough to reform the cloture vote rule for civil rights and voting rights bills, and get the George Floyd Police Reform Act and the For The People Act passed. If you pass the Floyd Act, Biden energized the African American base, he didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk. And the For The People Act would undo 90% of what GOP legislatures are trying to do to stifle the vote.

The comparison couldn’t be more stark, nor more clear. On the one hand, you have a party in power that is bending over backwards to keep it’s promises, and to work for the people it was chosen to represent. And on the other hand, you have a party totally committed to stopping them. That’s it, no plans, no agenda, just desperately trying to not be made to look like shit.

The 2022 midterms are all going to come down to turnout. And the Democrats have the chance in the next six months to put out a record that they can run on, that they can boast about, and that they can use to show GOP obstructionism for what it is. The polling and voter registration numbers all favor the Democrats. And in 2018, the Democrats unleashed a literal tsunami that righted the ship. If we can get them to turn out in 2022 in the same numbers, then Joe Biden has a clear field for the second half of his first term. It’s all in our hands. Don’t touch that dial.

Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35

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10 COMMENTS

  1. The elections will be a choice between extensively proved competence, and widely, wildly proved incompetence, between ‘Government can improve your lives, here’s the example’ and ‘Don’t trust government to do anything, except be corrupt , specially when we are in’.

    Hmm, what a hard choice.

    • depends where you live. I live in Texas and the state government is doing all it can do to be incompetent. voting laws, trans laws, withholding federal funds from the school districts. They expect this to be the winning formula in 2022.

      • I live in Texas too and the retaining of funds for schools is beside intolerable! They did something similar when we were sent extra vaccine doses. They withheld that many from our normal allocation. Just maddening! But the majority keeps reelecting these jerks.

        • I wonder how much cheating there is in the Texas election system? ? It just seems weird to me that people would not only tolerate GOP incompetence for so long but actually vote to keep it going.

  2. The ENTIRE reason that the GOP first took power back in 1994 was largely due to its “vision” (even bad vision is better than no vision at all) known popularly as the “Contract for America.” Overall, it was a bunch of hokum–mostly stuff that could be easily achieved with a simple House majority but stuff that SOUNDED good to voters (especially as the Democrats didn’t really have any competing ideas and congressional Democrats had been almost as antagonistic towards Clinton as the GOP was). And when the GOP proved it couldn’t really do much more than the simple stuff they’d proposed in the Contract and decided to engage in, and then expand, the witch hunt against Clinton, they lost voters just 4 years later (not enough to lose Congress but enough to scare the s#!t out of the GOP leadership).

    The worst part about the Democrats retaking Congress in 2006 is that people were treating the election as a real referendum on Dubya which held on in 2008. But, by 2010, the GOP was starting to coalesce around another (bad) vision–one which, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your feelings), led to the problems that the GOP now faces.

  3. Arghhh, can’t read a lot of your site as the ad and even the closed ad space cover the content. I know a necessary evil but I can’t deal with it.
    thanks!

    • Have you tried closing the ad? There is a sign that says “close” and an “x” to click. People complain about this but I don’t know what they’re complaining about. Just close it if it bothers you. What do you mean when you say “closed ad space cover the content?” When I close it, it vanishes. I’m happy to go to the ad people to complain if you’ll tell me what I’m supposed to complain about. Thanks.

  4. By next year, we will likely see high-profile trials of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Voters will be reminded that many Republicans supported the attack on the Capitol, and some were involved in the planning. That should have an impact on the mid-terms.

  5. I look for TN to be one of the few places the GQP does well in 2022. Between the redneck contingent who went full Trump and the totally demoralized Dems (not helped on the local level by Northern retiree transplants who talk a better game than they play), I have zero hope for this place. The one thing that I think might make the difference is enough of those same voters being too crippled or dead from COVID to make it to the ballot box.

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