“We’re Never Going Back” Focus Group Leader Proves Old GOP Is Dead, Trump Is Here To Stay

Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re too much in the thick of things to get any kind of an outside view, let alone a 10,000 foot overall one. Sarah Longwell, who writes for the Bulwark and does Republican focus groups, is of the opinion that we have seen the dawning of a new age in Donald Trump’s appearance on the escalator.

She points out that it is not rational to think that Trump was only a one-shot kind of a deal and now we’re all going back to politics as usual. Not in the Republican party, we’re not. No, for them, 2016 was a watershed moment. Trump was the candidate not only of the year, but of the hour. He was the one that the GOP had wanted and needed for some time.

At first Trump was hailed as a version of the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Lindsey Graham compared Trump to a “combination of Reagan, P.T. Barnum and Jesse Helms.” While I’m no defender of Ronnie Raygun, I think he deserves better than to be compared to an abject racist, circus con artist and reality TV host.

Dubya was arguably the last recognizable Republican in the Oval Office. Both John McCain and Mitt Romney were recognizable Republican types. Then along came Trump down the escalator and everything changed. And guess what? It’s not going back. This is something that the likes of Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and even Ron DeSantis need to digest at once. They’re not going to be viable candidates because the party, as it exists today, does not want their kind. Let Longwell tell it:

I’ve sat through hundreds of focus groups with GOP voters over the last four years and one thing is perfectly clear: The Republican party has been irretrievably altered and, as one GOP voter put it succinctly, “We’re never going back.” […]

As one voter put it, speaking for the group, a Pence presidency “would just be a return to pre-2016, which is what . . . the elite want. They want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected. And that would be the wrong direction.”

Or Nikki Haley. The former South Carolina governor is currently running as far and fast as she can away from her signature accomplishment in office: taking down the Confederate flag after the massacre at a black church in Charleston in 2015. Instead, she’s reinvented herself as a hardline Trump devotee who loves to kick her enemies. But trying to sound Trumpy doesn’t cover up the fact that she’s an avatar of the before times.

Haley is at 2 percent in the polls. Voters I talk to call her “a milquetoast Republican” and “a status quo politician, basically,” telling me “she’s just going to be a return to what everything was before 2016.”

That is the message here. The big donors may want to go back to pre-2016. They may want to do that more than anything. That’s why Ron DeSantis’ short mirage of a campaign got going. He seemed the perfect candidate, a mini-Trump who was tractable, a MAGA with a fine legal education and an academic, at least, understanding of government. Plus, DeSantis went on to forge an anti-Maverick name for himself, the bad boy governor of Florida politics, taking on the biggest employer in the state in a mano a mano match.

Above Disney, DeSantis took on Woke as the enemy. Oh, yes. Now you can’t talk about race in the classroom, or gender identity, or gays, and elsewhere you can’t talk about vaccines. Plus, refugees and migrants quiver in the dark, remembering the flights to Martha’s Vineyards. Yet even this isn’t working in DeSantis’ favor. Why?

Because before he became Trump’s handpicked governor, DeSantis was a normie mid-2010s Republican: He had Tea Party credentials. He was hawkish on Russia. He was a founding father of the House Freedom Caucus. And like all good Ryan-era conservatives, he wanted to privatize Social Security as a means to save our unsustainable entitlement system.

Trump is already trying to hang DeSantis with his BT record, attacking him as beholden to “Establishment RINO Advisors” and a “RINO in disguise!” who would gut Social Security and Medicare. […]

Voters I talked to recently say they’re “a little concerned” about DeSantis “because he’s still establishment,” and that “he seems like more of an open-borders, Paul Ryan kind of guy.” Others called him “more of a politician than Trump is” and said “he is very much one of those political, swampy guys.”

Words that stood out when we asked voters to describe DeSantis: “wishy-washy,” “a little shady,” and “not trustworthy.” One said, “I just don’t have a good feeling in my gut about him.”

Longwell is convinced that 2023 is the Rubicon. This is the year when it will become clear to one and all that the old GOP is dead. That begs the question of what’s next? A Trump-only party? And then what happens when Trump dies, we get Junior? That suggestion has been the source of satire, but I shudder to think if it’s real.

Yet whatever happens from here on out, I suspect that 2023 will be the year that puts to rest the view that the old days will return. By the time this campaign hits New Hampshire, everyone in America—even the conservative think tank donors—will understand that we aren’t living through an interregnum, but rather have passed into a new age.

The question, then, will be what AT Republican politics evolves into once everyone in the Republican party understands that it is the future.

The answer isn’t likely to be pretty.

No, and that’s one hell of an understatement. So what is the future of the two party system in America? We have one party going to blows with another at all times? Civility in politics is totally gone, because political theater is preferable? The day will come when Marge Greene’s mic doesn’t get cut off, because raging in Congress is the new normal?

And if the hair is standing up on your neck now, wait until you read this from  Politico Playbook.  Anybody hear about The Diploma Divide? If not, you will.

Sosnik’s latest big-picture take on the state of American politics digs deeper into what he and others have been calling “the diploma divide,” and it offers an excellent preview of the 2024 House, Senate and presidential elections. Read his full memo and slides

He begins with the observation that “college educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, and those without college degrees — particularly white voters, but increasingly all Americans — support Republicans.”

These changes mean that:

“Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues, including abortion, attitudes about LGBTQ+ rights, and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices, and voters’ sources of information that shape their understanding of facts.

“As a result of these economic and cultural trends, politics now has a class-based architecture where cultural affinity now surpasses voters’ narrow economic self-interests.

“This educational sorting has made the vast majority of states no longer politically competitive. It is the battleground states in the middle — where education levels are neither disproportionately high nor low — that will decide the 2024 presidential election.”

And the Diploma Divide is what also makes a person more susceptible to conspiracy theory and the likes of Fox News.

This is how the battle lines are dividing. Add one last stat to this mix: 49% of Americans are identifying as Independent, the same number that identify as Republicans and Democrats put together. And antsy Independents are responsible for House, Senate, and White House flips, at least since 2004. (2012 was the sole year the Independent vote didn’t cause such a flip.)

2024 is going to be a defining race in its own way but at this point I don’t know if it’s possible to predict just how. It won’t just be a rematch between two elderly white guys. There’s a lot more going on besides that. Ironically, Trump may be right. This is a battle for the soul of America, only not the way he thinks.