Ten Second News

Hilzoy: How The Republicans Got Donald Trump

by Mike Schilling · March 4, 2016

Mike Schilling

Mike has been a software engineer far longer than he would like to admit. He has strong opinions on baseball, software, science fiction, comedy, contract bridge, and European history, any of which he's willing to share with almost no prompting whatsoever.

Stillwater says:

March 4, 2016 at 10:58 am

That gets close to view I’ve been mulling over a bit myownself: since at least Bill Clinton’s presidency – tho I’m inclined to think it goes further back than that – GOP political rhetoric has been so disconnected from reality and so embued with conspiratorial “things aren’t what they seem” thinking that the target-zone of those attacks – Democrats – has expanded to include the very political structure which has defined itself in terms of that message. So lots of voters don’t trust the GOP anymore.

{{QED}}Report
Kolohe says:

March 4, 2016 at 11:01 am

Interesting that she uses failure to overturn Roe as an example. Isn’t Scalia’s death literally the only thing that is stopping in this term the largest deconstruction of Roe since Casey? Wouldn’t we be very close to a point of reversal if President Romney were now in office? Isn’t the fact that Donald isn’t in any way consistent on abortion, Planned Parenthood, and all the other touchtones of standard GOP orthodoxy in this matter mean that Trumpeters really don’t give a darn about abortion?

I think she also makes the common mistake of imprecision in the dynamics between the Tea Party, ‘the base’, the ‘establishment’, the Trumpeters, and the GOP electoral fortunes in the Obama era. The Tea Party has generally only taken down people that were asleep at the switch, like Castle and Cantor. Guys that were braced for impact, like McDonnell and Graham did just fine. Tea party people also only won general elections when the terrain was favorable to the Republicans anyway – competitive elections they usually lost. The GOP victories in 2014 and taking control of the Senate were when the ‘establishment’ people were in the races for the general election.

I also remember when the shoe was on the other foot.

Circa 2006, George Bush was bad, and GOP Congress was bad, but that year, people could only do something about one of them, and they did.
*Then* when the wars kept on going, and the economy tanked, the sales pitch was ‘oh, we the Dems need the White House too’.
And then won that.
Immediately after that the pitch was ‘oh we need Al Franken’s victory over Coleman to be certified, so we have a fillibuster proof Senate’.
And then that happened.
and *then* it was like, ‘oh that Ben Nelson is such a pain the posterior, we need real Dems, not people like him’.
And then Ted died, and Scott beat Martha, and the Dems were back to ‘oh, this antiquated Senate is such a downer and unrepresentative, we can’t do anything anymore’.
Then everybody in Team Blue, except the US Senate, got shellacked in 2010, and it became a self-fufilling prophecy.Report
- Stillwater in reply to Kolohe says:
  
  March 4, 2016 at 11:26 am
  
  Interesting that she uses failure to overturn Roe as an example.
  
  Yeah, it is interesting if your analysis of Trump is correct – that his equivocations on abortion indicate that his supporters don’t prioritize right to life issues in the way that, for example, the religious folks do. At that point, she’s blaming Trump on all the people who’ve never cared all that much about Roe anyway, which sorta makes no sense given the rest of her account. And certainly in the beginning of his campaign, as you say, he was all over the map on abortion. Lately he’s tried to tighten up his Right to Life bonafides but it still seems like buried message.Report
- Guy in reply to Kolohe says:
  
  March 4, 2016 at 7:57 pm
  
  I think she’s just bringing Roe up as a failure to succeed, not a break with the base (or any base). “They can’t even get this core position they’ve been harping on for thirty years” sort of thing. No disagreement with the rest of your post, though.Report