Don’t Turn a Blind Eye as the GOP Starts to Implode Bureaucratically

“The party, being the state party or the national party, has a fundamental job to help candidates be position for victory and to do the ground game and the data and so much of the infrastructure work of campaigns,” said Barbour. “So when you have a party that’s failing, it’s like the public utility down the street doesn’t work anymore. How do you get your electricity or your water? …  The party really plays that fundamental role in elections for its candidates.”

So says Mississippi GOP operative Henry Barbour – Mississippi Republican National Committee member, and nephew of former Governor Haley Barbour in a recent CNN piece on the “disarray” in the GOP. That reporting is all focused on the GOP shooting itself in the foot organizationally in key battleground states:

Republican party officials are becoming concerned that mounting dysfunction in a set of state Republican parties could imperil the GOP’s chances in 2024, going so far as to leave the eventual Republican presidential nominee hamstrung on party infrastructure in key battleground states.

The worries are based on the recent ousters of two state Republican Party chairs in Michigan and Florida, as well as dangerously low finances, ideological clashes and personal scandals that have hobbled the parties in those states plus Arizona and Georgia. And in Nevada, the party has had to deal with the fallout of its chair and vice chair being indicted in a 2020 fake electors case. Each of these states is set to play an essential role in the 2024 races for control of the House of Representatives, control of the Senate and even the presidency.

Now, long time readers of my work here, and on my mostly dormant personal blog will no doubt recall that I am not fan of the Democratic Party either – especially its often shown willingness to take charts and graphs to gun fights. So when a Party starts to implode bureaucratically I am not one to turn a blind eye.  Like it or not, our political system requires functioning political parties, no matter what the Founding Fathers said about them.

Unfortunately, Mr. Barbour and his ilk still refuse to properly diagnose the disease that may well bring his party down at the ballot box.  Sure, the inability to canvass may hurt them.  But so too will post-Dobbs total or near total abortion bans, which run in opposition to consistent national polls showing support by a majority of Americans for legal, safe abortion through the first trimester. They are also likely to be hurt by their unwillingness to actually do anything about immigration reform – where Democrats have easy soundbites to deploy showing the President and Democratic Senators working the issue, and the House refusing to address it at all. Their alleged support of parents right regarding books in schools is starting to come back to haunt them, both because people like Bill O’Reilly are finding their books removed as questionable, and because people like Moms For Liberty co-founder and Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler as just as openly and publicly hypocritical (and therefore easy to mock) as anyone.

In the end, get out the vote only works when you give people something to vote for.  And given the results of 2020 and 2022, the GOP needs to worry more about that, and less about whether all its financial ducks are in a row in Michigan.