By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, May 03, 2023
If the Republican Party wishes to have a shot at
winning the 2024 presidential election, the sizeable portion of its members who
remain immune to Donald Trump’s medieval-era demands of absolute fealty are
going to need to stop quivering, come out from under their beds, and tell their
tormenters in no uncertain terms that they should feel free to go ahead and
shoot the phantasmic hostages they insist they’re keeping in the attic.
I am told — sometimes as a threat, sometimes under the
guise of “analysis” — that if Donald Trump loses the primary next year, the
minority of Republican voters who tell pollsters that they will vote for him
and for him alone will sit out the general election and guarantee President
Biden a second term. This is untrue. It is a lie, a falsehood, a ploy. It is an
empty promise, based upon an assumption of potency, numerical strength, and
broad-based monomania that is simply not in evidence. Certainly, the Always
Trump contingent makes a lot of noise, but, practically speaking, they do not matter.
Should they fail to get their way in the primary, they will end up being as
impotent in 2023 as were the Never Trumpers in 2016. It is time, at long last,
for mainstream Republicans to call their bluff.
There is not much for the GOP to lose by jettisoning
Donald Trump and his acolytes. The number of Republican voters who are actually
prepared to boycott non-Trump candidates in a fit of pique is vanishingly
small, and, as we saw in 2022, those who do stay at home in
protest are considerably outnumbered by the Republicans and independents who
delightedly return to the fold. In Georgia last year, the incumbent governor,
Brian Kemp, won his primary 73 to 21, prompting the Always Trump contingent
that had gone to war with him over his “disloyalty” to predict that he would be
beaten roundly in the general. Instead, Kemp won it by eight points. The same
dynamic played out with Brad Raffensperger, the state’s beleaguered secretary
of state, who was supposedly destined for defeat as punishment for his refusal
to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 election. Raffensperger won his primary 52
to 33. But he won the general by nine points. At the same time, Trump’s
preferred candidate for Senate, Herschel Walker, lost by three points.
Georgia was by no means unique. Everywhere in America we
saw the clear electoral benefit of being separated from Donald
Trump. Which . . . well, which should not come as a great surprise, should it?
In about 2016, the institutional Republican Party decided that it would be a
jolly good idea to jettison the millions of suburban voters who have turned out
reliably for the GOP since 1968, and to replace them with a herd of chimeras.
In 2016, Chuck Schumer predicted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose
in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the
suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and
Wisconsin.” Because his party had nominated a candidate who was less popular
than syphilis, this did not come to pass immediately. But it has since. Seven
years later, and we know for a fact that neither moderate Republicans nor their
equivalents among independents will vote for candidates who they believe are
too closely allied with Donald Trump. This was true in 2018. It was true in
2020. It was true in 2022. It will be true next year, too. The GOP’s answer to
the boisterous promises of abstinence that emerge from the most obsessive
Always Trumpers should be, “Good!” In exchange for an online silo, they’ll gain
a midsize city in the real world.
Elections, whatever you may have been told online, are
there to be won. His disqualifying behavior to one side, Donald Trump ought not
to be the Republican nominee on the simple grounds that he is incapable of
putting together a coalition that can gain power. He is a loser. He loses.
He’ll lose in Georgia and Arizona and Nevada and New Hampshire and Michigan and
in every other contested area where he and his followers elect to compete.
Ultimately, there is nothing to fear from the Always Trump brigade, because it
represents the vanguard of an army that cannot march. Republicans who wish to
rid themselves of their present loser mentality should rest assured that the
hostages can be safely shot because the hostages do not actually exist. They
are ghosts — and no sensible political party would base its future around
those.
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