The Decimated GOP

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 09, 2024

 

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the latest New York Times/Siena College poll: One in 10 Republicans say they plan to vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. That’s up from 1 in 20 in the last Times/Siena poll. Republicans today are also three times more likely to say they plan to vote for Harris (9 percent) than Democrats are to say they plan to vote for Trump (3 percent). 

 

Donald Trump may be a lapdog for Vladimir Putin, a big-talking non-performer on the border, and a self-proclaimed adversary of Big Tech who chose Silicon Valley’s favorite yes-man as his VP nominee. But Trump has succeeded in doing one big thing: For the 2024 presidential election, he has (almost literally) decimated the Republican Party. 

 

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s most durable rival in the 2024 Republican primary, has, predictably, knuckled under. Like J. D. Vance, Lindsey Graham, and so many others, Haley has offered her full-throated support to the man she insisted—until the day before yesterday—was “unhinged,” “not qualified to be the president of the United States,” not “mentally fit,” a man whose election would be “suicide for our country,” etc. Vance, of course, famously worried that Trump was poised to become an “American Hitler.” Graham called him “crazy,” “unfit for the office,” a “kook,” and, at one point during Trump’s presidency, even thought it might be necessary to use the 25^th Amendment to remove him from office. 

 

Naturally, every one of those bootlicking sycophants has found a way to get on the side of whatever it takes to be where the money and the votes are. But what about everybody else?

 

My faith in “We the People” is, you might say, limited. But a significant share of them have shown themselves resistant to Trump’s brand of populist pornography. Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 Republican primary, less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 general election, and less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. During his presidency, Trump never got above 50 percent approval. He only broke the 50-percent approval-rating barrier recently, and then only briefly, when it became clear that Joe Biden simply cannot do the job of president now, much less in four years. As soon as Harris got into the race, Trump was back under 50 percent—and he has stayed there. 

 

Trump’s low standing in the polls has been in line with his serial failures at the polling place. In 2016, he edged out Hillary Rodham Clinton—one of the most unlikeable figures in the modern history of the Democratic Party—with a few thousand fortuitously distributed votes putting him on top in the Electoral College despite his smaller overall vote share. Since then, Trump has been ballot-box poison for Republicans in every election in which he has been a factor. Republicans have lost control of both houses of Congress and lost scores of seats at the state and local level. And, in 2020, Trump managed to lose to a witless senescent human eggplant who barely bothered to campaign against him. Kamala Harris was the worst-performing contender in the 2020 Democratic primary, but she is at the moment (caveats, caveats, harrumph, etc.) poised to hand Trump yet another much-deserved electoral beating. 

 

The good news is that 1 in 10 Republicans aren’t buying what Trump is selling. The bad news is that 9 in 10 Republicans are chumps. 

 

Think about it: Trump says something stupid, the newspapers report it, and he insists it’s “fake news.” Trump is behind in the polls, and he insists they are “fake polls.” The election comes out the same way the polls did—with Trump losing—and he insists it’s a “rigged election.” As the political philosopher Raylan Givens put it, “You run into an a–hole in the morning, you ran into an a–hole. You run into a–holes all day, you’re the a–hole.” Maybe it’s the case that the news is all fake and the polls are phony and the elections are rigged and we’re having all these hurricanes because shadowy Jews control the weather and the Bilderbergers put that worm in Bobby Kennedy’s brain … or maybe—hear me out!—Donald Trump is a loser, a charlatan, and an incompetent who won in a freak election in 2016 thanks mainly to his status as a genuine celebrity among the merely “Fox News famous.” You don’t have to be Occam and you don’t need a razor to cut through the bulls—t. 

 

Look at the Republican Party today: Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Hulk Hogan, and Donald Trump. For Pete’s sake, if I were to write that the Republican Party needs to get rid of that handsy weirdo, you’d have to ask: Which one? It’s the only way Republicans know how to reach across the aisle, as it were. 

 

No wonder that 1 in 10 Republicans say they’re going to vote for Harris in November. One wonders a good bit about the other nine.