As I draft this on Wednesday afternoon, I’ve been looking through analyses of yet another GOP under-performance in another set of off-year elections yesterday, as well as the latest from the Trump trial, and am feeling considerably less than cautiously optimistic about our chances next year.
I’m not going to watch the GOP debate tonight, because life is too short to spend time watching the prospect of the party stumbling forward into a replay of the loss in 2020. I’ll watch the shorthand analysis of the debate from some political commentators I trust, or at least as much as I can stomach of it.
Perhaps you fine folks in CO nation can buck me up and show me where my following thoughts and analyses are wrong? Because I really hope that they are!
1. Trump’s chances next year:
I fear that the bogus and infuriating trials that the corrupt Dems will be putting him through this year and next are going to make him susceptible to the Lenny Bruce syndrome.
Full disclosure: Bruce was before my time, and from what I’ve seen of his old recordings, he wasn’t my cup of tea, and his material hasn’t aged well. But he was widely influential on generations of comics who followed him.
At the height of his fame Bruce became embroiled in an obscenity trial. His last months of gigs (he overdosed at 40) were famously depressing, because he took to obsessively focusing on the ebbs and flows of his trial, going so far as to read trial transcripts on stage. Audiences became restless and turned away, for the obvious reason: a comedian’s job is to make people laugh, and regardless of the merits of his case (obscenity and speech laws changed dramatically not long after), they weren’t there to witness legal battles.
I’ve said it many times: the four cases against Trump are completely partisan hackwork, and the fact that they are even happening is an indictment of the outrageous corruption in our courts and media. (The only charge among them that is legitimate at all is the “he disclosed classified documents,” and that is only the case because Trump threw away the presidential get-out-of-jail-free card by confessing his guilt on tape – “I could have declassified these as president, but I didn’t.” – in an act of undisciplined foolishness.)
That being said, if the past month is any indication, we’re going to see a ton of Trump in and out of court and ranting at and about witnesses, judges and the rotten system. It’s likely that just about everything he rants will be true – just as the charges against Lenny Bruce didn’t stand the test of time – but that’s not going to help him in a general election.
People go see a comedian because he’s supposed to make them laugh. Persuadable voters support a presidential candidate because they want him to win and govern well. I don’t see how obsessing over trial transcripts on stage is going to advance that goal.
My overall take on this election is far from unique: every Dem and GOP nominee – regardless of who it is – starts with around 40-43% of the vote, and elections are won by winning the persuadable non-hardcore base voters in between those two set-in-stone voting blocs.
Biden is a uniquely awful candidate, presiding over a horrifically dysfunctional and unpopular administration. If he remains the candidate, the best strategy for any GOP nominee is to keep the focus on Biden.
Trump is a uniquely polarizing candidate, eliciting near-worship from his committed base, and the fiery hatred of 1000 suns from everyone on the center left, and too many in the mushy middle. If he is the candidate, the best strategy for any Dem nominee is to keep the focus on Trump.
Trump is constitutionally unable to stay out of the spotlight, even moreso now that he’s going to spend months on end in court, and will likely focus much more on his own legal persecution than on Biden’s manifestly disastrous presidency.
Biden, on the other hand, is constitutionally unable to appear, um, biologically viable. (He’s shuffled off this mortal coil!), which means that staying out of the limelight is right in his wheelhouse. (There’s no place farther from the limelight than a coffin in a White House janitor’s closet.)
That’s the route he took in ’20: hiding in the basement and making minimal appearances or speeches. I expect he’ll do the same this time around, including refusing any debates with Trump, since Trump refused to debate in the GOP primaries.
In fact, Biden’s argument on that point would be even stronger than Trump’s. Trump said that he is so far ahead of the other contenders that they aren’t even legitimate rivals, and he’d have nothing to gain by debating them (sadly, it appears, fact check: true). But Biden can easily claim that Trump isn’t a legitimate opponent (the MSM will do their best to bolster this lie), and claim (correctly!) that he has a lot more to lose than to gain by debating Trump.
Obviously, a candidate in a very tight race has a lot more incentive to duck debates – if he can get away with it – than someone with a big lead.
And if Trump tries to generate righteous anger to shame Biden into debating, he’s going to be accused of rank hypocrisy. (Once again, sadly: fact check true) Unfortunately, that’s a weapon that he put in the Dems’ hands, and I won’t be surprised if they use it, even if Biden isn’t the eventual nominee.
2. The results yesterday:
It’s not fair to blame Trump for the nationwide GOP losses yesterday – as never-Trumpers are itching to do – but I also think that two of what I think are three contributing factors are bad signs for him, though always-Trumpers will fight that assertion tooth and nail.
First, it looks like abortion once again hurt us in OH and elsewhere, and I don’t know how to react to that other than throw up my hands in frustration and even despair. It’s hugely disheartening to see how many people will eagerly perform a cranial-rectal inversion on themselves to avoid facing the clear truth that late-term abortions are infanticide.
Not to mention how many leftists and moderates insist that the federal government must dictate 98% of our life choices (what kind of car we can drive, what kind of lightbulb or toilet or stove we can buy, whether can protect ourselves with a gun, what schools our kids can go to, etc.), yet are horrified by any legal authority preventing them from aborting a viable baby in the womb. I don’t get it, and all I know to do is pray for them, and keep trying.
But this abortion issue is probably one that favors Trump’s more moderate position than it does DeSantis’ 6-week ban. (I think the RDS take is the morally correct one, but it appears to politically hurt us, even though we could largely mitigate that by clearly messaging it correctly.)
A second problem was the way the Dems out fundraised and outspent us. IMO, Ronna Romney-McDaniel (I for one won’t let her drop that “Romney”!) has once again botched the primary tasks of an RNC head, i.e. supporting strong candidates and raising tons of money.
And while spending isn’t everything – wisely spending is important, and candidate quality matters, as when Hillary vastly out-spent Trump in ’16 and got her adipose hindquarters handed to her anyway – it certainly helps, especially when deployed on get-out-the-vote infrastructure. And Ronna did not do that. Again!
She is another head-scratcher for me, re: Trump. I think he endorsed her for the job in 2016, and I know that he endorsed her to stay in the job after the ’18 mid-term losses and the disappointment in ’20. Then, after the dismal failure in the ’22 midterm – when Harmeet Dhillon challenged her – Trump stepped aside and let them “fight it out” without his endorsement.
I don’t get that. Dhillon famously supported and defended Trump in the aftermath of the ’20 election, so he couldn’t say she’d been disloyal.
One of the things I like about a businessman brand is that if somebody isn’t doing a good job, he fires them. (Unlike in our gov’t, where failures keep getting promoted. See: Biden, Joseph Robinette.) So after Ronna performed so badly in 3 consecutive election cycles – the last one disastrously so! – I don’t understand why Trump didn’t support Dhillon.
And thus we have yesterday: one more very winnable slate of elections in which the RNC head raised less money than the Dems, and we once again underperformed.
Not Trump’s fault, but not the best moment of another hand-picked endorsement of his, either.
As to the high-profile KY governor race, I don’t agree with Trump critics who blame him for Daniel Cameron’s losing a close race to Dem Andy Beshear. But I do think that the result should give pause to those who may have over-estimated the power of Trump’s endorsement, too.
I don’t follow KY politics closely, so I could be wrong about this. But I’ve been reading a writer at RedState who calls himself “Bonchie” (? Come on, man!) and who usually gives a pretty honest, conservative bounce on issues that I do follow. He’s not a Trump-basher, but his take is that Cameron seemed to over-rely on Trump’s endorsement:
“If you lived in Kentucky, you were bombarded with ads and social media posts that centered on one thing and one thing only: Being endorsed by Donald Trump. In fact, Cameron began his general election campaign by taking a shot at Ron DeSantis, who had endorsed one of his opponents, proclaiming the “Trump culture of winning is alive and well.”
“Cameron didn’t spend the waning weeks of his campaign being his own man, making a forceful case to voters. Instead, he spent it talking about a Trump tele-rally and releasing videos from Trump while emblazoning “Trump-endorsed” on every piece of media he could find.”
Again, I don’t think you can say his loss is Trump’s fault; in fact, Bonchie’s take is more a critique of Cameron than of Trump. But Cameron appeared to be an attractive, young, black candidate in a red state in a time when the Democrat party label is at low ebb nationally, and he was in a neck-and-neck race. Yet Trump’s endorsement didn’t put him over the top.
By the way, I mean no offense to my always-Trump friends here, but admit it: if Cameron had won, Trump would be tweeting and truthing and shouting from the rooftops that his endorsement was the deciding factor in Cameron’s historic, beautiful and earth-shaking victory. (Now that Cameron lost, I’d bet my house that Trump will be saying that the outcome had nothing to do with his endorsement.)
Having said all that, I will end on the encouraging note of some recent polls that show Trump having a lead in 6 of 7 battleground states against Biden. I still don’t think that Biden has more than a 50/50 chance of being the Dem nominee, and I know that trusting polls – especially a year out! – is foolhardy,
But at this point, I’ll take any glimmer of good news from wherever I can get it!
I’ll try to shake off this gloom, and come back with a column with my usual tomfoolery tomorrow.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 