Image Credits: Nati Harnik/Associated Press.
I’m not sure I quite follow Kevin Drum’s reaction to the Washington Post article on a private memo from the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC responsible for flipping the U.S. Senate to GOP control. The memo discusses internal polling in all the states where there are competitive Senate races, which overlaps somewhat with the battleground states in the presidential race. The takeaway from their analysis is that Republican senate candidates are consistently running behind Donald Trump by several points, and sometimes more.
Drum says “This is nuts. Trump is more popular than conventional Republicans,” and asks, “Do any Republicans watch his rallies and understand just how far he’s melted down since he was president? Or do they really prefer lying, ignorant, whining, vengeful, and racist to ordinary?”
A close look at the individual Republican candidates reveals that they’re almost uniformly a shitty crop. The one kinda/sorta exception is in Maryland where ex-governor Larry Hogan is the Republican candidate, and he’s actually running better than Trump. But that is not because Maryland Republicans like him better than the disgraced ex-president. It’s certainly due to Hogan being more popular with non-Republicans.
And Drum knows his question is already answered by the results of the Republican primary and caucus elections which Trump won in a walk: “I guess we already knew this since Trump won the Republican primary handily, but still.”
So, why does Drum frame the situation by suggesting Trump is “more popular than conventional Republicans” due to Republican voter preference?
Again, the only Republican Senate candidate who is running ahead of Trump is Hogan, and that’s not because Republicans prefer him to Trump. Candidates like Ted Cruz in Texas and Bernie Moreno in Ohio are badly lagging behind Trump’s numbers in their respective states, and the explanation is probably the same. They are less popular than Trump with non-Republicans.
There seems to be a widespread reluctance in the reality-based community to face the reality that Trump is a stronger candidate than “conventional Republicans” because he does better with independents and Democrats. Based on an examination of my own psychology, I think the reason is that reaching this conclusion is just damn depressing and demoralizing, and it’s less painful to just blame Republican voters for the strength of the deplorable vote. I think this is why so many on the left are also fixated on blaming the mainstream media. It allows them to avoid the painful conclusion that the American electorate is on the verge of opting for fascism with the decisive help of independents and Democrats.
The mainstream media’s coverage has its flaws, to be sure, but they have covered Trump’s crimes and flaws relentlessly and no one can fairly accuse them of not providing the American people with more than enough good information to reject Trump and Trumpism with extreme prejudice. The fact that they have not done so is not the fault of the media, but of the American people themselves.
This is not an observation Democratic candidates can or should make if they want to win, because you don’t win votes by criticizing voters.
Yet, if you want to be less depressed, it is a good thing that Republicans not named Trump are very unappealing to the voters right now. This will be important to the results in November, but also going forward. If the only thing keeping the GOP competitive is Trump and Trump loses the election, where does that leave the GOP?