State Republican parties are often deep MAGA

Post Reply New Topic

The decline of Virginia’s once-dominant Republican Party is a case study in how a party’s waning electoral appeal is often accompanied by a descent into madness. Rather than view the Virginia GOP’s experience as a cautionary tale, though, it seems state-level Republican Parties across the country see it as a model worthy of emulation.

Virginia Republicans had every reason to believe that Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in this historically red state was a fluke.

The following year, amid the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans retook the governor’s mansion and maintained a prohibitive block of reliable districts at the state legislative level. But in the decade that followed, Republicans became less and less appealing to the state’s voters. And as the GOP declined in relevance, its members became increasingly unhinged.

As National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis ably chronicled, devolution culminated in the 2018 resignation of GOP chairman John Whitbeck, after three years of service to the party, following insurgent politician Corey Stewart’s GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. Stewart’s agenda involved municipal police forcing individuals to prove their citizenship at routine traffic stops, and he presented himself as the candidate for “forgotten white voters.” He called Paul Nehlen, an anti-Semitic fringe figure who lost a primary campaign against Paul Ryan, one of his “personal heroes.” Stewart also called his conventionally Republican critics “cuckservatives” and maintained close ties with one of the organizers of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally that descended on Charlottesville in 2017.

For every Trumpy Virginian voter energized by Stewart, two more voters were repulsed. In the end, he lost by a resounding 16 points. But the Virginia GOP has not learned its lesson. In the interim, Rep. Denver Riggleman was ousted at a party convention—not a primary election—because he officiated a gay wedding ceremony. And the party’s leading frontrunner for the gubernatorial nomination this year, a woman who describes herself as “Trump in heels,” has drawn rebukes from the state’s minority Republican senate conference for defending the “white history” represented by Confederate statuary and attacking the “spineless eunuchs” within the GOP’s so-called establishment.

In Arizona, the GOP has avoided any introspection following the loss of its two U.S. Senate seats to Democrats over as many electoral cycles by lashing out at its own members. The party, which is led by Kelli Ward, a two-time failure as a statewide candidate for elected office, opted to censure many of its more successful members in January.

Mere hours after Rep. Bill Cassidy, who was unimpressed by the flaccid arguments of Trump’s attorneys, voted with six of his Republican colleagues to deem impeachment proceedings in the Senate constitutional, he was reflexively condemned by his state’s party. “The Republican Party of Louisiana is profoundly disappointed by Senator Bill Cassidy’s vote,” the Louisiana GOP’s statement read.

The moribund Illinois GOP voted overwhelmingly to censure one of the state’s few Republican congressmen, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, for behaving in ways that are “contrary to the values” of the GOP. You have to admire the honesty of a resolution that defines blind loyalty to Trump as a “value.”

Impeachment is such an incendiary issue for that state’s GOP that the state party chair, Frank Eathorne, raised the possibility of seceding from the Union in protest.

Indeed, disunion is in the air. Former Rep. Allen West, Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, has endorsed legislation that would present a vote to the state’s citizens on whether to withdraw from the Union. This maneuver follows Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton’s claim that the vandals who invaded the Capitol were not Trump supporters but Antifa activists.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey echoed these sentiments in a private conversation published on YouTube. Shirkey was himself recently censured by his party for backing a ban on bringing firearms into the state’s Capitol building.

In Oregon, where the GOP has been rendered an afterthought, the party voted in favor of the hoax narrative in a January 19 resolution calling the Capitol siege “a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans.

The GOP’s electoral failures should produce some soul searching. But we haven’t seen that. Maybe Republican voters aren’t all that interested in winning elections anymore. If so, state parties are delivering.