Harry Enten: Why GOP Leaders Are Playing It Smart When It Comes To Trump

Harry Enten threw another big bucket of cold water on the narrative this weekend.

CNN:

“(CNN) – The House GOP’s move to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position is widely seen as the latest move to placate the base at the risk of alienating the center of the electorate. Cheney had voted to impeach former President Donald Trump and has continued her critiques of him while most other Republicans seem to have a hard time distancing themselves from him.

But a look at the statistics reveals that Republicans may be playing it right when it comes to Trump. …

That said, there’s little sign that Trump is even on the minds’ of most voters these days. He’s not on Twitter, and Google searches for him are way down. Indeed, there’s not much of a sign that the GOP’s association with Trump is hurting them at this point. …

Examining all special elections where at least one Democrat and one Republican ran, Republicans are outperforming their 2020 baseline by 3 points on average. Not counting those elections with multiple Democrats or Republicans running (i.e. jungle primaries) or with a major independent candidate, Republicans are matching their 2020 position.

Keep in mind that even a small tick toward the Republicans would have resulted in a very different outcome in 2020. Biden won the state that put him over the top in the Electoral College (Wisconsin) by less than a point. Republicans were just 5 seats away from getting a House majority and a mere 1 seat from earning a Senate majority.

They don’t need a lot of things to change to win back the House or the Senate in 2022.

Republicans only need their 2020 base and a little more. …”

No one cares about Liz Cheney.

The GOP isn’t in the middle of a Whig-like collapse. The only thing that has happened here is that one woman with unpopular views has committed political suicide.

Storm clouds are on the horizon for the Democrats. Donald Trump is no longer the president and has disappeared from public view which has been a catastrophe for the media which built its business model around Trump hysteria. COVID which was the other big issue which got Joe Biden elected with swing voters in the suburbs is over now as far as most of the country is concerned.

There are a number of issues which Democrats should be concerned about as we move into the post-COVID era. The border has collapsed and immigration has returned with a vengeance and has pissed off Independent voters. 2020 was an exceptional year because the pandemic was the top issue and immigration was much less of a concern due to the shutdowns. Support for the police is way up because violent crime has continued to soar in 2021. Black Lives Matter has declined in popularity.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Joe Biden doesn’t have the votes in Congress to pay for his infrastructure or families plan by raising taxes. He can roll the dice on $4 trillion dollars in new spending and hope that inflation doesn’t skyrocket. There is no sign that the filibuster is going anywhere. There are other issues bubbling up like gas prices and the backlash over censorship and civil liberties.

Democracy Corps has found in a new survey what we already know to be true. The Never Trump wing is around 16% of Republican voters nationwide and a smaller share of the electorate in key battleground states. Republican voters are also angry and much more engaged which is to be expected considering the fact that around 70% of them believe the election was outright stolen.

Democracy Corps:

“The survey also finds that the critical bloc of non-Trump conservatives and moderates is only a quarter of the battleground electorate — compared to 30 percent in our national poll last month. The non-Trump conservatives are a healthy 16 percent of Republicans, but there are just fewer moderates (9 percent) in the battleground. Democrats win 5 percent of the former and 13 per-cent of the latter, but a greater risk to Republican consolidation are the “Biden Republicans” and their choosing to abstain or vote third party. After all, these races may be decided by only a few points.

We were also surprised by how much Donald Trump’s loyalist party is totally consolidated at this early point in its 2022 voting and how engaged it is. Yes, they have pulled back from histor-ic presidential year levels: the percent scoring 10, the highest level of interest in the election, has fallen from 84 to 68 percent. But Democrats’ engagement fell from 85 percent to 57 per-cent. Republicans are following their political theater much more closely than are Democrats — producing an 11-point gap.

Neither is showing the level of interest of the presidential election in 2019 and 2020, but they are higher than a comparable point in 2018, suggesting the era of high turnout elections is not over. And with such high early engagement of Republicans and white working class voters in this survey, it means the era of Donald Trump shaping the electorate is not over either. …”

Democrats have checked out.

We already know this from the massive decline in CNN’s ratings.

Most importantly of all, the headwinds of history and redistricting alone suggest that Democrats will lose the House in the 2022 midterms. It is shaping up to be a perfect storm of 1.) angry Trumpists, 2.) Trump’s disappearance which had the effect of depressing non-Trumpers and stoking Democrats and 3.) a combination of converging crises – crime, immigration, inflation, etc. – which are the consequences of deferring to progressive activists. Democrats will also have to own not passing their own agenda.

Is there anything else that is new which could move voters at the margins? Yes, the Wokelash which is gaining steam and particularly the fact that the Democrats have never antagonized the “far right” like this before, which they are doing now with their focus on “domestic extremism” and systematic racism. Coming out of the closet as explicitly anti-White and willing to curtail the rights and liberties of non-traditional “far right” voters is something that hasn’t been factored into the 2022 landscape.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

8 Comments

  1. Unless The Democrat Party has this cheating voting machine thing wrappt up tight, they will take a drubbing in the 2022 midterms like we have never seen.

    • I agree, unless the liberals get rid of all voting laws, they’ll get a prettry good beating in the offyear elections. I would also say despite what our host has politely said, that the Washington swamp stole the e;ection from
      Trump. .

      • @Copperhead…

        Thank you for the affirmation, Sir.

        If this election was not stolen, why are counties, in certain Swing States, in violation of federal law, wiping clean the voting machines?

        For me, that is the ultimate indictment, and removes any doubt about what has occurred.

        The problem is : The Republicans will storm into total control of every aspect of Congress, and then, sit on it until they lose it again, because they have no idea what to do, or, if they have an idea, they are too bought to carry it out.

        That’s why I am unenthusiastick about the coming drubbing of The Democrats.

        Be well!

  2. Don’t get cocky, racial demographic change will make it very hard for the GOP to take Congress back. The suburbs aren’t overwhelmingly white anymore. They have been flooded with Asians, Indian and Hispanic immigrants. Where I live in the NYC suburbs, many towns that were 80-90% white in 2000 are now 60-70% white due to Chinese/Korean/Indian/Hispanic/Arab immigration.

    • @ATBOTL…

      By January 2023, The GOP will be in control of Congress, widely so in The House.

      That said, I see this coming without any joy, the reason being that The Republicans are unable to enact any agenda, so it will be another waste of years.

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