I agree when it comes to candidate quality being a huge factor in 2022 (Democrats also blew their chances in races like WI Sen and OR-5 by running weak candidates; DeSantis doesn't win by 20 if he's running against a better opponent than Charlie Crist). What this election also reinforces, however, is this idea that "Trump's base is not enough". It wasn't in 2018, it wasn't in 2020 and it now again wasn't in various pivotal races in the 2022 cycle. Divisive candidates like Kari Lake just have a low ceiling that isn't good enough to win in purple states, or at the presidential level for that matter.

Moderate or generic candidates like Laxalt or Oz also fell short, so it's not necessarily just a problem with MAGA-candidates; there were deeper, structural issues at play which the GOP needs to fix asap. Still, in terms of electoral math, there just isn't a path forward for the GOP without broadening their appeal. This does not automatically have to imply pivoting to the center. DeSantis himself is an example of someone who has quite hardline conservative policies, but was able to retain a crucial degree of crossover appeal and managed to not become too polarizing.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 14 2022 10:43pm

If the GOP figures out how to ballot harvest like the Dems do, elections will be competitive again. That is by far the largest delta between the 2 parties now. Not candidate quality (Fetterman...???), not abortion, not inflation, literally just voting logistics. Yes, they changed the rules and stacked the deck. Either play by the new rules and win, or continue to stand by your dork ass principles and lose.

yep. the republicans are the stupid party for a reason. instead of telling their base just vote mail in or early or absentee they expect people to stand in line for hours and then scream vote fraud (it is funny it takes 7 days to determine a winner when it took 12 hours just 6-8 years prior, but that’s a different subject)

Excellent post as always, my friend! Great to see you here on this wonderful subforum--as always!

The GOP also needs to infiltrate the parts of the mechanism that arbitrarily decides there's a broken pipe on election day, or that you should expect for the vote count to take 2 more weeks while we carefully "cure" just enough votes to win, then immediately stop counting. Imagine if Democrats didn't have what could be described as the debug version of a video game beta where the devs forgot to remove the cheat codes.

LOL your not coping well.
that is all

People don't care as long as their party win. Just look right now. People focus on Trump while there's Shang Tsung leading the country sniffing underage souls.

Continuing the streak of being the most ignorable and irrelevant nobody on this board I see? I noticed others saying the same thing. Why do you never have any real contributions?

Someone's got to restock shelves I guess

all we're hearing for the basis of fraud is "it took a long time" - what happened to the effort, at least fabricate something, like another candid shot of boxes of photography equipment / "BALLOTS"

I would say that it's coalition driven rather than base driven. Trump's coalition sacrifices suburban votes in order to turn out the rural, non-college, and blue collar blocs. That's great in certain places, but it's not great in Arizona. Nevada was blue before Trump, and Republicans are making gains, the caveat being that it will take time. Same for South Texas, Republicans weren't ready to flip those seats, but they increased their margins by 5+ points on the whole and need to keep pushing forward.

Which leads us to the second point, I agree with respect to DeSantis. Pivoting to the "center" in most circles means returning to the 2012 electoral map that had Democrats giddy about a permanent electoral majority. That's categorically the wrong move. The question is whether suburban voters are turned off by Trump or his putative policies. I say the former. A more conventional candidate will make inroads with the suburbs, and a more populist, nationalist socio-economic bent will continue to make inroads among the constituencies Trump performed well in. Trump himself is not required, he made himself so toxic that all anyone thinks about is the conspiracies and addled rants. The incredible challenge is going to be sidelining him without allowing him to destro the party. He'll certainly try.