Quote (thundercock @ 10 Oct 2021 21:40)
In order to be considered conservative, it's now a requirement that you believe that Trump won in 2020. Poll after poll after poll show that this is the most important characteristic of being Republican. Just look at who is being purged and who is surviving.
Republican != conservative.
Also, polls show that faithfulness to the Trump agenda ranks even higher on the list than fealty to Trump the person.
Many people who voted to impeach Trump are not getting purged or even attacked all that much, for example John Katko of New York or David Valadao of California. Why? Well, unlike the Kinzingers and Cheney's of the world, they are not running around on CNN or MSNBC all the time attacking their fellow Republicans. Despite their impeachment vote and their evident distance from Trump, they are team players for Team Red. Cheney et al., the ones who are getting purged and receive all the scorn from the base, are not.
Quote (thundercock @ 11 Oct 2021 05:45)
It's not just them though which is a problem. The GOP needs to be a party with legitimate ideas as opposed to strictly an opposition party. If they continue down this path, they will allow bad liberal ideas to flourish. How much longer will they be able to hold onto power by courting a dying demographic and relying on institutional advantages?
Quote (thundercock @ 11 Oct 2021 06:03)
How many times has your side won the popular vote in the past 30 years? Like I said, you can't rely on institutional advantages forever.
Those structural advantages will keep Republicans the dominant party throughout the decade as long as they get their fucking shit together (and run neither Trump himself nor a Romney or Cheney clone in 2024), and competitive until well into the 2030s. You also imho underestimate by how much even a small shift of latinos toward Republicans would push back the "demographic doomsday clock". And that has to be expected since at least a portion of latinos are bound to go the way of other ethnic groups before them, like the Irish or Italians, and become "white" in a political sense.
Regarding the popular vote: 1. Republicans did not have a really great presidential candidate in a single cycle over said 30 years. Democrats had not one but two generational political talents in Clinton and Obama. 2. Democrats winning the popular vote is kinda easy when they reap the benefits of decades of illegal immigration. (Yes, due to birthright citizenship, illegal immigration will eventually yield additional votes for Democrats.)
I agree with you, however, that the GOP really needs to come up with ideas of their own and will eventually doom themselves if they don't have any platform or ideas to stand for.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 15 2021 12:11am