To any objective observer, the national Republican Party appears to be bent on suicide — a colony of angry white male lemmings headed straight for the cliff. Every decision the party’s leadership makes, every strategy they pursue, seems to be motivated by a singular, urgent need to stoke their voters’ basest fears and inner rage.
In the minds of much of the population of this minority-majority state, the GOP is the party of white people who don’t like non-white people, a branding that — fair or not — repulses most minority voters and no small number of white voters as well.
But while the GOP base may take glee with the party’s wars on women, African-Americans, Latinos, students, the poor, immigrants, seniors and science, normal Americans, including the independent swingsters who decide elections, are increasingly unnerved by it. Driven by their base, the national GOP is ignoring the swingsters’ concerns and doubling down on efforts to appeal exclusively to teavangelical Fox watchers and Dittoheads.
As Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community noted this week, this is a familiar scenario for Californian Democrats and independents, who have watched with muted astonishment over the post 20 years as the nation’s largest state Republican Party obstinately pursued a similar doubling-down on its angry white base — a strategy that has left the state party fiscally and ideologically bankrupt and shriveled to its lowest voter registration in over a century:
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