Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com
In the current political reality, the ten months until the midterm elections manages to feel like it is both light-years away and just around the corner.
And for many in the Republican Party, under the “leadership” of Donald Trump, Election Day 2018 is not exactly something they are eagerly anticipating.
Indeed, recent polling confirmed that the midterms were already shaping up to be a disaster for Republicans. Quinnipiac University found that, on a host of issues from immigration to taxes to North Korea, the American people resoundingly rejected the GOP’s stances.
That repudiation, along with the nation’s marked disapproval of Trump, likely contributed to the raft of recent retirements in the party and the difficulty it is having in recruiting new candidates.
As the Post reports, McCarthy “described scenarios to the president ranging from a bloodbath where Republicans lost the House ‘and lost it big,’ in the words of one official, to an outcome in which they keep control while losing some seats.”
Apparently, McCarthy was unable to concoct a single scenario in which the party did not lose any races.
And no wonder, considering even a deep red state like Georgia has largely turned against Trump, and a Democratic upset in equally deep red Alabama left the GOP essentially mired in a civil war — something the party might repeat with racist convicted criminal Joe Arpaio jumping into the Senate race in Arizona.
All around the country, seats that had previously been solidly Republican either have or are predicted to flip blue. A top election forecaster recently declared that Democrats’ chances of winning the House majority in 2018 were “very real.”
And thus, so is the fear that many in the Republican Party are feeling as they look at the political landscape around them.
But they have only themselves to blame for it. Perhaps if more of them had been able to locate their spines and their consciences and rebuke Trump’s bigotry, ignorance, crassness, and recklessness, the voters might be more willing to re-elect them.
Instead, Republicans went all in on Trumpism, even knowing the potential damage it could do to the party’s chances. And the American people are ready to make them pay for it.
