Good News for the GOP
A feckless Biden administration and some strong polling numbers are cause for Republican optimism.
It could be worse, fellow deplorables. You could be a Democrat.
Oh, sure, the GOP is powerless to set the agenda these days — powerless to hold hearings, and powerless to bring legislation to the floor. But you could be staring at three and a half more years of Jolt-less Joe Biden as your party’s standard-bearer, and Unlikeable Kamala Harris as your error apparent.
Yep, it could be a lot worse.
Things are actually looking up, in fact — and not just because everything looks up when you’re flat on the floor. Even Democrat pollsters are taking notice. The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker writes:
Republican voters are united behind former President Donald Trump and enthusiastic about putting a check on President Joe Biden in 2022 as GOP infighting in Washington fails to translate outside the Beltway. That is the conclusion of a fresh survey from veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who measured Republican voters’ fidelity to Trump and their intensity as it relates to participation in next year’s midterm elections. Greenberg discovered that three-quarters of the Republican electorate takes its cues from Trump and GOP voters overall are, by 11 percentage points, more interested in 2022 than Democrats.
November 8, 2022, is still an eon away, but that 11-point enthusiasm gap is considerable, and it correlates strongly with voter turnout. And voter turnout is the only thing that’ll force Nancy Pelosi to twist her lips and turn over the speaker’s gavel to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
The big takeaway from this Democracy Corps poll, though, is that the Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump until he says otherwise. “The Trump loyalists [and the] Trump aligned … form a breathtaking, three quarters of the party in the electoral battleground states and districts that will decide who leads the country,” writes Greenberg. “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.”
As for the Liz Cheney dustup, it really hasn’t fractured the Republican Party at all, much to the dismay of the Democrats and their Leftmedia lickspittles. As our Thomas Gallatin wrote recently, “Cheney sealed her own fate with her refusal to back off countering Donald Trump’s claims about a stolen election, as well as her continued vehement and vocal opposition to Trump himself. She frustrated a majority of House Republicans who recognize that Trump is still a major leader in the party and who want a unified focus on countering Joe Biden and the Democrats’ radical agenda, not relitigating the 2020 election.”
Gallatin’s assessment is also borne out by the polling: As a recent CBS News poll showed, “Eighty percent of Republicans who’d heard about the vote agree with Cheney’s removal — they feel she was off-message, unsupportive of Mr. Trump, and that she’s wrong about the 2020 presidential election.”
We know what you’re thinking: It’s a trap! Those lying leftist pollsters are setting us up!
We’re not so sure. Nor is National Review’s Rich Lowry. In fact, he’s downright bullish. “The GOP Future Is Bright,” blares the headline of today’s column. “All indications,” he writes, “are that GOP voters are united and energized, and the party is doing what’s necessary to make Kevin McCarthy the next speaker, which would instantly squash the never-very-plausible talk of Joe Biden being the next FDR. The foundation of the GOP’s unity, of course, is that Donald Trump effortlessly maintained his control of the GOP. The anticipated civil war came and went with barely a shot fired.”
So there you have it. Have a great weekend.