DEAD WITH A STAKE THROUGH ITS HEART

This is the week that demonstrated the GOP has been completely taken over by Donald Trump.

Normie Republicans in Ohio thought - before the polls closed Tuesday night - that there was a good chance that “normal Republican” Matt Dolan could win the GOP primary for Senator. Steve Stivers, the former Republican congressman who now runs the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which supported Dolan, said, “If we can’t win under these circumstances, we have to acknowledge the party is completely gone.”

Tuesday night, the Trump-backed Bernie Moreno crushed Dolan by almost 20 points. This week we wake up every morning to the latest episode in the longest-running program in contemporary American politics: It’s Trump’s party. Today’s Republican voters want Trump. And they want Trump-backed candidates.

Democrats spent about $2 million to boost Moreno - who has gone 200% Trump in the past two years since he fizzled out in the 2022 Ohio senatorial primary for the seat now occupied by Hillbilly hack typist Widdle Jimmy Vance. The idea being he’d be a weaker opponent. Still, in a presidential year, with Trump expected to win the state, Moreno probably starts off with a 50-50 chance to win.

Meanwhile, as Simon Rosenberg points out, Biden is the midst of his best run of polling in some time.

5 post-State Of The Union polls have him ahead (all via 538):

47-45 FAU/Mainstreet

44-43 Morning Consult (March 9-11)

46-45 Public Policy Research

50-48 Ipsos/Reuters

45-44 Civiqs

The Economist poll average has Biden 1 point ahead of Trump for the second week in a row. This is good news, but due to the “Republican tilt” in the Electoral College, a Democrat needs a winning margin in the popular vote of around 5% - and not just from increased voting in big blue states like New York and California. The Democratic campaign effort in the “swing states” is crucially important.

It is also crucially important to find ways to reach out to the Haley voters who have continued to express their resistance to Trump in primary vote after primary vote - even after she officially stopped her campaign. Trump is losing 20%-30% of the Republican primary vote to a candidate who quit the race weeks ago. He won Arizona with only 75% of the vote.

Throughout the primary elections, Donld Trump has consistently under-performed in his vote totals. The news was even dire for him in what is supposed to now be solid red Ohio. Only 70% of the Republican primary voters there said last night that they would definitely vote for him in November. Another 10% said that they would probably back Trump. However, 20% of Republican primary voters in Ohio said that they would support Joe Biden or a third-party candidate.

The idea that Trump is a strong figure who has consolidated the GOP around him is a myth that Donald Trump most often promotes, and which the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable morons of the DC Press Corpse continues to buy as they make themselves increasingly irrelevant.

The fact is that about two-thirds of Haley voters say they are either planning to vote for Biden or are open to the idea. There is enough anti-Trump vote within the Republican Party to cause Trump to lose the election in November. These are the people whose votes will determine the outcome of that election. A big effort should be made to let these people know their world won’t end with a vote for Biden - it’s the step to take to get back to the pre-Trump world.

The Democratic Party, as the only political organization in the country dedicated to defending the Constitution and the democratic constitutional republic it created, must be the “Big Tent” party. Right now, the campaign must be centered on protecting democracy above all else. The “issues voters” on the Democratic left need to see that this election is not about who is going to invest more in solar, or protect Palestine, or any of their other issues. It is about protecting a system that allows them to argue about and support these issues.

2024 is about stopping Trump and his campaign that has stated its complete opposition to doing anything about the Climate Crisis and in fact doing things that will make the crisis worse. If you somehow think that’s not important, go read the Nature Magazine article I cross-posted earlier this morning.

This is not a time to follow the inept Stalinist morons of the German Communist Party who campaigned in 1932 against the Social Democratic candidate for being a “social fascist” and claimed a Nazi victory would “speed the revolution.”

We all know how that turned out.

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