Where is the Median American Voter Right Now?

A few thoughts on the state of the 2024 election.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

The signs the GOP’s abject capitulation to Donald Trump have been on display this past week. There was Nikki Haley recognizing the inevitable and suspending her presidential campaign. There was Mitch McConnell’s endorsement of Trump for president despite McConnell’s unconcealed disgust for Trump. Trump managed to get his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, installed as the RNC co-chair despite her lack of, you know, any real qualifications.¹

Peter Wehner’s New York Times essay describing the state of the GOP serves up a grim conclusion:

Twenty-six Republican senators voted against the recent aid package for Ukraine, which a pre-Trump Republican Party would have overwhelmingly supported. And of the 17 Republican senators who were elected beginning in 2018 and who are age 55 or younger, 15 voted no.

In other words, the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Mitch McConnell, one of the most influential majority leaders in the history of the Senate, who excoriated Mr. Trump for his role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 from the floor of the Senate, recently announced he was stepping down from the Republican leadership, and soon after that, he announced he was endorsing Mr. Trump. It was a surrender to Mr. Trump, an acknowledgment of his dominance.

Mr. Trump will be the Republican nominee for the third time. His imprint on the Republican Party is now comparable with — and in some ways exceeds — Ronald Reagan’s. And that imprint is likely to last for at least a generation. It is a staggering achievement….

[Trump] and the Republican Party fused ideologically; it’s now a populist rather than a conservative party. It’s instincts are nativist, protectionist and isolationist. But the most significant fusion is ethical and moral. The Republican Party keeps getting darker. It has become anti-intellectual, conspiracy-minded and authoritarian, intemperate and brutish, transgressive and anarchistic. And there’s no end in sight.

This has already led to some seemingly odd tactical behavior by Republicans for the upcoming presidential race. Dan Pfeiffer argued on his Substack that the GOP strategy of painting Biden as a senile old man was bound to backfire. His State of the Union address, which revealed a fully operational president, made it easy for him to exceed expectations. Pfeiffer argues that the GOP’s tactical blunder is due to them getting high on their own propaganda supply:

Trump and the Republicans (with help from the political media) set a low bar for Biden. Generally, you want to raise expectations for your opponent to the point that they are impossible to meet. Trump did the exact opposite….

Fox News, Trump, and others propel the myth that Biden is senile and question his mental fitness because it serves their political purposes and makes their Right Wing audience of Biden haters happy. Somewhere along the way, they lost plot and began to believe the caricature.

For a long time, Republican politicians and political operatives understood that Fox News and the rest of the Right Wing media were propaganda operations designed to excite the base and damage the opposition. They were in on the joke. But in the Trump era, most of them followed the former President down the rabbit hole. They stopped getting their news from legitimate sources and live entirely inside the MAGA media bubble. They turn on Fox and think it’s a window instead of a mirror. They believe voters — the vast majority of whom could not find Fox on their cable package — see the world the same way they do.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World agrees with Wehner and others about the danger that Trump’s takeover of the GOP represents to the future of American politics. And I want to believe that Pfeiffer is correct about how Trump’s takeover of the GOP represents a fatal mistake that will doom the party into irrelevance for as long as Trump owns the Republican brand.

What is terrifying, however, is that it might not be a fatal mistake.