Quick take on the primaries
Three Dynamics at play across the country
Here’s a quick take on yesterday’s primaries. Usually, we look at elections and talk about who won and who lost. This season is less about individual candidates than it is a story of three dynamics that effect the whole country.
Gerrymandering. The Supreme Court, a no-longer legitimate institution[i], gutted the Voting Rights Act. They have opined that political gerrymandering is legal and that racial gerrymander is never illegal. Among the obvious outcomes is how few toss-up seats there are in the House: only 55 Democratic and 10 Republican seats according to the Cook Political Report. That’s out of 435 seats. Those competitive seats are only 14 percent of the House, and we can expect a fortune to be poured into those races this fall. All of post Dobbs generic ballot polling suggests Democrats are leading, but this is misleading. Gerrymandering means it is very unlikely the Democrats can maintain control of the House even as they win the popular vote.
Because the popular sentiment has less and less to do with the ultimate makeup of House of Representatives, that chamber is less and less “the people’s house.” Americans are savvy. They know the deck is stacked, and that drives a lot of the anger in our politics. Worse, because the only legislative elections that matter are primaries, the dynamics push candidates to extremes, further alienating Americans from our politics.
This is particularly true amongst Republicans, which brings us to the second thing:
The alarming radicalization of the GOP. No one looking at today’s Republican Party would see in it the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. While there are some holdouts still in office, they are being hunted down as RINOs[ii], and soon will be just as extinct. Here in Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, the transformation of the Party of Lincoln is now complete. Moderate Republicans and their wealthy donors lost to the scorched earth crowd. Trump endorsed Darin Bailey is the party’s nominee for Governor. True, Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker helped him win the nomination, but that only shows the moderate forces in the GOP were not strong enough to hold off a cross party attack. When two conservative Republicans found themselves in the same district, Rep. Mary Miller praised Hitler, thanked Donald Trump for giving America “an historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court,” and cruised to victory over Rep. Rodney Davis who was only outrageous enough to promise to investigate the Jan 6th Committee if re-elected. (Compare that to IL 14 where two Democratic Reps faces off and the more centrists Sean Casten won.) The rage-wracked GOP no longer has a governing philosophy. It is in a death spiral of radicalization, each campaign a race to the right requiring the invention of new outrages.
But Americans are not buying it, which leads us to:
The Insurrection. By now it’s clear that Donald Trump and his gang of traitors sought to overturn the last Presidential election. Many among the radicalized GOP still cling to the lies, and in state after GOP controlled state, legislatures have put in place laws to make it easier to nullify future elections. But Americans love their democracy and are not having it. Attempts by the MAGA crowd to nominate election deniers to posts that control elections have run into serious headwinds, even among GOP primary voters. Most recently Colorado’s Tina Peters, an election denier under indictment for her behavior as Mesa County Clerk, lost her bid for the nomination to become Secretary of State. While the insurrection remains a threat, the combined work of the Special Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol, Americans’ basic commitment to democracy, and the flow of subpoenas from the Justice Department are all signs that the insurrection is now on the defensive.
[i] No longer legitimate, the Supreme Court is a threat to our liberty (substack.com ) and No longer legitimate, the Supreme Court is a threat to our liberty (substack.com))
[ii] GOP Senate candidate releases 'RINO hunting' ad aimed at fellow Republicans (nbcnews.com), or just search the net for RINO hunt
