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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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As others have noted, almost any Republican would've won in 2016, and most probably would've won more convincingly.

Winning elections is not the goal. Securing wins on policy is. Trump was quite bad at this, but all the Republican candidates who could have "won more convincingly" were incapable of even trying. "the more radical elements of the base", as you call them, are a significant enough fraction of actual GOP voters that the coalition probably doesn't work without them, and their interests and concerns have been systematically ignored for decades. "Tacking back toward the center"... the center of what? Consensus opinion, as dictated by Blue Tribe Elites?

The Post-Trump GOP is very different from the pre-Trump GOP, and the differences favor the interests of Trump's supporters. Without Trump, this would not be so, but your analysis elides the distinction.

Doesn't matter anyway. "Any Republican could have beaten Hillary" is anti-Trump cope. The other candidates didn't have enough fight in them to go against the Democratic Hillary juggernaut, and it showed. That's a large part of why Trump won in the primaries in the first place. Jeb would have been a clueless loser, Cruz a sore loser, and Rubio a more genteel loser.

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