The Country Club-Never Trumper crowd hated Reagan and all the Reaganites, despised the TEA Party and now they despise Trump and all his supporters.
Deep in their heartless hearts they know that they could never get anywhere near the support Reagan and Trump have gotten. They would NEVER get a landslide and 80 million + votes.
It is OUR Party. We built it from the ground up. And, they will never be able to get control of it EVER AGAIN.
Spot on. Our best bet is to primary out the GOP-E/rhinos.
Demon rats always unite behind their candidate. So in battleground states, assuming 50-50 split for argument sake, that gives them close to 50%. How do we possibly win splitting our vote in any of these ratios:
American Party 45%, GOP 5%
American Party 40%, GOP 10%
American Party 35%, GOP 15%
American Party 30%, GOP 20%
American Party 25%, GOP 25%
I passed 3rd grade math, so can confidently call these races... WE LOSE, PERIOD!!!
If the American Party candidate wins the primary, I just don’t see them picking up 100% of the GOP primary votes in the general, because I also don’t believe in unicorns. So in 50-50 battleground states, that means we lose.
The problem is that Mitch McConnell failed to cultivate a stronger GOP over the last decade because of his own feeble character. It was not so much a matter of Senators reacting to individual constituencies, it was that a feckless GOP leadership bred a weak-minded party that had no experience with nor tolerance for hard-ball politics.
Just compare the behaviors of Pelosi and Schumer in the two weeks prior to Democrats retaking the House in 2018 with McConnell, Ryan, and McCarthy in the same period to see what I mean. Democrats spent a decade honing their party discipline while McConnell, Corker, and the rest created one internal conflict after another, losing crucial seats along the way. They let Adam Schiff run roughshod over Devin Nunes in 2017 despite Nunes running the committee. They let Dianne Feinstein run all over Chuck Grassley during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings despite running that committee, too.
I believe that Senators believe they were elected to do their party's bidding, since it's the parties that funded their elections. I think they vote for McConnell for leader out of fear of losing their campaign funding if they oppose him and he still wins. Nobody wants to be the one who was left behind if he wins. Since within the GOP everybody has been raised to suspect the votes of the others, nobody wants to take the chance that their colleagues will cave at the last minute, since somebody always does.
If you look at recent history, Democrats always back the candidates their states put up, but not McConnell. Because he feared a growing Tea Party presence in the Senate, look how McConnell treated:
If Mitch McConnell had put his ego and his powerlust aside and supported the primary candidates of his party, he'd have had a much stronger Senate these past six years. Instead, he led his caucus to defeat.
To fix this, we have to focus on changing the leadership first, and not with next-in-line seat warmers. We need the next generation of leaders to step up now and push the old guard aside. We need our own AOC to scare McConnell and McCarthy into stepping aside to prevent worse from happening.
In the Senate, that might be Tom Cotton (43), Todd Young (48), Joni Ernst (50), Ted Cruz (50), or even Mike Lee (49).
In the House, it would be less important until Republicans win back control. Current informal leaders like Jim Jordan (56) and Elise Stefanik (36) are effective now.
-PJ
Not sure what you mean by "OUR Party". IMO, the Republican party is made up of conservatives, America-first people, county-club-republicans swamp-dwellers aka GOPe and RINOS. On the other hand, Republican party 'leadership' is made up primarily of swamp-dwellers aka GOPe and RINOS.