Posted on 09/01/2017 2:42:06 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
If I pack up my toys and go home, there are people in red MAGA hats who would be saying, Dont let the door hit you on your way out.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is losing faith in her party. And that should trigger alarms for Republican leaders concerned about the GOPs long-term health.
Anderson is a smart and telegenic young Republican pollster. She has specialized in studying how the party can improve its anemic performance among the Millennial generation, which will pass the right-leaning baby boomers to become the largest generation of eligible voters in 2018.
Now she is wondering whether Donald Trumps GOP has a place for people like her, who want a party that marries support for less government and robust national defense with a commitment to racial and social inclusion.
There are still enough good people inside that I agree with that I am still staying, Anderson told me recently. But I am significantly less convinced that I am going to succeed in this effort. [Thats] because at the same moment somebody like me is becoming very disheartened, there are voters who are thinking, This is the Republican Party I have been waiting for. If I pack up my toys and go home, there are people in red MAGA hats who would be saying, Dont let the door hit you on your way out.
Andersons fear is that in a rapidly diversifying America, Trump is stamping the GOP as a party of white racial backlashand that too much of the partys base is comfortable with that. Trumps morally stunted response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month unsettled her. But she was even more unnerved by polls showing that most Republican voters defended his remarks.
What has really shaken me in recent weeks is the consistency in polling where I see Republican voters excusing really bad things because their leader has excused them, she told me. [Massachusetts Governor] Charlie Baker, [UN Ambassador] Nikki Haley, [Illinois Representative] Adam KinzingerI want to be in the party with them. But in the last few weeks it has become increasingly clear to me that most Republican voters are not in that camp. They are in the Trump camp.
The portion of the party coalition willing to tolerate, if not actively embrace, white nationalism is larger than most mainstream Republicans have ever been willing to grapple with, she added.
Andersons gloom is understandable. Even before Trumps emergence, the GOP relied mostly on the elements of American society most uneasy with cultural and demographic changethe primarily older, blue-collar, rural, and evangelical whites who make up what Ive called the coalition of restoration. As a candidate and as president, Trump has yoked the party even more tightly to those voters prioritiesa tilt evident in everything from his very fine people remarks about the white-supremacist protesters in Charlottesville to his recent pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.
All of this has predictably corroded Trumps standing with the young people that Anderson has studied, both in her 2015 book The Selfie Vote and a perceptive post-2012 study for the College Republican National Committee. Her study reached much the same conclusion as the fabled autopsy that the Republican National Committee commissioned: that the GOP could court younger and diverse voters with a message of economic growth and government reform, but only if it embraced a more tolerant and inclusive vision on racial and cultural issues.
Given her perspective, Trump was never her choice in the 2016 primaries. But she didnt exclude the possibility that in office he could reach a changing America. In February, she told me she thought Trump, as an outsider, could attract younger people with the growth and government-reform message she had championed in 2013but only if he avoided decisions that would portray the GOP as intolerant and racially biased.
Now, though, Anderson sees Trump systematically advancing the most divisive elements of his agenda while slighting any reforms. I cannot think of a worse possible direction we could be going, she said glumly.
Polls showing Trumps approval among young people falling to 25 percent or less justify her pessimism. And yet, as she noted, Trumps approval among Republicans, while slightly eroding, remains at about 80 percent. Only one-fourth of GOP partisans criticized his handling of white-supremacist groups in a recent Quinnipiac University national survey.
All of this suggests that, as Anderson fears, any insurgency to define the GOP in more inclusive terms would face a tough climb. But it is nonetheless premature to declare Trump the permanent victor in the fight over the partys direction.
In many ways, that battle has not been fully joined because other Republican leaders, despite their private misgivings, have been so reluctant to publicly articulate a clear critique of Trumps insular, racially barbed nationalism. If leaders voiced a more defined alternative to Trump, more of the rank and file might rally to it. Its worth recalling that even in 2016, Trump did not win 50 percent of the vote in any Republican primary until New York, near the finish line. And while he dominated among Republicans without a college degree, ABCs cumulative analysis of all exit polls found he carried only about one-third of college-educated Republicans. Trump also lagged among Millennial Republicans.
Those white-collar and younger Republicans would be the likely foundation of any potential effort to reverse Trumps direction, whether that means electing House and Senate Republicans who reject it or supporting an uphill 2020 primary challenge. In polls, college-educated and younger Republicans are generally less supportive than their blue-collar and older counterparts of Trumps hardline approaches on immigration and somewhat less likely to say he shares their values. In a Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday, these groups were also considerably less likely than others in the GOP to say they like Trumps conduct as president.
Yet Anderson fears that Trump has changed the balance in the party by driving out those voters and absorbing more who are attracted by his winks toward white identity politics. Anderson isnt interested in joining the Democrats, but she wonders whether there is space that I havent considered before for a centrist third-party ticket in 2020. Like the business leaders who stampeded away from Trump after Charlottesville, or the surveys showing the partys standing collapsing among the rising Millennial generation, Andersons step toward the exit measures the price Republicans are paying for tolerating Trumps serial intolerance.
I presume that she’ll repudiate the ethnonationalism of BLM.
Ms Anderson is a tool.
It’s “M - A - G - A”. That’s “America” in there.
America is NOT interested in what color you are, if you lift the seat or keep it down, or if you have any thoughts on G-d.
America if for American Citizens, of all kinds.
Ms Anderson’s Identity Politics are solidly in the Left column.
BTW- Millenials are WAY more MAGA than many are here being led to believe, notwithstanding Our Dear Kristen
#MAGA
#Build The Wall
In other words, I will work for Democrats, so please hire me.
______________
More like she’d love to work for Jeb or Marco.
At the broader level, what is so crazy about these “concerns” is that the people with with are ignoring the proof of their own eyes, of what actually happened.
They are so afraid how Trump will lower the Republican chances, but Trump won.
And Republicans are increasing their numbers across the country.
“More like shed love to work for Jeb or Marco.”
That too.
But I’m assuming that or similar is whom she has been working for.
I didn’t read the article to find out.
If I pack up my toys and go home, there are people in red MAGA hats who would be saying, Dont let the door hit you on your way out.
Oh, boo-hoo! Take your pity party with you.
They are so afraid how Trump will lower the Republican chances, but Trump won.
And Republicans are increasing their numbers across the country.
______
Scott Adams calls this phase of Trump’s 1st term, the “deconstruction” phase. The points are, that so far, Trump has demolished the Democrat Party, the Republican Party, the MSM and the internationalist globalist UN contingent in the eyes of the voters. After demolition, comes the rebuilding.
Those new R registrations would re-register with an America First Party if it becomes any more apparent that GOPe and Dems are two sides of the globalist coin. And if Trump heads the new party. Even the hidebound GOPe knows this.
I don’t think Trump will abandon the GOP first and I have no sense of the best timing, but at some point, he will have to.
Don’t forget, not all states require party registration. The source of a lot of the stats are incomplete. LS always cautions us about that.
One definite way to make yourself heard in an organization is to go to the hostile media and bash the organization.
The party of open borders and Heather Has Two Daddies and a Transister in pre-K?
Gen-Xers are the baby bust generation between the Baby Boom and the kids of the Baby Boomers.
It must take a long time for the “reporter” to find a person like this or she is a story teller (IE: fake news)
Is she a pollster trying to gauge the public’s response or is she a push-poller trying to shape the respondents’ opinions and sell the media on an idea with “numbers” to back up the foregone conclusion?
There are a number of problems with Brownstein’s article, but I only want to address one of them.
Kristen, why are the Republicans winning elections and Democrats aren’t?
Deplorables Kristen, deplorables.
That is why you are a poor pollster. You missed the Deplorables.
5.56mm
Kristen Lynne Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster, television personality, and writer. She has written for The Daily Beast, Politico and The Huffington Post. In 2013 Time magazine named Anderson one of the 30 People Under 30 who are changing the world.
Why is a Republican writing for only left-wing rags and getting recognized by Time magazine?
“Now she is wondering whether Donald Trumps GOP has a place for people like her, who want a party that marries support for less government and robust national defense with a commitment to racial and social inclusion. “
Translation: They want you to be poor and to support endless Wars that are not in America’s interest. Oh and on social issues to shut up.
No thanks.
Also the lack of Inclusiveness mantra is a bunch of BS.
She sounds like a bitter never-trumper.
Because she's their house wigger like David what's-his-name of the creased pants.
This Anderson dingbat should acknowledge the single most important point that can't be ignored in any discussion about Donald Trump and the future of the Republican Party:
HE WON.
Not only that ... His victory in 2016 was built on winning Rust Belt states that hadn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate in decades.
Just like the democratic is composed of blacks, unemployed, gays and wacked bicoastal liberals.
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