Posted on 01/28/2021 4:07:38 AM PST by Kaslin
Ditching the GOP is a bad idea born of justifiable frustration, and we need to stop being emotional and start being ruthless in our campaign to retake this country from these liberal establishment aspiring fascists. A third party is not the way. It is a bad idea, one that is technically impractical and which is strategically inept. It will lead to disaster. And the Democrats know it, which is why they love this third party palaver. The only thing that makes the tooting likes of Eric Swalwell coo in delight harder than some mediocre Chi Com honeypot is the thought of us conservatives committing ritual suicide by splitting our half of the country in two because some of the 50 percent of Americans in our camp are insufferable sissies.
News flash, folks. We’re going to have to suffer the sissies forever. The question is whether they run the party apparatus, or whether they are consigned to the fringes, scribbling in their blogs about how True Conservatism™ requires that we go to war everywhere, that we allow giant corporations to limit our speech, and that we all wear vinyl gimp suits with ball gags and address Nancy Pelosi as “Mistress P.”
Just kidding.
The part about “we” going to war is a joke. You and your kids get to go to war while they, with very few exceptions, who never shut up about it, get to stay home and fight their endless war against push-ups and testosterone. The rest is pretty dead-on.
Let’s look at the big picture. The design of the Constitution essentially mandates a two-party system. A third party has never won the presidency, and one rarely wins legislative seats. Usually, such candidates call themselves “independents,” but Democrats know they are really Democrats and understand this is just a ploy to appeal to the suckers.
There is always going to be a party of the left, and a party of the right, with the battle over the middle. A party getting 55 percent of the vote is considered to have won in a landslide. America is that closely divided. For our sins, the party of the right is the Republican Party. And math says we are stuck with it.
You cannot divide the 50 percent of America on the right up and hope to beat the 50 percent on the left. It does not work, and all the hopes, dreams, and krakens of a million outraged conservatives on Twitter will not make it so. Politics must be about addition, and that implies we need to add people who are not as conservative as we are. If you want purity, date a nun. This is politics, and if you don’t win, you lose.
I propose we win.
Third parties do have a track record of disrupting elections. The Left blamed the Greens for Bush in 2000, and some blame the Libertarians, among other factors, for President * in 2020. Clinton won in 1992 because Perot split the vote for George H.W. Bush. But these events all have one thing in common – the third party never wins. Nor will one.
Trump himself seems to understand, walking back the “Patriot Party” stuff in order to settle in as a GOP kingmaker. He knows he loses in 2024 running as a third party candidate – 50 percent of people already hate him and some percentage of the GOP will stay GOP out of habit if nothing else. You can’t expect to win if you start off, best case, losing 50 percent + 1. But by remaining in the GOP – as its most popular figure by far – he has real power to influence events.
The third party talk also ignores the practical reality of the GOP’s irreplaceable infrastructure. A competitive national political party is a Broadway play, not a show some kids put on in a barn. While some imagine a sort of spontaneous, math-defying movement materializing out of the political ether, the reality is that a party structure performs essential tasks and there is no substitute for it. Who has the donor lists, the volunteer lists, the organization to drive get out the vote efforts? The party. You can’t patch one together overnight out of fervor and contempt for the squishes.
There are many things that are critical that go into a campaign and go on behind the scenes that most of us never even imagined. For example, who are the lawyers who worked for the GOP who know election law who will be leaving their GOP contracts to come and keep the “MAGA Party” candidates out of jail? You think the Establishment will give the “Constitutionalist Party” a pass for not understanding the campaign finance laws? And who pays these lawyers, assuming any really good ones want to flush their career in electoral law down the toilet to go all-in on a losing one-shot cause?
That’s just one example of many of the things a party infrastructure does, and no one is going to build another national structure (not to mention a structure in each of the 50 states) in the next four years. It is appealing to leave the jerks in the GOP behind, but if you do, you are choosing irrelevance.
But hey, you’re angry so you gotta cater to those feelz.
That’s stupid and weak. Tighten up. Yeah, the GOP establishment sucks – and no, you’re not the only one who has noticed. We are always going to have people near the center who frustrate us. That’s the reality, and being angry about it is like yelling at clouds. But what we can do – and have done – is slowly force the party to conform more closely to our vision. It’s like turning the Titanic, an apt metaphor if there ever was one, but it is happening already.
Look at the GOP just five years ago and look at it today. Yeah, we have the rump Renfield contingent with tiresome goofs like Mitt (R?-Miracle Whip). We have others who alternate between establishment-curious moderate wimpiness and coming through for us at many key junctures – Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. But look at what we don’t have – Jeff Flake is gone. Jeb! is a flabby footnote. And as hard as Nikki! is trying to make herself happen, she’s not happening. The GOP has shifted our way – on wars, on culture, on tech, on playing to win. We have earned the support of Americans of all races in unprecedented numbers because we have focused on people who – remember this? – work hard and play by the rules. That’s progress. Not enough, not nearly, but to deny the progress because you are angry only empowers the people you are angry at. We can’t throw out what we have already achieved simply because we have much more work to do. Take the W, people.
We need to do more. We need to infiltrate the infrastructure and remake the Republican Party from the inside into a party for working Americans of every demographic who love their country and demand their rights, as opposed to the 2015 party that shafted working Americans so Democrat-donor big corporations can rig the system and let SJW twerps endlessly hassle us for the crime of being normal.
But Kurt, we do vote and sometimes we lose!
Yes. You will lose much of the time. This is called reality. People who compete often lose. The ones who don’t compete never lose, but they never win either.
Here’s your action plan. If you are a registered Republican, stay that way. If not, register Republican. Then vote in the primaries to rid ourselves of squishes. Then take the next step. Find your local GOP organization and join, then run for local party and then government offices. We need to build our farm team, and that means traveling along the American cursus honorum from GOP precinct captain to county GOP committee member to city council to state assembly to Congress and beyond.
Gee Kurt, that sounds like hard work.
It is. It’s a lot easier to declare you are never ever voting GOP again on Twitter. But I was under the impression that we are the faction that is not averse to hard work, especially when it is our country at stake. So, this is a test – if you’re serious about winning, you stay GOP.
A third party hands total control over to the left, and if you want to see what that scenario looks like, check out my newest novel Crisis, as well as my other four novels of America splitting into red and blue nations, People's Republic, Indian Country, Wildfire, and Collapse!
exactly, the way to fix the situation and stick it to the RINO’s like Liz Cheney is to PRIMARY them out! (just as Liz Cheney is losing her primary bid BIG now after her vote)
OK. Without a third party, then, for me, and millions like me, there will be no party. I am through with the republicans. And as far as voting: this seems to be a waste of time.
If this becomes a nationwide trend, there’s still hope for the pubbies.
I’m not optimistic, however.
My optimism evaporated the minute biden took the Oath of Office.
I’m a pessimistic cynic for the foreseeable future.
I despise ‘em ALL.
Zactly.
We have no chance of creating a viable 3 party political structure but we could definitely create a 1 party political structure. I think I like that idea actually and it may be the only card we have left to play- give America the government it deserves.
The 2 party structure has failed us and the three party structure isn’t doable but we could create a 1 party political structure and that could be quite a bit of fun too. Just don’t vote. Let the commies have this country and go down saying “I told you so”.
I’ve been frustrated and “walking away” from the GOP for a long time. McCain, Romney, etc. I keep saying “I’m through”. But, in fact, I have voted a straight Republican ticket in every election since 1980. Forty years of loyalty, despite my frequent frustrations.
It’s gone. I’m done. I will not ever vote Republican again. Screw ‘em. They stabbed Donald Trump in the back and they deserve to lose. Hard. Every time. Forever.
1. Lying to voters and defrauding the party’s donors for more than seven years with its endless promises to repeal Obamacare.
2. Rigging primaries in favor of RINO/Swamp candidates over TEA Party candidates (see Mississippi 2014 as a perfect example).
3. Openly campaigning for Democrats in critical elections (Alabama in 2017, for example).
We have no reason to trust the Republican Party anymore, Kurt.
Rand Paul’s impeachment proxy vote the other day was a litmus test of how many fakes must be purged from the GOP - about 10%. That seems very doable.
Still mulling here:
Seems to me at least 50 million people would jump at the chance for a 3rd party.
There are many heritage democrats Democrats who will never vote Republican but might and probably would switch to a 3rd party.
Big inroads were made in the Hispanic and black voter blocs who could be persuaded to switch to a 3rd party. They are after MAGA, not party labels. As may of us are.
The Republicans generally proved who they are standing by while
Trump fought alone and for them. When the chips were down they mostly stood by or plotted ways to dissemble and capitulate.
And that goes for Republican legislatures who allowed the election changes that were a golden opportunity for fraud and abuse. And who are STILL not making changes to prevent it in the future.
So no...a 3rd party might be just the ticket. The Republicans rose from the ashes of the Whigs in 1854 and had captured the White House by 1860. Different times, yes but could happen again.
You are correct. The WhiGOP would become the 3rd party and it would no longer be viable.
Long live MAGA!
This is a repost of Kurt Schlichter’s poo poo on third party panicking.
This underscores one of the many problems with the GOP. They think that we only care about beating the Democrats and they are willing to compromise everything else to win. They think that they need to give us Mittens Romney to win. We get Democrat light. Donald Trump showed them how to win but they are too in love with their D.C. cocktail parties and hobnobbing with their cronies in their Washington homes to think about us, the unwashed masses that put them there. No, we don't care who wins if neither party represents us. It's not a football game.
It’s more and more clear to me that 75 million of us should join the democrat party. They wouldn’t know what hit them, nor could they handle it. We could wreck their primaries, put in a lot of conservatives, get inside the local and state committees, their conventions, etc.
And then vote for the most conservative candidates in the general.
It’s the simplest solution, and easily do-able. We just have to hold our noses.
They didn’t dismiss the option entirely. In fact, the statement from that guy Miller was an open threat without any nuance. He basically said: “We have no plans to start a third party now, but that will depend on what elected Republicans do in office.”
Perhaps Curt and others should have thought about the CONSEQUENCES of telling your base that you no longer support fair elections?
Look at Impeachment 2.0 - the Republicans hated Trump so much that they forgot or maybe didn’t realize, that you need VOTERS if you want to win and hold seats, and pissing off a guy at 95% approval with those voters is NOT how you hold on to them.
P.S. — It’s clear to me that Trump sees a third party as Plan B. Plan A is to take over the GOP directly.
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