Trump too extreme is bullsh*t.
They ,Republicans, have destroyed as many rights they believe they can get away with.
Now they want to be seen as good and caring people.
Rats, jumping to new ship.
Drumpf is poison and he will act much worse as the walls close in.
They can change the letter next to their name as often as they want, but have any of their positions changed?
Or are they still in favor of trickle-down theft, corporate capture of regulatory agencies, Russian capture of the federal government, voter suppression, gerrymandering, politicization of the courts, unlimited availability of military weapons to the mentally ill, imprisonment (and, now, force-feeding) of harmless asylum-seekers, and selling elections to the highest bidder?
I hope these “defections” help sane people retake local government. But I also hope every one of these early-bird weathervanes gets primaried into the dustbin in the next election. Every one of them is complicit. It was the job of the Republican party to keep Trump away from the White House, and they folded like the empty corporate shills they are.
Democrats have been losing seats there [Oklahoma] over the last two decades.
This clearly explains Oklahoma’s meteoric rise in areas like education.
ETA: And health care.
“But I still believe there are a majority of New Jersey independent-unaffiliated voters and even some soft Democratic voters that will vote for the party that’s going to solve the various crises.”
Which will never be the Republican party.
The values of Ronald F’ing Regan, who announced his 1980 run in Philadelphia, Mississippi?
I don’t think the core values of the Republican Party have changed one bit.
ETA. See tpr above.
There’s nothing a party can do to pick candidates. It’s all on the lunatic base that they chose Trump. Trump’s nomination is the best case for going back to smoke-filled rooms.
IIRC, party leadership makes decisions about things like how many debates to hold and what the debate format should be. They could have imposed a debate format that would have sorted the lunatic nutjobs from the sane folks. They chose the laziest, least-rigorous “debate” format in history.
When there are 16 folks with their hat in the ring, no one of them is going to wield enough power to dominate those discussions. If the GOP had cared at all about preventing Trump’s rise, it could have chosen a path that likely would have exposed him as the know-nothing charlatan & con-man he is.
So the AP was only able to find sources over 75 to comment for their man-in-a-bar grafs?
They’ve got to get a representative sample of the Vox Populi. Not just anyone can lift the veil of what’s on the mind of the man on the street. You must feel better informed when they find someone who really captures the zeitgeist of the popular will.
The AP is always ready to deliver great insight like, “Well… speaking as a Conservative, I just drone on and on and on and on without letting anyone else get a word in edgeways, until I start foaming at the mouth and falling over backwards. Ooo-aaahhh.” Don’t you feel enlightened already?
C’mon in, no swamp water here…
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like turncoats. Of any stripe.
He was exposed. The GOP base lapped it up. They loved him in debates and on the stump and on Twitter. Parties are just a lot weaker than most people think. I was a party chair. Local, but still a chair, and I couldn’t do squat to select candidates except maybe ask someone to run.
So who is making these decisions? Who decides that there will be 2 debates, and that each candidate will have 11 seconds to respond, and that the topics will be limited to Best Cats and Why I Love Real Americans?
I don’t dispute your account. I guess this just means I need to look elsewhere for answers.
God, I would love it if the DNC let the League of Women Voters run the debates this year.