Discussion for article #224037
“GOP candidates have been trained not to publicly lecture rape victims about their responsibility to carry pregnancies to term.”
Give them time on that. It will pop up again and again as we get closer to November. Because its part of an attempt to move the Window on the abortion discussion further to the right. Currently abortions are legal for a pregancy, regardless of how the pregnancy happened. When the float one of those insane rape comments, they turn the conversation into one about abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest. That’s a significant change in topic.
“But the bottom line is that Republicans appear to have decided to rely on a wildly favorable landscape, a built-in midterm turnout advantage, and of course money, to make predictable gains this November.”
What wildly favorable landscape? We have been watching their sure fire national strategies evaporate one by one this year…first Obamacare, then Benghazi, then Nevada ranchers…you see the trend here? That sort of trending doesn’t happen in a wildly favorable landscape. And again, let me ask the question: Given that republicans need 6 seats to win the Senate, please show me the net 6 Senate races that republicans have a lead in the polls.
As far as the “built in midterm turnout advantage”, lets take a look back on the last few midterms. Republicans won in 2010…Dems won in 2006. We can probably scrub 2002, as it was colored heavily by 9/11. The '98 midterms was a wash for the Senate, but Dems picked up 4 seats in the House. And that was when Clinton was under the national microscope for the Lewinsky scandal. So I am not really seeing this “built in midterm advantage”. Its a meme that has been locked in to explain 2010 and everything else is just assumed.
But besides those points, another interesting article by Kilgore.
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Outreach? Too much work!
Rebranding? “Look at Cantor!”
Same shit, different election? You betcha! (wink)
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They’re discovering that you can’t rebrand a turd.
I’m reminded of an old Kliban cartoon:
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Given TPM’s high standards in editing is it possible they meant “mildly favorable”? Since more Democratic Senate seats are up than Republican ones, I would go so far as to call the GOP prospects “mildly favorable”. The generic polls, which showed a “highly favorable” environment for the GOP in 2010 do not show any better than “mildly favorable” this time.
What is really striking here is the complete and total lack of ideas in the Republican party. I didn’t much like Reagan and many of his ideas were bad ones, but while his rhetoric was too often “government is bad”, the policies every so often went beyond that. They did fix Social Security and put in the EITC, which has been a big help to the working poor, and had a tax reform that wasn’t just handouts to the wealthy. Even Gingrich’s Contract with America had some ideas, though they were largely bad ones. But today’s GOP can’t even muster that much. Just as an example, they have utterly failed to propose even a lousy replacement for the ACA. It’s not that they are arguing that pre-ACA was wonderful; they just can’t even be bothered to address the issue.
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The “built-in midterm advantage” stems from the fact that the party that holds the White House usually loses seats in Congress in midterm elections. Special circumstances can alter this, but for most of the 20th century, the party holding the White House lost seats in the midterm election. The election of 1998 was an exception precisely because of the Lewinski spectacle. Clinton’s approval rating shot up 10 points after impeachment and the R’s lost seats in the House because of it. In 2002, as you say, 9/11 affected the results, but 2006 and 2010 followed the expected trend (although in both cases more spectacularly than anticipated). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_midterm_election.
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I lived in Phoenix for 13 years. Our house was built in 2004, the fourth in our Fulton Homes subdivision. I personally observed all my neighbors’ homes built by crews of Spanish speaking men, led by bilingual supervisors who all reported to a single white man in a shiny, new Chevy truck.
Every week we went to the builder’s office to watch the sales prices increase by up to $10,000 per week. My neighbor paid 50% more for an identical house. So clearly, home buyers got exactly none of the big savings from all that cheap labor. Unless you believe those workers all got huge raises, then roughly 100% of that surplus went to Fulton Homes.
Had Sheriff Joe Arpaio, today infamous for harassment of Hispanic-looking individuals, been serious about illegal immigrants in 2004, he could’ve effortlessly rounded up 100 people per day at any construction site among dozens. But this would’ve inconvenienced Mr. Fulton and the other developers… So Our Piehole became infamous for making prisoners wear pink underwear instead.
So I think the Republican-supported status quo, is hypocritical to the extreme. Business owners are happy enough to hire someone for $8 per hour cash with no benefits or legal rights. They’re happy enough to hire someone with a plausibly deniable false identity, for minimum wage. They’re mostly savvy enough not to say so out loud, but these calls to bait more appealingly and switch more subtly are just laughable.
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The Repubs have been successful at rebranding. The only problem for them is it’s worse than before! They have problems with learning!
The New Improved Republican Party Now With 50% More Hate.
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Republicans already rebranded after the first Obama election that is how we got the tea party. Hows that working out?
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One of the realities for the Republican Party in the current political environment is that they feel powerless, helpless, and cornered. In such circumstances humans instinctively revert to primitive instincts where they believe the best defense is to attack, and try to buy some maneuvering room by backing the opposition off.
Unfortunately when we invoke the “fight or flight” mode, while we appear very formidable, our focus of attention narrows, blocking from our perception reasonable alternative strategies which appear all around us, leaving us totally and myopically focused on the “enemy,” and our decision making capabilities go right down the tubes.
It is interesting how often we observe this reality being demonstrated in the behavior of individuals on almost a daily basis, yet learn so little from watching this futility play itself out.
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I think “rebranding” is a bad analogy. A “rebrand” is some tweaks to your logo, an updated style guide, more relevant typography, a mobile-friendly website and some new stock photography. That’s not what the GOP needs to do. Their problem is the product itself that’s being sold. Trickle-down doesn’t work and their last guy in the White House tanked the economy, so they’ve got no viable economic agenda. Our middle class is shrinking, so their anti-labor agenda will only become less popular. Nobody under 40 gives a shit anymore about gay marriage, so their homophobic agenda isn’t working anymore. Demographics are shifting, so their pandering to racists isn’t much of a sell anymore. Obamacare is mostly working and we still haven’t heard what their “replace” is comprised of, so their healthcare agenda is shit. Useless wars, being asleep at the wheel on 9/11, and a Democrat getting OBL and ending said useless war doesn’t bode well for their failed foreign policy. They’ve got nothing but conspiracy theories and fake outrage left, and now that their Benghazi, Obamacare and birth certificate bullshit is thoroughly debunked, they’re out of anything worthy of selling. There needs to be a fundamental shift in their ideology, and they just seem completely unwilling to consider their options.
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Republicans are having Rand Paul write a new definition for “rebranding”. Or find a new definition that somebody else wrote.
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Rebranding, how about you call yourselves the Whigs Party. History in the making, again.
There isn’t anything such as republican rebranding. They are inherently racist, liars and untrustworthy, and will always remain the same!
In a related story, the Tea Party has also announced a rebranding. Stating that they are offended by the nickname “Teabaggers,” which they see as derogatory, Tea Party officials announced that because they believe their Libertarian principles will master the Democratic donkey, they wish henceforth to be known as the “Ass Masters”…
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For all of that, it seems to me that republicans have actually managed to get most of what they want even being in the minority, so the current situation where they’ll likely manage to hold the house for the foreseeable future isn’t necessarily bad for them in terms of getting their policy preferences implemented.
The current budget largely reflects republican preferences, abortion is all but banned in large swaths of the country, and the biggest reform in a generation is a hugely corporate friendly giveaway (the ACA), that doesn’t look like they’re losing when it matters.
I think that the Republicans have realized that gerrymandering, voter suppression, and smear campaigns run by well-funded PACS are much more likely to help them win elections than any attempt to make the platform of hate, misogyny, willful ignorance, and “spend as I say, not as I do” financial hypocrisy more palatable to the general public.
Sad, but true. You don’t have to run the machine to throw a wrench into it.
Shorter version of the GOP rebranding document:
“People probably won’t vote for you if they think you hate them.”
Turns out that’s too controversial.