Republican flavors: MAGA Crunchy, MAGA Smooth, and "mainstream"
What's next for the MAGA MCU? (Part 3)
Rewind: On October 19, 2016, in his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump refused to say he whether he would accept the results of the coming election. The following day, he announced to a rally that he would. “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election… IF I WIN.”
And so it began.
Fast Forward: After Trump lost to Biden in 2020, “concessions optional” was cemented as the new Republican orthodoxy: Any election we lose, is rigged.
Rewind: In 1940, Orson Welles played with the same idea in Citizen Kane. Kane’s newspaper headlined his election loss, “FRAUD AT POLLS.”
If only Charles Foster Kane had known a Rudy Giuliani or a John Eastman, he might have gone on to contest the election. If he had known a Roger Stone or a Steve Bannon, he might have sent a mob to overturn it. But he didn’t know anyone like them, so “FRAUD AT POLLS” was played for a quick laugh and then it was off to the opera.
Fast Forward: In the Trump era, “FRAUD AT POLLS” isn’t just a sight gag. Three officers at the Capitol died for it on January 6th. So did four of Trump’s demonstrators—one shot, one trampled, one of heart attack and one of stroke.
Joe Biden, in his address last week, generously allowed…
Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.
I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.
Despite Biden’s attempt to distinguish between “MAGA” and “mainstream,” nearly all Republicans took offense at the speech. They denounced it as a hateful attack on all 74 million people who voted for Trump.
Adam Zyglis, in The Buffalo News nailed the GOP reaction in yesterday’s cartoon.
Based on the GOP’s unison response to his speech, you’d be right to conclude that Biden had it wrong about “mainstream” Republicans. They’re not a majority of the party. They’re all but extinct.
If there are any “mainstream” Republicans left, they’re keeping their heads down. (I put quotation marks around “mainstream” because it’s clear that they’re more side-stream than mainstream. No more than a trickle.)
As described by David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, in The New York Times, GOP attitudes toward the 2020 election fall into three camps: Deniers, Enablers, and Accepters. I prefer to call them MAGA Crunchy, MAGA Smooth, and "mainstream."
MAGA Crunchy
Deniers claim outright that the 2020 election was stolen. Deniers make up the largest faction in today’s GOP. In much of the country, proclaiming that Biden’s election was not legitimate has become table stakes for running as a Republican. Numbered among the MAGA Crunchy:
Up to 70% of Republican voters
Over 50% of Republican officials in some states
Two-thirds of currently serving GOP House members
Eight U.S. Senators
Attorneys General in 17 States
More than 100 GOP candidates for office in 2022.
Most of these candidates are in solid GOP states, where their fanaticism won’t change election outcomes. But some of them are running in key swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) where, in 2024, they could outright block any Democratic slate of electors chosen by voters.
MAGA Smooth
The next ring of MAGA Republicans don’t explicitly claim that the 2020 election was rigged. If asked about it, they quickly pivot to inflation, crime, and immigration—or to Hunter Biden’s laptop. Instead of claiming in their own voice that 2020 was stolen , they play a bank shot by supporting MAGA Crunchy candidates who do.
Mitch McConnell, for example, congratulated Biden on his win and was quick to say, “The electoral college has spoken.” Yet he has thrown his support to the election-denying Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, has said that Biden's victory was "certifiably fair." Yet he has campaigned for the election-denying candidate for governor of Michigan, Tudor Dixon.
The poster child for the MAGA Smooth ring is, undoubtedly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Of all the enablers, he is the most active in campaigning for outright deniers. He has appeared in Arizona for Kari Lake, (governor), and Blake Masters (Senate). In Pennsylvania, DeSantis gave a 40-minute campaign speech for Doug Mastriano, one of the most radical election-conspiracy mongers among the GOP nominees in this cycle. (Not a long speech in MAGA Land. Donald Trump spoke for nearly two hours to support Mastriano and Senate candidate, Mehmet Oz.)
Beyond his campaigning for outright deniers, DeSantis governs as though fraud were rampant in his state—even though Trump carried Florida by a larger margin in 2020 than he had in 2016. DeSantis topped a string of voter suppression measures by standing up a statewide ballot-box Gestapo, the Office of Election Crimes and Security. They have already made their first busts—20 people they claim voted illegally.
Even when they don’t cry “fraud!” about the last election, enablers cry “potential fraud!” about the next one, and join the deniers in legislating to erect barriers that discourage the “wrong people” from voting.
As Biden said
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
“Mainstream” Republicans
Biden would have been more accurate to label them not “mainstream,” but “old-style,” “traditional” or even “ex-” Republicans. Calling them “mainstream” was only wishful thinking.
The most prominent of the accepters are the Republican members of the January 6 committee – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Neither will be in Congress next term. In fact, of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6th assault on the Capitol, only two will be on the ballot this November. There are, in fact, only a small handful of Republicans remaining with the courage to speak out in favor of fair and free elections. The price for doing so is too high.
Why Deny?
There’s a simple reason that Republicans invest so much time, attention, and money into denying the past election and to undermining future ones: their agenda is unpopular. From abortion to gun safety to health care to climate voters prefer the Democratic positions. There are, to be sure, a number of issues that work against Democrats, chief among them is inflation. But gas prices have been in steady decline since June 1st and there are signs that inflation is easing.
The U.S. election system already has built-in mechanisms to amplify the power of the minority party. All states have two Senators, regardless of population. The electoral college gives extra weight to states with smaller populations. The process of nominating candidates through party primaries favors people with extreme positions over centrists. In the U.S. Senate, the filibuster gives the minority party a virtual veto over most legislation.
But the agenda of today’s Republicans on key issues is so unpopular that their built-in structural advantage is still not enough for them to prevail with independent voters in national elections. There go-to tactic of fear-mongering over cultural issues works with their base, but falters against the wave of opposition to ending abortion access.
In the latest Quinnipiac poll, 67% of American adults said they thought our Democracy was “in danger of collapse.” That’s a 9-point jump from January, the last time they polled that question. Biden’s speech resonates with the national mood.
The Republican vehement response is revealing. Their base has trapped them into the MAGA World (either crunchy or smooth) but they sense that a strong majority of Americans opposes the MAGA movement. They are circling the wagons hoping that their base will prevail. Biden is betting that the non-MAGA America will say otherwise.