Gallup: “In 2019, on average, 47% of U.S. adults identified politically as Democrats or said they were independents who leaned toward the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, 42% identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents.”
“Americans’ political leanings have been quite stable since 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president. The Democratic figure has not changed in the past four years, and the Republican figure has been 41% or 42% each year since 2012.”
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Two state Republican Party leaders in Delaware are facing backlash for comments on Facebook that their colleagues called homophobic and anti-Semitic, CNN reports.
Blue Delaware posted screenshots of the posts.
Stuart Stevens: “In a long-forgotten era — say, four years ago — such a question would have elicited a very different answer. Though there was disagreement over specific issues, most Republicans would have said the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today it’s not that the Republican Party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.”
“Republicans are now officially the character doesn’t count party, the personal responsibility just proves you have failed to blame the other guy party, the deficit doesn’t matter party, the Russia is our ally party, and the I’m-right-and-you-are-human-scum party. Yes, it’s President Trump’s party now, but it stands only for what he has just tweeted.”
“A party without a governing theory, a higher purpose or a clear moral direction is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate that exists only to advance itself. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.”
New York Times: “Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached.”
“But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.”
“His iron grip was never firmer than over the last two months, during the House inquiry that concluded Wednesday with Mr. Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress. No House Republican supported either article, or even authorized the investigation in September, and in hearing after hearing into the president’s dealings with Ukraine, they defended him as a victim of partisan fervor. One Republican even said that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment.”
The RNC goes into the presidential election year with more than seven times as much cash on hand as the DNC: $63 million vs. $8.3 million, according to FEC filings.
Mike Allen: “This is a stark new sign of what we’ve been reporting all year — that President Trump’s digitally driven campaign is giving him a massive fundraising and organizing advantage over whoever emerges from the Democratic race.”
Jonathan Freedland: “Well, guess what. Labour’s ‘radical’ manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. And if judged not by the academic standard of ‘expanding the discourse,’ but by the hard, practical measure of improving actual people’s actual lives, those hate figures of Corbynism — Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power.”
“That’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; it’s not a pressure group that exists to open the Overton window a little wider; it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not ‘a 30-year project.’ Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing.”
Axios: “The Trump campaign and RNC combined took in more than $10m in small-dollar donations last week alone, as the House Judiciary Committee adopted two articles of impeachment, according to a campaign official.”
“In the 72 hours that followed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s initial September announcement that she would move forward with the impeachment inquiry, Republicans raised $15m.”
“Since the impeachment inquiry began, an official said, a quarter of Trump rally registrants are self-described Democrats or independents, and about the same proportion are low-propensity voters.”
A must-read out next year: It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens.
“Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.”
Pew Research: “About three-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (31%) say journalists have very low ethical standards, roughly six times the 5% of Democrats and Democratic leaners who say this.”
Gallup: “More Americans continue to identify as Democrats or as ‘Democratic-leaning’ independents than as Republicans or ‘Republican-leaning’ independents. The current 47% to 42% Democratic edge is largely in line with what Gallup has measured over the past five years.”
“It’s not a political party anymore. It’s a cult.”
— Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), quoted by the Quad City Times, on the Republican Party.
“When I see that the Republicans are going to have a press conference, I kind of get a little nervous because I think, ‘Oh, no. Lots of white guys.’ Love white guys, but there are a lot of other folks in this great country.”
— Former Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), quoted by Politico.
Politico: “President Donald Trump is winning at least one trade war: The one with his own party. Free-trading Republicans have feuded with the president for years now, and his decision on Monday to reimpose tariffs on Brazil and Argentina brought new criticism from GOP senators — right as he needs them to fend off the impeachment inquiry threatens his presidency.”
“Yet despite the complaints from Senate Republicans that Trump is eroding his party’s free trade bona fides, the GOP seemingly can’t — or won’t — rally the votes to handcuff the president. Competing proposals that would give Congress more sway over certain tariffs have been languishing in the Senate Finance Committee, leaving more establishment-minded Republicans little option but to sit back and gripe and wonder what just hit them.”
Laura Field: “Bannon, Gorka, and Miller are the very sort of men who support Donald Trump Jr., and the very sort of men whom he supports. And like it or not, they are the face of today’s conservatism and today’s Republican party. Earlier this month, emails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller’s white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation. As Jeet Heer put it back in August, Stephen Miller’s Republicanism is perfectly mainstream.”
“And so, while my first thought after the Trump Jr. protest was to question the journalism—Why are they calling these guys mainstream?—it’s the reality that’s off, not the writers.”
“I would like to think there’s a coalition of the decent out there who are just horrified by watching Donald Trump, by watching what he’s doing, but also what he’s doing to us. I would love to see the emergence of a coalition that would set aside ideological differences, at least temporarily, to deal with the current emergency.”
— Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes, quoted by The Progressive.
Max Boot: “Republicans have turned their back on conservative principles to become a cult of personality for an aspiring authoritarian. All voters with a conscience should now turn their back on the Republican Party. For aiding and abetting the president’s egregious abuses of power, the Republican Party deserves to be destroyed from top to bottom. We need a center-right party in this country. What we have instead is a party with no fixed principles that is willing to do anything — no matter how vile — to serve its maximum leader, a.k.a. ‘the chosen one.'”
Dallas Morning News: “In a bizarre political blunder, a document laying out the Republican Party of Texas’s election strategy for the 2020 elections has ended up in the hands of Texas Democrats. Attacking Democratic candidates through websites and mitigating ‘the polarizing nature’ of President Trump are part of the plan.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.