“No one person controls this party.”
— Speaker Paul Ryan, quoted by The Hill, saying the Republican party is not Donald Trump’s party.
“No one person controls this party.”
— Speaker Paul Ryan, quoted by The Hill, saying the Republican party is not Donald Trump’s party.
“Donald Trump’s path of destruction has pushed the Republican Party to the cusp of a historic reckoning, an existential crisis that has left half of America’s political establishment in desperate need of new leaders, a new message, and even a common orthodoxy,” the Boston Globe reports.
“Party members say it is almost impossible to underestimate the challenges facing the 162-year-old GOP, which for the last three decades has been largely defined by a hagiographic vision of Ronald Reagan but is now riven by a civil war with multiple dimensions.”
“Some Republicans are even studying the collapse of the Whig Party in the mid-19th century, hoping they can avoid a similar fate. Others are girding for proxy wars that will be waged on Capitol Hill, within the Republican National Committee, and live on the set of Fox News.”
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Catherine Rampell: “The end of a principled, intellectually coherent, organizationally robust center-right party is bad for democracy. It’s also bad for Democrats, given some of the dumb ideas flourishing on the left that desperately need a thoughtful counterweight.”
“But even on priorities on which liberals are likely to make progress, the lack of an honest, articulate, respected adversary is troubling. That’s because liberals need a worthy intellectual rival to sharpen their thinking and keep their own bad ideas in check. Right now a number of bad ideas booming on the left need a credible, coherent, megaphoned rebuttal. These are ideas that may sound nice and perhaps appear helpful. But pursuing many of them would be, at best, irrelevant and ineffective, a waste of time and resources; at worst, they would be actively harmful to the marginalized groups that bleeding-heart liberals claim to champion.”
Noam Bramson: Work to beat the Republican party on November 8 and to save it starting November 9.
Politico: “This election, the conventional wisdom goes, has done tremendous damage to the American body politic, but nowhere is the damage as severe as it is inside the party that nominated the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump. Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. In the face of mounting evidence that Hillary Clinton is set to dominate the electoral map on November 8, Republicans across the right side of the spectrum recognize there’s defeat coming. And behind the scenes, in conversations and closed-door venues—the Hoover gathering was not open to the public—the people who once considered themselves the heart, or at least the head, of the party have begun a very pessimistic reckoning.”
“As yet there seems to be no coherent vision for what kind of future November 9 brings for the Republican Party—or, for that matter, if there will even be a Republican Party they could support.”
S.E. Cupp: “As a conservative woman who wanted very much to support the Republican nominee, it’s been a deeply disappointing year and a half. After helping the Republican National Committee address some of the troubling deficiencies the party faced after 2012, as outlined in its so-called autopsy report, and witnessing some real progress in our outreach to women in the ensuing years, I did not expect an egomaniacal arsonist to come along and set all that ablaze.”
“Mr. Trump has sent the party back to the Dark Ages — or at least the 1950s — with his provincial notions of masculinity and misogynist notions of femininity, his cartoonish bombast, his vulgar jocularity and his open hostility to women who question him. In short, he’s reaffirmed the worst stereotypes about Republicans that Democrats have pushed for decades.”
New York Times: “If the most likely scenario holds — a Hillary Clinton victory, a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate and a diminished Republican House majority — Republicans will have to make crucial and onerous decisions they are now beginning to confront.”
“Do they try to find a way to cooperate with Democrats and get something done after years of stasis in Washington, perhaps as a way to move beyond the Trump phenomenon? Or do they dig in against Democrats and the new president as a bet on a Republican comeback in the 2018 midterm elections, adopting a noncooperative strategy to recapture the Senate majority and pad their numbers in the House?”
New York Times: “Some of the loudest voices on the right seem poised to channel that anger into one of their favorite and most frequent pursuits: eating their own.”
“Some in the deeply factionalized Republican Party, including Mr. Trump and some of his senior aides, are already fanning the flames for a revolt against the House speaker, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, once Congress reconvenes after the election. Mr. Trump, who has lashed out at the speaker for being critical of him, has privately said that Mr. Ryan should pay a price for his disloyalty, according to two people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal campaign discussions.”
Donald Trump “has stopped holding events for his high-dollar fundraising operation for the rest of the campaign, an unusual move that deals another serious blow to the GOP’s effort to finance its get-out-the-vote operation before Election Day,” the Washington Post reports.
“Trump’s decision effectively turns off one of the main spigots to the Republican National Committee, which collected $40 million through Trump Victory as of Sept. 30. The party has devoted a large share of the funds to pay for its national voter mobilization program to benefit the entire Republican ticket.”
“The Republican Party must reform or die. Because if it stays on its current course, George W. Bush’s fear may be proven right. He may be the last Republican ever elected to the White House.”
— MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, quoted by the Washington Post.
Charlie Cook: “Republicans will now have four years to think about what they did to themselves this year, plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of handing over their party’s car keys to the tea-party movement and watching as the quintessential tea partier, Donald Trump, drove the car over a cliff…”
“When I talk to smart Republican leaders and strategists, they have a very good idea of what their party’s problems are, and they know what needs to be done. But my colleague Amy Walter recently reminded us of a great line by former House Speaker John Boehner: A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk. Republican leaders are faced with a party in which about half of its members believe that compromise is a four-letter word and hold some pretty exotic views of what this country is and where it is headed—views that are very different from where the country actually is and where it is going.”
For members: The Next Face of the Republican Party
“The third and final debate Wednesday marked the beginning of the end of a presidential race that most Republican leaders cannot wait to forget. But the party’s Donald Trump-driven divisions will not cease on election night,” the Washington Post reports.
“The axis of furious conservative activists and hard-right media that spawned Trump’s nationalist and conspiratorial campaign is determined to complete its hostile takeover of the GOP, win or lose.”
For members: Paul Ryan Has a Really Big Trump Problem
“It’s splitting right before your eyes. It’s happening now. There is a civil war in the party that is going on right now. The question is whether, after the election, the party will be able to repair itself; or cease to exist; or continue to exist in some diminished way.”
— GOP strategist Rick Tyler, quoted by The Hill.
Matt Lewis, Chris Riback and Taegan Goddard discuss the future of the Republican party on the latest episode of Political Wire Conversations.
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“I will tell you that if the Republican Party does not evolve, the Republican Party is going to die.”
— Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), in an interview with Business Insider.
Matt Taibbi: “The party spent 50 years preaching rich people bromides like ‘trickle-down economics’ and ‘picking yourself up by your bootstraps’ as solutions to the growing alienation and financial privation of the ordinary voter. In place of jobs, exported overseas by the millions by their financial backers, Republicans glibly offered the flag, Jesus and Willie Horton.”
“In recent years it all went stale. They started to run out of lines to sell the public. Things got so desperate that during the Tea Party phase, some GOP candidates began dabbling in the truth. They told voters that all Washington politicians, including their own leaders, had abandoned them and become whores for special interests. It was a slapstick routine: Throw us bums out!”
“Republican voters ate it up and spent the whole of last primary season howling for blood as Trump shredded one party-approved hack after another. By the time the other 16 candidates finished their mass-suicide-squad routine, a tail-chasing, sewer-mouthed septuagenarian New Yorker was accepting the nomination of the Family Values Party.”
President Obama gave Republicans a frank dressing-down for allowing Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee by “feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years” at the annual Ohio Democrats’ dinner Thursday night, TPM reports.
Said Obama: “The problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does. The problem is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience. So if Trump was running around saying I wasn’t born here, they were okay with that as long as it helped them with votes. If some of these folks on talk radio talked about how I was the antichrist, that’s just politics.”
He added: “They stood by while this happened. And Donald Trump–as he’s prone to do—he didn’t build the building himself, he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it. And that’s what happened in their party.”
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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