Gallup: “Overall, 46% of Americans identified as Republicans or independents who leaned toward the Republican Party, compared with 45% who identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.”
Prior to 2022, Republicans only had a slight edge once before, in 1991.”
Seth Masket offers two very basic facts about modern Republican politics:
The Republican National Committee on Friday reelected Michael Whatley as chair, continuing the tenure of President-elect Donald Trump’s second hand-picked leader for the GOP, Politico reports.
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“Early Monday afternoon, former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) received an email from a Georgia GOP official spelling out a trio of punishments for his embrace of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign last year,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“The state executive committee formally expelled Duncan from the party, demanded he cease referring to himself as a Republican and banned him from attending any state GOP events.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said he does not think President-elect Donald Trump has permanently changed the GOP, The Hill reports.
Said Sununu: “We’ve always been a spectrum in the party. We’ve had moderates, we’ve had fiscal conservatives and social moderates and social conservatives. It’s a huge spectrum, and it’s a big tent, and it will be, it will continue to be.”
“Is Elon Musk the new dictator of the Republican Party?”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), quoted by the New York Times.
“Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent Donald Trump critic who will soon retire from Congress, stood by his criticism of the president-elect’s character but said Trump and his MAGA movement now define the Republican Party,” CNN reports.
Said Romney: “I’m, as you know, not a supporter of President Trump’s. I didn’t support him in this election. I didn’t the last time he ran either, largely for matters of character.”
However, he added: “MAGA is the Republican Party and Donald Trump is the Republican Party today.”
“Lara Trump will step down as co-chair of the Republican National Committee as she considers a number of potential options with her father-in-law, President-elect Donald Trump, set to return to the White House,” the AP reports.
“Among those possibilities is replacing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whom Trump tapped to be the next secretary of state. If Rubio is confirmed, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will choose who takes the seat through the remainder of Rubio’s term, which expires in 2026.”
Janan Ganesh: “Had Kamala Harris won the U.S. election last month — and it was close, remember, despite the tone of the coverage since then — would Donald Trump have conceded defeat within 24 brisk hours? Would Republicans in Congress be preparing to certify the result in the new year? Would the party’s voters accept her as the legitimate president when asked in polls? On all three counts, there is enough doubt that posing the questions doesn’t seem exotic.”
“Without quite acknowledging it, American politics has arrived at an understanding. One side can ignore the rules of the game — to the point of challenging election outcomes without proof of fraud — and the other can’t, or at least doesn’t. In the language of the street, but also of game theory, the Democratic party is the sucker. If it were one of the two detainees in the prisoner’s dilemma, it would confess to a crime, the accomplice wouldn’t, and jail would beckon for the former. The prisoner at least has the excuse of ignorance. Democrats are aware of being diddled.”
“This isn’t tenable. The ultimate risk to the American republic is that Democrats give up their unilateral observance of basic norms. The system can survive, just about, one of the two main parties going feral. It can’t survive both. And so the story isn’t that Joe Biden has pardoned his son, having promised not to. The story is what far worse behaviors it might augur from the Democrats in future, given the incentives they face.”
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley has agreed to remain in the role following President-elect Donald Trump’s request for him to stay, Politico reports.
Derek Thompson: “This primitive romanticism is the core of the modern Republican Party. To the extent that any single attitude unites the motley coalitions under Donald Trump, it is a pervasive distrust of incumbents, establishments, and legacy organizations. In Pew Research surveys, less than half of Republicans say they believe that higher education, Big Business, tech firms, the media, the entertainment industry, or unions have a positive effect on society.”
“Although more than 60 percent of Democrats say they trust a variety of news organizations, including CNN and The New York Times, there is not one media company that more than 60 percent of Republicans say they trust, including Fox News.”
Playbook: “Over the last 16 or so hours, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation in two big fights that will define the near-term future of politics here in Washington.”
“One is over a key administration post — and what that tells us about both the state of today’s Republican Party and what America under Trump 2.0 will look like.”
“The other is for the chairmanship of the Democratic Party as it finds itself locked in the wilderness.”
Eliot Cohen: “Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.”
“Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing ‘conservative’ about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of ‘the Squad’ and see what happens.”
“Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects.”
“I think there is sort of a faction in the Republican Party that has a strange kind of… sort of homoerotic fascination for Putin, which I personally don’t share.”
— Former British prime minister Boris Johnson, speaking at an event.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said Tuesday’s election showed a realignment of the Republican Party and the American electorate that centers less on race and more on occupation, the Washington Post reports.
Said Rubio: “Donald Trump won it by fundamentally remaking the Republican Party but I hope also revealing to people that for voters in the United States of America, their primary identity is not their ethnicity, it’s not their race. It’s what they do for a living, it’s who they are in their daily lives.”
Donald Trump is making clear that he’ll blame Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee chair who Trump tasked with building the party’s massive “election integrity” team, Axios reports.
Said Trump at a recent rally: “So Michael, you better win or you’re never going to be able to come back here. He doesn’t win, he won’t be at RNC and he will no longer be in North Carolina. He’ll be looking for a job.”
David French: “When Trump announced his first run for president, his vitriolic speech planted a seed of hatred in the American body politic. That seed found fertile soil.”
“If I could talk to my 2015 self, I’d deliver a simple, dispiriting message: There isn’t a specific tactic or argument that will win back the Republican Party from Donald Trump.”
“You’ve already lost.”
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) told NBC News that she is a “conservative” but does not consider herself to be “a member of Donald Trump’s Republican 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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