Trump Voters Are Committing Political Suicide

 

Traditionally in the United States, an off-year election has the party in power losing seats in Congress. This year may be an exception. If so, we can thank Donald Trump and his voters. They seem to be doing everything they can to make sure Republicans lose in 2022.

The following is part of an op-ed in The Washington Post by Megan McArdle:

The Democratic Party has no better friend at the moment than Donald Trump.

An overwhelming majority of voters pronounce themselves unsatisfied with the condition of the country: Gross domestic product has fallen, inflation has taken a significant chunk out of everyone’s paycheck, and President Biden’s approval rating is at 40 percent. Even offering extra credit for a very strong labor market, Republicans ought to be a lock to retake the Senate and the House in November’s midterms, with a solid shot at holding the trifecta come 2024.

Instead, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is warning that Republicans face an uphill battle in the Senate this year. And for that you can mostly thank Trump, who has been meddling in race after race, deterring strong candidates such as Larry Hogan and Chris Sununu, while elevating weak and inexperienced ones such as Blake Masters and Dr. Oz. The Trumpy base, which loves to see the GOP’s more moderate candidates getting what-for, is helping Trump to inadvertently elect Democrats. . . .

This is the tragedy of Republican politics right now. It looks increasingly clear that Trump is doing more damage to the Republican Party than to the “establishment” or the “deep state” or whoever it is that his most ardent supporters think they’re thwarting when they cast a vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate. . . .

Try for a moment to see how the world looks to a Trump voter, which is to say, someone who probably doesn’t have many friends who work in academia, or journalism, or high up in some expert bureaucracy like public health or the courts. They are aware that those folks have long viewed them with a mixture of bemused contempt and outright loathing, and they’re understandably a little peeved. They’re also pretty mad that Republican elected officials colluded with those elites to suppress consideration of popular restrictions on immigration and trade.

That Trump is a pariah among the professional class is a feature, not a bug. The collective freakout over Trump’s election and subsequent four years as president only strengthened this attraction, and because some of the freakouts were less than warranted — I’m looking at you, Russian collusion — they made it easier for Trump voters to dismiss the critics as hysterics.

That’s not to say that Trump wasn’t a danger. Many of his outrages fully warranted a freakout, most notably his baseless allegations of election fraud. But convincing someone that those allegations are nonsense requires either that they have an expert command of polling and election data, or else that they trust the pronouncements of mainstream institutional sources — which, if you are a Trump voter, means trusting people who have spent much of the last six years explaining that you voted for Trump because you are a) a bigot b) a fascist and/or c) too dumb to come in out of the rain. . . .

This is bad for the Republican Party, which is going to lose at least some elections it should have won in November, and bad for America, which needs two healthy political parties — and certainly doesn’t need another four years of Trump.

And it is also bad for those voters themselves, who are empowering the very liberal elites they thought they were electing Trump to fight.