‘It’s almost like insanity’: GOP base continues to lash out over Trump’s defeat

Authored by politico.com and submitted by daredelvis421
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In Cobb County, the archetype of the GOP’s suburban erosion, Republican activists over the weekend were still relitigating former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud while drafting resolutions to rebuke the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and other Republican officials for their unwillingness to overturn Trump’s loss. The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has been all but excommunicated .

The once dominant Georgia GOP might be in meltdown in the suburbs, but the rank and file remains obsessed with Trump and the perceived wrongs of the last election.

As party activists vented at their county convention, the chair of the Cobb County Young Republicans, DeAnna Harris, stewed in the parking lot of her local party office.

“Huge mistake,” she said of the hostilities directed at Kemp and the reliving of 2020. “We’ve got to get out of this mindset. It’s almost like insanity.”

To traditionalist Republicans in Georgia, the infighting between fervent Trump supporters and the establishment wing of the party has become increasingly alarming as the midterm elections come into focus. The GOP is desperate to regain its footing in the suburbs after Trump’s collapse there. But it was moderate Republicans and independent voters, not Trump loyalists, who abandoned Trump in November, and the party’s fixation on the former president may only alienate them further, with potentially disastrous consequences for 2022 and beyond.

Party officials remain optimistic that since the midterms historically favor the out-of-power party, state Republicans “should be poised to have a very good year,” said Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who served as Trump’s ambassador to Luxembourg.

Yet there are plenty of reasons to question whether historic trends will swing in their direction.

“I’m convinced that if infighting escalates, we could easily blow it, as well,” Evans said. “We’ve got to figure out how to come together, really. And it’s an easy thing to say but a very difficult thing to actually do in this environment… The consultants and the insiders will undoubtedly attempt to shift the focus toward a message that we can all agree, like we’re not Biden-Harris, and so let’s just focus on that. But I think some of these divisions are so deep that I don’t know that that’s enough.”

Making gains in the midterms is hard, he said, “if you’re shooting at each other inside the tent.”

Even before Trump lost the nation’s suburbs to Joe Biden, Republicans were facing a crisis in suburbia, the result of shifting demographics and voting habits around America’s largest cities. In Atlanta’s diversifying suburbs, what had once been a gradual “metamorphosis” was “put on steroids by Donald Trump,” said John Watson, a former Georgia Republican Party chair.

Mitt Romney had carried Cobb County by nearly 13 percentage points in 2012. Four years later, Trump lost the county to Hillary Clinton by about 2 points , and four years after that, he was clobbered by more than 14 percentage points. Over the span of eight years, it marked a 27-point swing against the Republican nominee.

The predicament for Republicans is that while many suburban voters, especially women, recoiled from Trump, he dramatically expanded the party elsewhere, pulling more working-class whites into the GOP and making inroads with Latinos . Now, for Republican Party organizers, the question hanging over the midterm elections is how to hold on to Trump’s base while recovering the moderate voters he lost to now-President Biden in November.

In Cobb County, the party’s election of a new county chair on Saturday offered a glimpse of the difficult path forward. A three-way race for an open seat, the contest featured one woman, of Puerto Rican descent, who invoked the “image problem” confronting the overwhelmingly white convention attendees in a county where people of color now make up nearly half of the population. Another candidate presented herself as an analytics expert. The third, Salleigh Grubbs, ran on a “Cobb First,” “America First” platform.

One supporter referred to Grubbs, a businesswoman, as “the female version of Donald Trump.”

The result wasn’t even close — Grubbs won in a landslide.

LobsterBluster on April 20th, 2021 at 12:43 UTC »

I live in the Chicago suburbs. I was in Schaumburg a couple weeks ago and there’s a major intersection by the mall where there were probably at least 100 trump supporting protesters. This is what they chose to do with a Saturday with perfect weather...

It’s like they still think they can change the outcome of the election.

Custergrant on April 20th, 2021 at 11:37 UTC »

Shit, you mean it's not totally normal for people to keep flying flags and displaying signs for a failed presidential candidate that lost nearly half a year ago?

Custergrant on April 20th, 2021 at 11:28 UTC »

He said, “It’s hard to go into east Cobb County and talk to suburban voters with a MAGA hat on.”

Fuck, as it should be.