Change from ideology…..
To….
Ass kissing Trump….
At first, Trump seemed like an unlikely candidate to redefine conservative politics. In 2016, he was pilloried as insufficiently conservative by some quarters of the GOP after supporting tax hikes on the wealthy and pledging to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Voters didn’t think of Trump as that conservative. Senators who were widely regarded as conservatives, like Sens. Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake, said they wouldn’t vote for him.
Ultimately, Trump’s nomination and subsequent election set up a fight within the Republican Party over what the party stood for — a fight the former president seems to have won. In fact, we found in our research both in 2016 and 2021 that Trump’s influence on the party has started to redefine what it means to be “conservative.”….
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A few key findings immediately stand out. First, in looking just at our 2021 survey data, a politician’s support for Trump has come to define who party activists think of as conservative. Romney, Toomey and Sasse were all rated as fairly liberal Republicans despite their conservative voting records in Congress, according to DW-Nominate, which quantifies the ideology of every member of Congress based on roll call votes cast in a legislative session. Staunchly pro-Trump politicians (or Trump-adjacent politicians), like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sens. Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham, and Trump were all clustered together on the more conservative end of the spectrum, even though there is quite a bit of difference, ideologically speaking, between these men. Pence, for instance, stands out for having established a very conservative track record pre-Trump whereas Cotton, Graham, Hawley and DeSantis’s claims to being so conservative are more closely linked to their connection to Trump. What seems to matter more is not so much one’s voting record in the pre-Trump era as one’s relationship to Trump….
Note….
The hard part of this for Republicans is how does the party appeal to those who do NOT LIKE Trump outside of Red States?
Trump said last night in an interview with Sean Hannity that he has made up his mind about running in 2024 but declined to reveal that decision.
In a real shocker…
Ted Cruz says he is “considering “ running for President again in 2024.
Wow!
None of them are gonna just step aside for Trump……
None? Why then did no one challenge Trump in 2020?
Oh wait. Weld, Walsh and Sanford did challenge Trump, but the three of them combined only got one delegate. If Trump chooses to run, he will have a more significant challenge than he had in 2020, but why would a Republican support a Trump bootlicker if they can have Trump himself? These guys supported Trump the whole time and if Trump runs and now when they are running for President, you think they will attack him for the first time? Yeah, that will work out well for them!
Mitt Romney,no Trump bootlicker,has stated that Trump can have the Republican nomination in 2024 if he wants it.
So you can believe someone who understands what is going on in the Republican Party or you can believe James.
Admittedly,it’s at tough call .
I agree there will be more of a challenge to a potential Trump candidacy in 2024 that there waa in 2020.
But if he chooses to run Trump will start as a more formidable front runner for the nomination than even a sitting Vice President like Bush in 1988 or Gore in 2000.
Agreed Scott….
Except RIGHT NOW?
I feel DeSantis IS early the leader
We’ll see if the image of him next to Biden hurts him with the party faithful
For better or worse, people know, or think they know, what Trump is like as President, as opposed to that self-promoting developer/would-be-celebrity who ran in 2015-16.
The only roughly-comparable analogue for Trump’s comeback try would be Grover Cleveland, Governor of New York (rather than a federal office-holder) in 1884, and former President in 1892.
The major technical difference is that Cleveland won a plurality of the popular, as opposed to Electoral, vote in his failed re-election bid in 1888, while Trump lost both in 2020.
What is most likely to distinguish Trump’s and Cleveland’s comeback tries from the other three I can recall (Van Buren’s in 1848, Fillmore’s in 1856 & Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1912) is that, should Trump run, he like Cleveland would have his own major party’s nomination for all three successive campaigns.
If Trump runs and loses the nomination to say DeSantis or another Republican will he simply go away quietly?
Or will he insist the nomination was rigged and try to run a third party bid?
If it’s the latter it would bear a resemblance to 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt failed to deny Taft renomination at the GOP convention.
The difference is that TR was legitimately robbed of that nomination.
I would think no matter what?
Donald J Trump will remain as a circus act looking for crowds
And trying to make back the money the government IS take from him in the end
Against all evidence and against all reason, JB still minimizes the fact that something on the order of 20-25% of voters and something between 25% and 40% of Republicans will still support Trump — even if they get slowly disabused about the pandemic and the electoral system — circus act or no circus act.
As I’ve written here before, Nixon and McCarthy still held onto the sympathies of something like 20% of Republicans decades after their disgrace. McCarthy may have disappeared, but McCarthyism lasted about as long as the Soviet Union.
Oh, i acknowledge Trump IS STILL popular among Republicans…
That is inescapable
My feeling is that his numbers are in decline..
Right now
I see DeSantis as the parties future presidential choice