CNN: Trumpism midterm elections gop-1978-zelizer: How the GOP has risen to power in 2020 and what it can do about it

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, of which one is about the presidency of Donald J. Trump. He has a account on the social media platform of @julianzelizer. The views that he gives are of his own. Discuss your opinion on CNN.

Republicans are feeling much better about the midterms. The polls are showing that the GOP is doing better than the Democrats in these elections, which is nice for them after a summer when the Democrats seemed to defy the trend.

High levels of concern about inflation and diminished attention on the electoral impact of the Dobbs decision appear to have hurt the Democrats. While Americans are worried about the future of our democracy, many think the main issue is corruption, not threats from the GOP to overturn future results.

It would be huge if the GOP shows a strong showing. Not only could Republican success potentially shift control of the House and Senate, leaving President Joe Biden to deal with two years of trying to raise debt limits and avoid draconian budget cuts, but the midterms could entrench Trumpism and solidify the direction of the party.

The Washington Post claims that 291 Republicans who are running for office in November are election sinners who don’t accept that Biden won in 2020. While many of these candidates will lose, a large number have good odds of being victorious – potentially helping to create a path for former President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024.

The midterms could turn supporters of election denialism into the new Freedom Caucus – the Tea Party Republicans who came to Washington after the 2010 midterms and organized into a powerful faction in the House GOP within a few years. They could be a driving force in a new majority that pushes anti-democratic policies to the very top of the Republican agenda.

A majority of Americans will not vote in the election, according to FiveThirtyEight. The secretaries of state would allow the deniers to conduct state elections in the future.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/opinions/trumpism-midterm-elections-gop-1978-zelizer/index.html

The Transformation that the Midterms of the GOP Have Learned: The Case of Rep. L. C. Greene and R. J. Brock

The transformation that has been taking place in the party was captured in a recent report by New York Times Magazine. In the piece, Robert was able to show how Greene has become a power broker in the GOP because she’s too right-leaning.

In other words, Republican success in the 2022 midterms will cement that Trumpism wasn’t some sort of aberration – it is the norm. Wyoming’s Liz Cheney is out of Congress, while Nevada’s Wayne Beatty is in.

It’s a big role for mid-term elections to define what parties are about. While the pundits spend much of their time spinning who will win or lose, equally important – though too often ignored – is what the voting says about the character of a party.

“President Carter,” one reporter noted, “was unable to turn back the Republican tide that apparently defeated Democratic candidates for the Senate in more than half of the 19 states in which he campaigned.”

Republicans gained six gubernatorial seats, where the Republican National Committee invested a lot. Republicans celebrated securing control of 12 state legislative chambers, up from four. “This is the most profound change for us,” noted then-RNC Chair Bill Brock, in Time magazine.

The numbers were not as important as the inner substance. There were several up-and-coming Republicans, like Gingrich of Georgia, who championed a new generation of brash and aggressive conservatives and rejected the older generation of party leaders who believed in the need to stick to the center.

Republicans like Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi won seats that had been controlled by conservative Democrats for decades. James Eastland was one of the main opponents of civil rights and Cochran took his seat. Dick Clark was defeated by Roger Jepsen, who attacked the senator from Africa for his fight against apartheid. The Republicans spoke about tax reductions and a stronger stance against communism.

Conservative political organizations were flexing their muscles. The National Conservative Political Action Committee, created in 1975 and one of the most important forces of what was being called “The New Right,” helped to unseat several prominent Democrats. Gordon Humphrey, a conservative abortion opponent, defeated the incumbent senator from New Hampshire.

Surveying the results, Newsweek noted, “Nearly a half century after the dawn of the New Deal, America swung rightward toward Republicanism last week … The real message of the election returns was that a new agenda that was no longer partisan was now being adopted by the nation, one that was centered on inflation as the priority and tax-and-spend government as the villain.

It’s already happened and people wonder if there will be long-term change in the Republican party. While that kind of question is impossible to answer, the hold of election denialism on so many Republican candidates and the rightward shift on policies like immigration is a very strong indication of where things stand – even if some of the high-profile Trump-selected candidates, such a Herschel Walker in Georgia or J.D. Vance in Ohio, lose.

The former president was trying to overturn a presidential election with an anti-democratic theme. His strategy is still going strong despite his failure in doing so.

The midterms are turning into a moment for the Republicans to double down on this direction, reminding voters why conservatives such as Cheney don’t really have much room at the table. The party of Trump will not turn away from the next election cycles if they win in November.

The editors note the existence of some “bipartisan” myths that transcend party or ideology, but overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right. In an analysis that spans 20 chapters, more than 300 pages and centuries of American history and public discourse, this emphasis is striking. Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it. It might need its own debunking if it isn’t.

Bell points to the 17th century sermon in which the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote that the Puritan community would be as a city on a hill. The reference is required in every discussion of American exceptionalism, though the text of the sermon remains virtually unknown until recently, so Bell does not think it’s relevant to the debate.

It is an intriguing assumption, at least to this non-historian, that the initial obscurity of a speech (or a book or an argument or a work of any kind) would render it irrelevant, no matter how significant it became to later generations. It is the same attitude that Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale and the author of a chapter on myths surrounding the Constitution, takes toward Federalist No. 10. James Madison’s essay “foreshadowed much of post-Civil War American history,” Amar writes, in part for its argument that the federal government would protect minority rights more effectively than the states, “but in 1787-1788, almost no one paid attention to Madison’s masterpiece.” Unlike other Federalist essays, No. 10 did not make a great impression in American coffeehouses and taverns, where patrons read aloud and discussed both local and out-of-town newspapers. Alas, Mr. Madison, your piece was not trending, so we’re taking it off history’s home page.

To his credit, Amar is consistent in privileging immediate popular reactions in his historical assessments. He criticizes the argument of Charles Beard’s 1913 book, “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” that the Constitution was an antidemocratic document. Why did the people vote for the document if it was antidemocratic? Amar asks. “Why did tens of thousands of ordinary working men enthusiastically join massive pro-constitutional rallies in Philadelphia and Manhattan?” Even just in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, however, it seems clear that people in a free society can be rallied to democratic and anti-democratic causes, with great enthusiasm, if they come to believe such causes are righteous.