Birthers, ‘Trumpists’ and a crisis for the GOP

[PosterChild]

Birthers, ‘Trumpists’ and a crisis for the GOP (DU Get a mention)

http://wapo.st/1KQDqCA

[PatrickforO]

1. Good article. But, 20% is SCARY.

[PosterChild]

3. It is! But,...

Since we have a two party presidential system it gets encapsulated within the gop. To an extent that provides use some protection. If they did go rogue third party it might be better . It would be uglier but it would divide the right and make it easier for the left.

[HassleCat]

2. Crisis or watershed?

I don't think the Republicans see this as any kind of crisis at all. The WaPo article hopes they will hold on to their tradition as the Party of Lincoln, but they abandoned any pretense of that in 1980, or perhaps in 1968 with Nixon's southern strategy. (Or maybe it was 1972.) Anyway, the GOP has followed the same pattern for many years: run way to the right in the primaries, then hustle back to the middle for the general. Even though they allowed a truly right wing candidate to get the nomination since Barry Goldwater in 1964, they use the conservative fervor to energize the base. Now that they have to deal with the Tea Party, it's more important then ever to have candidates like Trump to blame out problems on immigrants and minorities. They don't see this as a crisis because they're confident they can dump Trump and substitute someone not quite as crazy. The obvious choice is Jeb Bush, but he's such a lackluster candidate they might have to look elsewhere, and then they would have a crisis, because the others in the field don't look too good. They would have to go with someone like Scott Walker, and hope they could hush him up on the whacky libertarian ideas.

[PosterChild]

6. What do you think about the ...

..... demographic factor? As the country becomes more minority-majority and the white demographic becomes plurality rather than majority ?

[HassleCat]

7. Helps them in primary, hurts them in general

If they can stick to the time-tested strategy, they will benefit from the sunset of the white majority. Obviously, there is a point where they will not be able to win general elections, first for president, then for senator, and eventually for most congressional districts. Until that happens, they can use the gradual rise in non-white voters to generate more fear of "them." They will stick with this tactic until it doesn't work anymore. As the demographic divide widens, it also widens the distance they have to travel back and forth between the primaries and the general. They may already be failing at the presidential level.

[Gothmog]

4. Fox News pandered to the idiots in the GOP base and now these idiots want the GOP to deliver

[pampango]

5. "We need to reckon with 'a solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist voting bloc that has been growing

since the mid-1990s."

While we do need to reckon with what Trump himself means for U.S. politics, we need to reckon even more urgently with what can now be called the “Trumpists,” a solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist voting bloc that has been growing since the mid-1990s.

The Trumpists are our equivalent of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) and France’s National Front, both anti-immigrant, nationalist parties. For the past five years, Trumpists have clocked in at about 20 percent of the electorate, if one tracks numbers of committed “Obama is a Muslim-ists.” This makes them even more powerful than Britain’s UKIP, which won 12.6 percent of the vote in May’s parliamentary election. These numbers put the Trumpists on par with the National Front in France, which in March elections took 25 percent of the vote to the 32 percent that went to the center-right party of Nicholas Sarkozy.

The critical difference between our nationalist faction and the European ones is that their parliamentary systems register them as “parties,” whereas our two-party model makes it harder to see that what we’re confronting truly is the rise of a new party. Provided, that is, the Republicans don’t sell their souls.

If the Republicans can hang on to the convictions that make them the party of Lincoln, we ought to see the party split. For the good of the country, we should hope for it.

Great article, Poster Child. Trump is the immediate worry but his "solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist "movement" may be a far bigger one in view of what is happening in the UK, France and other European countries.

[loyalsister]

8. I've been looking for info that includes minorities that are not necessarily ethnic

ie. disabled, LGBT, religious minorities, even poor people...

What a force we would be if we all would get over our differences and apathy to join forces!

I read somewhere that we are on track to achieve minority majority status much faster than predicted. There are 54 million disabled people and millions of baby boomers soon to join us.

I only remember getting the general scope of it, but don't have real numbers. Has anyone seen anything about it? My google search wasn't satisfactory.