Does nobody want Paul Ryan’s vote? The former House speaker has declared that he can’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because of her policies, and he can’t vote for former President Donald Trump because of his character. “I’m gonna write in a Republican this time,” he said.
The handsome Wisconsinite has only one vote, obviously. But other people share his dilemma. I am not talking here of those Republicans who are so revolted by their former party’s abasement before a convicted felon that they have gone full Dem. No, I mean those mainstream conservatives who will enthusiastically back downballot Republicans but who regard Trump’s refusal to concede when he loses elections as a threat to the republic.
I don’t know how many people are in this category. Maybe it’s 5% of the electorate, maybe 10%. Given that 20% of registered voters say they won’t cast a ballot this time, those seem reasonable estimates. With the polls evenly balanced, 5% would be decisive.
So, to repeat, who is wooing Ryan? Who is appealing to former Vice President Mike Pence, to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to the old Reaganites? Who is reaching out to my colleague Quin Hillyer, who launched his own write-in campaign in these pages? Why, in short, is neither party interested in the votes of constitutionalist conservatives? It’s not as though their support would alienate anyone else. Both parties are bizarrely spurning a bloc whose votes are there for the asking.
All the Democrats needed to do was nominate a normal candidate. Anti-Trumpers understand that they can’t be too picky. They weren’t holding out for some pro-bitcoin, anti-abortion gun nut. They would, by and large, have settled for someone who showed a modicum of patriotism and who understood that markets, not politicians, generate wealth. What they got instead was a nominee who backed gender surgery for minors, urged her supporters to post bail for Black Lives Matter rioters, refers to Hispanic people as “Latinx,” and avoids interviews because she knows that the more she says, the worse she does.
The Republicans, too, could have appealed to the anti-Trumpers, even with Trump as their candidate. They could, for example, have given him a mainstream running mate, such as former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Instead, they plumped for someone who, having initially seen the MAGA movement for what it was, is now Trumpier than Trump. The GOP’s repudiation of anti-Trumpers is not tactical but visceral. What does the party gain by hounding Pence? Whose support does it win? It offends those who see the former vice president as a decent and religious man without any compensating gain.
Which raises a deeper question. Do the two parties truly want to win? It has become a pollsters’ cliché that any Democrat except Harris would smash Trump and that any Republican except Trump would smash Harris. But neither party seems to care. Both sacrificed electability to their domestic taboos. In the case of the Democrats, an inability to leapfrog a woman of color, whatever her failures. In the case of the Republicans, the creepy Führerprinzip that has seen the party program rewritten around the personal interests of one man.
Party primaries used to weed out the duds. But at some point over the past decade, they started to have the opposite effect, allowing fools and shysters through, provided they told their base what it wanted to hear. North Carolina’s Republicans, to pluck a timely example, must have been aware that theirs was a key state. Yet they picked an obviously unhinged gubernatorial candidate simply because he pressed the right MAGA buttons. In doing so, they may very well have gifted Harris their state and, thus, the presidency.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
This self-indulgence is all the more bizarre when we consider that contemporary politics is defined by negative polarization. If Republicans think that Harris would end the republic as they know it, that she would open the borders, create senators from Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, stuff the Supreme Court, and nationalize the economy, don’t they have a duty to pick a more electable candidate? Conversely, if Democrats believe that a second Trump term would destroy democracy because he would rule as an autocrat, don’t they have an obligation to pick someone capable of making it through a TV interview?
Political strategists go through the motions as though this were a pre-2016 election. Republicans talk of making Trump more conciliatory, Democrats of making Harris better at answering questions. But that is not who they are. Trump’s viciousness and Harris’s vacuousness are baked in. The parties knew what they were buying and bought anyway. Now, the country as a whole is set to do the same thing.