Republicans will find themselves — or ‘find out’
Hugo Gurdon
Video Embed
There is an old joke about a lost traveler walking along a country road and stopping to ask a yokel the way to the city. The local, leaning on a gate, scratches his head and scrunches his features, then answers, “I wouldn’t start from here, if I were you.”
The obvious flaw in the advice is that your only available starting point is where you are, no matter your destination. The Washington Examiner magazine’s two cover stories deal with this knotty problem.
ANTITRUST CASE OF THE CENTURY: WHAT TO EXPECT AS JUSTICE DEPARTMENT V. GOOGLE CASE BEGINS
Republicans are on the wrong road to the White House. Four months before voting begins in the 2024 primaries, former President Donald Trump leads his GOP challengers by more than 40 points — by more than 50 in some cases — despite his being under indictment and having led the party to defeat in the past three elections. His lead has, moreover, extended to its unprecedented distance as his legal woes have piled up.
The Republican predicament is, therefore, far from ideal. Nevertheless, if the GOP wishes to win the presidency, it can get there only from where it is, not from where it might have been or where many of its members wish it were.
What is unlikely is, by definition however, not impossible, and “The GOP can win…if it wants to,” as our headline proclaims. Two-thirds of the country, including a majority of Democrats, don’t want President Joe Biden to run again. Bidenflation has drained everyone’s wealth and purchasing power, and he has also frittered away America’s national prestige with his fecklessness and incompetence. He is manifestly unfit for the job. Too old, too.
Several Republican candidates now running could appeal to a broader range of voters than Trump can. They’d also probably beat Biden rather comfortably, although no national election result is a foregone conclusion. Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Gov. Nikki Haley, and Sen. Tim Scott are genuine conservatives with strong records who could be expected to win support from independents sick of misgovernance by radical Democrats and their befuddled figurehead.
Politics editor Jim Antle writes about how Republicans must act strategically and soon to narrow the field if they are to prevent Trump grabbing the nomination with only an unpopular plurality in the early primary states and then going on to lose the general election.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Varad Mehta argues similarly that the GOP must start from where it is in that it cannot expect Gov. Glenn Youngkin or any other deus ex machina to swoop in and rescue it at the last moment. Waiting and hoping for an as-yet undeclared champion to deliver such a miracle merely delays the point at which Republicans focus on the fact that they must proceed from where they are with what they have.
The nominee is going to be Trump or one of the non-Trump candidates already in the field. The former president boasts that the Republican Party has already decided he’s the one. If so, so much the worse for the GOP and the country. Let’s hope we find out to the contrary and don’t, as modern parlance has it, merely “find out.”