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The Republican Party’s Problem is the Republican Base
Running hard-right MAGA candidates in swing states is a recipe for defeat. But the GOP base loves them.
With inflation near 8% and an unpopular president in the White House, history suggested that Tuesday’s midterm elections were going to be a wipeout for Democrats, as the 1994 and 2010 midterms had been. Instead, as we now know, Democrats did very well by historical standards — while, once all the votes are counted, they will likely have lost control of the House, they still have a good shot at keeping control of the Senate, and they won key governorship and Secretary of State races in swing states, while actually flipping state houses in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The two factors that had the biggest impact on the Democrats’ performance were, it seems clear, candidate quality (which really means that Republicans nominated a surprising number of extremist candidates in potentially winnable races), and abortion rights. And the interesting question going forward is whether the Republican Party can do much to change the dynamics around either of those issues.
I’ll look at abortion in my next post. Here, I’ll focus on the question of candidate quality, where the Republican problem is pretty simple: the GOP base in swing states like…
