Monday, February 22, 2021

Greg Sargent in the WaPost 


In short, the big lie that the election was stolen from Trump — and the fact that a lot of Republican voters believe this — is becoming the fake justification for more voter suppression and a redoubled commitment to winning future elections with counter-majoritarian tactics.

All this underscores the stakes of the next two years. Republicans are openly boasting that they will use extreme gerrymanders to recapture the House in 2020, and some experts believe they can do this even if Democrats win the national popular vote.

Losing the House to an increasingly radicalized GOP would go a long way toward crippling the country’s ability to respond to large public problems.

The stakes are incredibly high

This intensifies pressure on Democrats to hold the House, of course, which in turn requires a reckoning with why Democrats lost a dozen House seats in 2020 even as they won the White House and Senate.

When I asked DCCC Chair Maloney how the party will learn from 2020, he promised a “deep” analysis into those losses, “to understand what lessons there are both in terms of where we can do better, but also what worked so well in places like Georgia.”

Maloney noted that this analysis will look at what went wrong with outreach in Latino communities — where Trump and Republicans gained ground — and how to improve communications on digital and social media.

But this state of affairs will also require communicating with the public about what today’s Trump-controlled GOP has become — with a particular emphasis on how its descent renders it incapable of handling big pressing problems facing the country.

“They are divided and under siege from their dangerous elements,” Maloney told me. “If that’s where they continue to take themselves, then I believe they will separate themselves from the voters they need to win.”

“Swing voters in swing districts,” Maloney said, will “not follow the Republican Party to crazytown.”

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