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Swing voters? We don't need no stinking swing voters!


As I was happily relaxing on my staycation yesterday, I came across this tweet:
Hogan made this statement in reference to Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

Now, I don't much care what Larry Hogan has to say about DeSantis. We all know that if DeSantis won the GOP nomination in 2024, Hogan would click his heels, give the stiff-armed salute, and vote for him. I mean, he's not Donald Trump, praise Jesus pass the butter.

But what interested me what this chyron.

The fact that GOP doesn't have a larger margin of seats in the House, and Democrats have fifty-one seats in the Senate, are down to this disastrous relationship with swing voters. Swing voters are by definition wishy-washy. They tend to lean Republican. But they're not crazy. Lazy? Sure. But not insane. And if the GOP is represented by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, they're not going to hand power to them. They like having the nation's debts paid, and they're counting on Medicare and Social Security for their later years.

However, this begs the question: Why is a major political party so inept at appealing to persuadable voters? Until the GOP collapses, it is a major party in the United States along with the Democratic Party. Libertarians and Greens have no pretensions of being major parties of government any time soon. Even if we had a proportional system of voting they would be nowhere near the levers of power. Republicans are. And yet, they eked out a mere five-seat majority in the House in an environment tailor-made for an opposition party, and failed utterly in the Senate. Why?

Well, the answer is quite simple, falling into Occam's razor: Republicans don't care about swing voters. The party has moved so far to the right that it holds swing voters in contempt. If voters can't see the righteousness of their cause, then why waste time reaching them?

Of course, the obvious problem with that political strategy is that it results in what happened in 2022: An election which should have been a cakewalk for the GOP turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is beholden to the extremist elements of his caucus for his so-called power. Democrats are in the catbird's seat for 2024. Nothing of benefit will be done over the next two years; but we will see Hunter Biden's dick pics, and flirt with default on the national debt, further cementing the party as an unserious political actor which should never be within sniffing distance of power. 

The Democratic Party is a broad coalition. It ranges from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left to Henry Cuellar on the right. But it does share certain core philosophies. And the major philosophy of the party is a belief that government can make the lives of its citizens better.

One can't say that about the Republicans. The party offers no positive program. It is a party of grievance and complaint. This is most evident in it decrying the "double standard" the FBI is showing in its handling of President Joe Biden's secret document "scandal" as opposed to Trump's. It is still in thrall to Trump's voters, fearing that if he goes third party it will be decimated in 2024. (Spoiler: Trump will go third party, and we'll see Democratic majorities the like we haven't seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the 1930s.) Appealing to middle-of-the-road swing voters would mean alienating the Trump base. And the Trump base shows up to vote in primaries, threatening those who don't toe the line. 

After every defeat, the GOP commissions reports to figure out where they went wrong. And then they ignore the obvious: the party is too radical, and too devoted to its radical base. It can eke out a "victory" as in 2022. But that's small consolation. If it had shunned Trump in 2016, it would be in a much stronger position right now. But the Trump insurrection has undone the party, and it has simply given into him. 

Why has the Republican Party done such an awful job of appealing to swing voters? Because as it is currently constructed, it cannot reach out to them. It cannot moderate its political philosophy. And as long as this state of affairs obtains, it will continue to struggle appealing to these voters, who might be amenable to the message of a traditional GOP. This is our chance to split the GOP coalition, and win power from that discord.

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