‘It’s almost like insanity’: GOP base continues to lash out over Trump’s defeat

Source: Politico | April 20, 2021 | David Siders

There’s no evidence of election fraud in Georgia. Even so, the party rank and file is fixated on it — even if it costs them in the midterms.

MARIETTA, Ga. — Nowhere has the post-Trump era been more painful for the Republican Party than in Georgia, where Trump loyalists’ war on Republican elected officials is still raging, at great cost.

After the presidential election, lost by Republicans in Georgia for the first time since 1992, the party crumpled in the January Senate runoffs. In the Atlanta suburbs, once a citadel of conservatism, Republicans were blown out.

Yet if that was cause for any introspection, it was not readily apparent as Republicans gathered at county conventions in recent days to chart their course for the midterm elections and the next presidential race in 2024.

In Cobb County, the archetype of the GOP’s suburban erosion, Republican activists over the weekend were still relitigating former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud while drafting resolutions to rebuke the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and other Republican officials for their unwillingness to overturn Trump’s loss. The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has been all but excommunicated.

The once dominant Georgia GOP might be in meltdown in the suburbs, but the rank and file remains obsessed with Trump and the perceived wrongs of the last election.

As party activists vented at their county convention, the chair of the Cobb County Young Republicans, DeAnna Harris, stewed in the parking lot of her local party office.

“Huge mistake,” she said of the hostilities directed at Kemp and the reliving of 2020. “We’ve got to get out of this mindset. It’s almost like insanity.”

To traditionalist Republicans in Georgia, the infighting between fervent Trump supporters and the establishment wing of the party has become increasingly alarming as the midterm elections come into focus. The GOP is desperate to regain its footing in the suburbs after Trump’s collapse there. But it was moderate Republicans and independent voters, not Trump loyalists, who abandoned Trump in November, and the party’s fixation on the former president may only alienate them further, with potentially disastrous consequences for 2022 and beyond.

……..

Mitt Romney had carried Cobb County by nearly 13 percentage points in 2012. Four years later, Trump lost the county to Hillary Clinton by about 2 points, and four years after that, he was clobbered by more than 14 percentage points. Over the span of eight years, it marked a 27-point swing against the Republican nominee.

……..

In Cobb County, the party’s election of a new county chair on Saturday offered a glimpse of the difficult path forward. A three-way race for an open seat, the contest featured one woman, of Puerto Rican descent, who invoked the “image problem” confronting the overwhelmingly white convention attendees in a county where people of color now make up nearly half of the population. Another candidate presented herself as an analytics expert. The third, Salleigh Grubbs, ran on a “Cobb First,” “America First” platform.

One supporter referred to Grubbs, a businesswoman, as “the female version of Donald Trump.”

The result wasn’t even close — Grubbs won in a landslide.

Shaking his head at the back of the room when the outcome became apparent, Shelley Wynter, a conservative talk show host in Atlanta, said, “It’s going to hurt the party. We don’t need a bomb thrower. We need diplomats and ambassadors.”

He said, “It’s hard to go into east Cobb County and talk to suburban voters with a MAGA hat on.”

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  • Consistent #48491

    EVERYDAY #48503

    As long as Trump continues to perpetrate the “stolen election” lie, the cult will continue to believe and spread it around. Even state & local Republican candidates for office will spread the bogus story because, like Trump, they see it as a moneymaker for their political candidates.

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