Good morning. Over the past two weeks, I have received a lot of threats, intimidation, and harassment of my radio stations and advertisers because of my piece on the nutjobs of the right spreading. Your subscription helps keep me from being canceled, and I very much appreciate that.
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Also, perhaps my piece below is not what I should be writing to sell you on a subscription, as I suspect I’m about to piss off a lot of people. But, only paid subscribers can leave a comment. Heh.
Both parties can count on their base. The most loyal Republicans will turn out for anyone with an R beside his name, and the most loyal Democrats will do the same for a D. No party wins with its base alone, though. Most Americans are not party loyalists, and that includes plenty of people who vote in Republican and Democratic primaries. They say that they are Republican or Democrat, but they find their own parties frustrating enough to sometimes opt out. Those voters, along with the independents who only vote in general elections, decide elections.
The parties keep insulting them. Both sides serve up a crap sandwich of a candidate, point across the aisle at the other side’s crap sandwich, and insist you have to eat theirs because the other one is worse. It is no longer a choice between the lesser of two evils. It is a choice between the evils of two lessers, and voters are getting tired of it. No amount of insisting that Jesus Christ is the only flawless candidate is persuasive as we reach new levels of perversity among the candidates.
Republicans scripted this out in 2016. When evangelicals raised concerns about President Trump’s character, the answer from the party faithful was that we were electing a President, not a pastor. Forget the affairs, forget the business dealings, and forget the temperament, because “he fights!” Character was no longer king, and even a lot of pastors who denounced Bill Clinton for his character decided character needed to take a back seat to beating the libs.
Now the bill has come due in Texas. Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the Senate. His own party’s House impeached him for abusing his office. He spent years under a securities fraud indictment that ended with a deal to pay restitution. His wife filed for divorce on biblical grounds. And he has been a lazy campaigner on top of everything else, with abysmal fundraising efforts. Paxton’s main argument against James Talarico is that Talarico is a heretic. That is true. Talarico’s progressive theology sits well outside historic Christianity, and he is wrong on abortion and on the transgender issue. But I thought we were not electing pastors? Christian pastors told us so.
Paxton supporters keep telling Republicans in Texas who do not like Paxton that it is their turn to sit down, shut up, and be loyal because Paxton’s voters showed that loyalty to Cornyn for years. What these Paxton voters have never seemed to grasp is that many of Cornyn’s voters were not loyal to the party, but to the character and principles Paxton rejects. Paxton has alienated those voters and the independents both parties need.
Republicans, including a lot of pastors, have spent a decade telling voters that a candidate’s faith and morals are now beside the point because of what’s at stake, and independent voters in Texas have been listening. Talarico is attacking Paxton for corruption in office. Paxton is attacking Talarico for his religion. Republicans, and pastors, told voters which of those should count, so the voters of Texas are now weighing a heretic in the Senate against a man who used public office for personal gain and swindled people along the way. Republicans are baffled that the race is close. They should not be. After all, Texans aren’t electing a pastor, and corruption is the number two issue on voters’ minds.
The hypocrisy does not stop at the Texas line. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy is struggling in part because some of the same people who lectured the rest of us to hold our noses for President Trump have decided they cannot vote for a brown-skinned Hindu whose positions match their own. Their red line is not corruption or adultery. It is race.
Democrats are no better. They have spent this cycle defending Graham Platner in Maine, Nazi tattoo and all, because the alternative is a Republican. They’re pouring resources into defending a terrorism apologist in Michigan. Just the other day, a prominent progressive said it was no big deal that the Democrat candidate in Alaska uses gay slurs because it is the end of all things if she loses. Both parties have decided that the other side’s awfulness excuses their own.
Both parties, and the most aggressive, bullying corners of their bases, use a tool to keep voters in line. They insist the end is nigh if their side loses. Every election becomes the last election, the republic hangs by a thread, and a vote for anyone else, or for no one at all, is a vote for national ruin. That insistence on the end of all things is how they get voters to act against their own convictions. Then, cycle after cycle, we never get better candidates. We get more corrupt and more terrible ones, and we are told once again that we must vote for them or the republic will fall. I once believed every election was the last election if my side did not win. It was not true then, and it is not true now. The doomsday prophecies are simply how the parties dupe voters into holding their noses for their preferred perversions.
Every time I say something nice about President Trump or defend one of his policies, someone berates me for it. Every time I decline to repeat the Republican talking points about how wonderful everything is, someone else, sometimes right here in the comments, calls me controlled opposition. Meanwhile, as the candidates on both sides grow more corrupt, more adulterous, and more incompetent, the rhetoric grows more shrill. The warnings grow more frantic that the other side is going to cheat to win, and that all hope is lost unless Congress passes the SAVE Act.
None of that shrillness has changed the results. The candidates get more corrupt, and their families get richer once they are in office. The debt keeps growing, the military keeps falling further behind, abortion and the abortion pill keep getting a pass from the party that calls itself pro-life, and our children keep learning less in school. Voters were told they had to trade character for power to stop the decline. Instead, the decision to hand power to moral cretins seems to have sped the decline up, and it is a decline voters keep being told they must choose — two roads to the same hell. Pardon me for thinking a growing number of them will simply opt out of choosing which path to hell they’ll walk.
The decline is not only a matter of character. Republicans are now embracing socialism. The Trump Administration has taken stakes in 30 companies, from Intel to a golden share in U.S. Steel. It has made tariffs a centerpiece of trade policy, which amounts to a backdoor tax increase on every American who buys anything. The President started a trade war with Canada for no good reason right before the midterms. Now the Trump Administration is using our tax dollars to run a recycled 2024 campaign ad for the President, with the disclaimer swapped out to note it is now paid for by you and me. After the 2012 loss, the GOP decided it needed to be an echo of the Democrats to win again, and Donald Trump shattered that narrative. In 2026, Donald Trump’s GOP has decided to be an echo of the Democrats on economics, and voters have consistently told Republicans that an echo can never beat the real thing. The GOP needs to offer voters a real alternative on the economy, not an echo. Pro-life socialism is still socialism.
Every time voters hold their noses for a terrible candidate, the party learns it never has to find a better one. If Paxton wins, Texas Republicans will have no incentive to do better next time. Everyone has a line in the sand. Mine is abortion, and if both candidates are for it, I will not vote for either one. More and more Americans are finding their own lines, and a lot of them are simply going to stay home. I am not telling anyone to sit out an election. I am telling the partisans that people will sit out elections, whether the partisans like it or not.
Voters remember when there were candidates they disagreed with but still respected — people who did not cheat on their wives or profit from their office. Those candidates have been pushed aside, and voters are now told to choose between the freaks and believe the myth that those who came before the freaks were just as bad, but did not get caught. The lesson is for 2028 more than 2026. If either party puts up someone voters may disagree with, but who is not a horrible human being, that candidate will probably win. The party that decides to take character seriously again first is the party that is going to win.
Until then, the parties will keep serving crap sandwiches and keep acting surprised when more and more people simply decide not to eat. Increasingly, those who are opting out are creating the only way to get the nation back on track — a supply of votes there for the taking by advancing character and competence.
