A Little Less Conversation
As Donald Trump romps to the Republican nomination, likely becoming the first non-incumbent to sweep every primary contest, there are some brow-raising numbers [or perhaps brow-furrowing, depending] emerging in the results. He received a shade over 50% in Iowa, a shade over 54% in New Hampshire, just under 60% in South Carolina, and a bit under 70% percent last night in Michigan.
Now, if you look at Trump as a non-incumbent, he looks extraordinarily powerful as a candidate. As I said, no non-incumbent has ever swept a primary the way Trump is on track to do. But if you accept the premise that Donald Trump is the incumbent candidate — and what else would you call a candidate who most recently served as president? — those numbers are a disaster for Trump. Just as a point of comparison, if Dean Phillips [or some other insurgent Democrat running against Biden] was pulling between a quarter and 40% of the vote against Joe Biden, Biden would be facing irresistible calls to resign, a la LBJ in 1968. [As it stands, the worst Joe Biden has done thus far is to have a shade over 13% of Democrat primary voters select “Uncommitted” last night in Michigan. For reference, Barack Obama had just under 11% vote Uncommitted in his uncontested 2012 primary, and went on to win the state by nearly 10 points in November.]
Trump’s numbers, meanwhile, reveal a deep division among Republican voters that could indicate a terminal weakness in his general election effort. To wit, Trump won South Carolina by 12 points in the 2020 general election. It’s a redder state than Texas, Florida, or Ohio. The entire South Carolina Republican establishment, including the governor, both senators, and all but one congressman, had endorsed Trump during the primary this year. And even with all of that, and with there being no real question that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee save for an act of God, Nikki Haley still managed to pull a surprising 40% of the vote. Even if we take the exit polls and narrow it down to only self-identified Republicans, Trump “only” wins that group 70-30. It’s beginning to raise the question, how many voters are using Nikki Haley as a vehicle to simply say “I am an erstwhile Republican who will not vote for Donald Trump?” In other words, how many of my people are there?
It’s been a point of contention around the barrel fire in the anti-Trump homeless encampment. There are some, like the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last [and several of his colleagues there], who don’t understand the motivation of anti-Trump Republicans. Why not simply identify as Democrats? The Republican party obviously does not want [y]our input. Why not just leave and join the other team? He often says [quoting from memory], “If you care about democracy, capitalism, a robust foreign policy, the rule of law, and individual liberty, your natural home these days is in the Democratic party.” I don't often disagree with JVL, but I do here. I will readily admit that what could broadly be described as Reaganism — much less Bushism — is unwelcome in the Republican party these days. Even the last remaining “leg of the stool” — opposition to Russian aggression — is a point of division in the current Republican party. As are all the rest of the recent Trumpian heresies against what was considered conservatism until 10 minutes ago — people can’t claim to support democracy while supporting the guy who attempted an autogolpe and/or indulging in crackpot theories about “stolen elections;” or claim to support the rule of law while supporting Mr. “Universal Presidential Immunity” with multiple criminal indictments; or claim to support the free market while being all in on “Tariff Man;” or claim to support a smaller size and scope of government while supporting the guy who talks about using the Insurrection Act to put down protests and “terminating” parts of the Constitution that he finds inconvenient; etc. But that doesn’t automatically mean that the Democrats are now my “natural home.” At least personally, my connection to the Republican party was an ideological one, not a partisan one. The Republican party wasn’t simply “my team,” it was the most convenient vehicle for implementing my preferred policies. Just because they now have, uh, other priorities, let’s say, the Democrats are no closer to being the most convenient vehicle for my preferred policies.
There is some non-zero contingent of voters like me who would prefer to have a sane right-of-center party and are either waiting for a new one to sprout up or for the current Republican party to be sufficiently fumigated of Trumpism [and populism generally]. The question has always been how many of us are there, and how politically relevant are we? I don’t think I’d be so bold as to say it’s the full 25-30 percent of Republicans currently voting for Nikki Haley in the primary, but it’s important to note — despite the fevered conspiracy dreams of Trump voters — Trump actually lost in 2020. If he’s forfeited any of the party since 2020, he has to hope for a massive meltdown from Joe Biden voters to even keep it close.
Just for fun [because I’m so unbelievably cool], I took the 2020 election results by state and plugged them into a spreadsheet to see what it would look like if Trump actually lost various percentages of the Republican vote. Presuming that Biden’s vote stays the same, if Trump actually were to lose 30% of his voters, he would lose 37 states, including Florida, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Indiana, and Mississippi — and lose the electoral college 462-76. I mean, even though I often say that in a self-respecting country Donald Trump would receive zero votes, that’s not a plausible outcome. [Would that it were!] But is it plausible to say that he loses five percent of Republicans relative to Biden? Ten percent? A five percent drop in turnout translates to a shade over a percentage point in results, which would mean that Trump still loses, and worse than in 2020. At 10 percent, he loses Florida. At 15, he also loses Texas.
I’m not a Marxist by any measure, but lately I do find myself becoming more sympathetic to the concept of “heightening the contradictions.” Which is to say, if the GOP is going to split apart, let’s get on with it. I’m a big proponent these days that people should have the courage of their convictions and live up to the things they say. Arizona failed gubernatorial candidate turned soon-to-be failed senate candidate Kari Lake told McCain Republicans — in Arizona! — during her campaign in 2022 to “get the hell out.” So they did. And then she lost. She’s now trying to make nice for her bid for senate, but people rarely go where they’re not wanted. Similarly, if Donald Trump wants “permanently bar” Haley supporters from his coalition, great. If he wants to install a loyalist, election-denying crank at the RNC and put his daughter-in-law in charge of Republican fundraising so that he can use campaign donations to cover his exorbitant legal fees…fine. Let the RNC experience the consequences of their decisions and try to run a national campaign to fund hundreds of candidates with such a glaring [and self-imposed!] disadvantage. Good luck. There should be consequences for a political party becoming so enthralled to a single personality that it prioritizes the good favor of that single personality over, y’know, winning elections; and I’m starting to feel like we should hasten those consequences.
Trump has been successful within the Republican party because he cares so little about it. He cares less about Republicans winning elections than he does his own ego — as we’ve seen in every election since 2016; but especially in, say, the 2020 Georgia senate runoffs and various 2022 senate races. There is also mounting evidence that his supporters would rather lose with Trump [or Trumpist candidates] than win with supposedly “establishment” candidates [as we saw in various 2022 races and are seeing now — Nikki Haley would absolutely demolish Joe Biden; Trump voters simply don’t care]. Which means the only people who actually care about winning elections are the so-called establishment officials, which leads to a power imbalance — or as some have described it, a hostage crisis. It’s a hostage crisis where the party’s electoral prospects are held hostage by a madman using the party for his own personal and financial comfort. Maybe it’s time for those of us who care about a viable Republican party, at least as a vehicle for implementing conservative public policy, to figuratively shoot the hostage. [Which I guess in this metaphor is…ourselves?] If Trump wants to torch the party, fine. Let him. Those of us clinging to a pre-Trump image of conservatism should not exert ourselves to save Republicans from their own poor choices.
Nikki Haley’s go-to criticism of Trump during this primary is that “he’s chaos.” [Or, in her annoyingly passive formulation, “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”] But it’s not simply that Trump is chaos, or that “chaos follows him;” he’s also, to borrow a phrase, a fuckin’ asshole. [I try to keep this PG-13, but sometimes that doesn’t quite capture my exasperation. My apologies.] He says things like “the black people like me” because he got indicted, because in his estimation that’s sort of like being discriminated against. There’s no need to run down the ever-expanding list of examples of how Trump is simply a ghoul of a human being, but we also shouldn’t write it off. Which is to say, if people want to vote for a fuckin’ asshole for president, that’s their prerogative. But they should at least have to grapple with the fact that they so enthusiastically support, well, a fuckin’ asshole.
After Trump won in 2016, those of us who opposed him from the right were told in no uncertain terms how unnecessary, and how few, we were. Trump even called us “human scum.” So, alright. Personally I think 2018, 2020, and 2022 are evidence that we’re actually somewhat of a vital voting bloc. Usually three consecutive losing election cycles is enough to convince a party to abandon its current course, but when the voters convince themselves that, actually, they didn’t lose — it was stolen, it apparently takes a bit longer to convince them. So as I said, let’s just get on with it then. If there needs to be some sort of reckoning, no sense in putting it off.
In Defense of Alabama, Sort Of
Conservative pundit and editor of National Review Ramesh Ponnuru said something relatively early in my politically-formative years that has stuck with me — “I want to engage my opponents’ strongest arguments, not their weakest.” I’ve always tried to follow that advice myself. Any schmuck can knock down a strawman or a caricature, and I have an almost pathological need to give the benefit of the doubt. It’s why I’m never particularly incensed by Twitter randos. In a country of 330 million people, you can likely find at least one example of someone who believes literally anything, and they will profess whatever cockamamie idea on the internet. But one crank is not necessarily indicative of an entire category of people.
So when headlines started blazing across social media last week that “Alabama Supreme Court Declares that Embryos are People” I was skeptical. I mean, even by the low esteem in which I generally hold the state of Alabama, that would be quite something. And of course, since then there’s been enough snickering, scoffing, and mocking that, if we could harness it as energy, could power a city. Memes about using the HOV lane with a cartoon of eggs. Daytime talkshow hosts indignantly noting that embryos can’t be people because they don’t even have organs.
The actual facts of the case are, you might be surprised to learn, somewhat mitigating. It’s not as if the Alabama Supreme Court simply decided on a random Friday, “Y’know what? Embryos are people. Deal with it.” The ruling is related to a series of lawsuits from three couples who had some of their embryos cryogenically frozen at an Alabama fertility clinic. In 2020, a patient at the clinic somehow got into the storage area [I assume just snooping around, not nefariously, but the details are vague], picked up a container [dish?] of frozen embryos, and then dropped the container on the floor when she felt the extreme cold, destroying the embryos. The couples whose embryos they were then sued the clinic for failing to prevent the destruction of their embryos under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which a state constitutional amendment in 2018 expanded to include unborn children. The Supreme Court ruling noted that there is no legislative difference between a frozen embryo and an unborn child, so by that standard the wrongful death statute could apply to the destruction of an embryo. As such, multiple fertility clinics in the state ceased invitro fertilization treatments out of an abundance of caution, given that the treatments themselves can lead to the destruction of embryos, theoretically making the clinics liable for wrongful death.
To me, this seems like a pretty simple case of a legislative blindspot that could be remedied in an afternoon. Everyone knows there’s a difference between the destruction of an embryo as a result of a failed IVF attempt and that of a destruction of an embryo through negligence or even malfeasance [like some doofus poking around a freezer and dropping a container of embryos, either on accident or purposefully].
But it raises an interesting question. Now, I’m biologically literate enough to understand that not every fertilized egg, even those conceived through perfectly natural means, turns into a person. I imagine most people would be shocked if they new how many fertilized eggs simply fail to attach to the uterus. There’s an old argument along these lines from the stem cell research days that went something like “you can tell embryos aren’t people because if there’s a fire at the research facility you wouldn’t start grabbing containers at the expense of living people.” To which I say…yeah fair enough. But embryos aren’t…nothing, right? Which is why all the gags about taking the HOV lane with a carton of eggs strike me as so disingenuous. If we were merely talking about unfertilized eggs, I don’t think anyone would care. [Although now that I think about it, I know several women who have had their eggs extracted and frozen for various reasons. I imagine they would be upset to learn that they were inadvertently destroyed. But that’s a topic for another time.] Nevertheless, these were fertilized eggs that the parents [if that’s the appropriate term] wanted and presumably hoped to grow into living children. And they were deprived of that ability through the actions of another person. It’s not unreasonable to me that they be entitled to some sort of recourse for their loss. I’m not saying the woman who dropped the embryos should be liable for manslaughter, or that the clinic should be liable for wrongful death in the same way they would if a child crawled into the apparently unlocked freezer and froze to death. But…it’s something, isn’t it?
I also don’t have a lot of patience for people who are getting their dress over their head like “Republicans want to ban IVF!” No, IVF is a 90-10 issue, maybe even a 98-2 issue, with the two being crazy-ass Catholics like this clown who apparently think IVF and surrogacy are akin to sexual assault. But even Donald Trump, a man whom I obviously have incredibly little regard, and Tommy Tuberville, quite possibly the dumbest man to ever be a U.S. Senator, have rushed to make clear that they don’t actually object to IVF as a practice.
Personally, I liken it more to the level of, say, my dog. I can intellectually recognize that my dog’s life is worth less [sorry, bud] than human life. If my house was on fire and I had to choose between him and my kids, obviously I’m saving my kids [and spending the next several years in therapy]. But if someone else’s negligence somehow led to the death of my dog, I would become an unstoppable cyclone of fists and knees. [Even though, legally speaking, dogs in that case are generally considered property and not living things.]
All that to say, it’s easy to make memes about egg cartons and wail about the untoward beliefs of a vanishingly tiny minority of Americans. What’s difficult is actually addressing the facts of the case in a compassionate manner, which is why most of us aren’t doing it.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Football coaches
Clue: He was the first coach to win both an NCAA Football Championship and a Super Bowl.
Jimmy Johnson
Today’s clue:
Category: Phrase Origins
Clue: In the 1870s, Geronimo enraged the U.S. govt. by going “off” this, an expression now used to mean “out of control.”
Dispatches from the Homefront
My older daughter was being, well, four, over the weekend and ended up in the dreaded Time Out. [Though if I’m honest, having to sit in a chair by myself for as many minutes as I am years old seems much more like a reward at my age.] Anyway, so she’s in the chair in her room and the rule is that she can’t get up until the timer dings [after four minutes]. But then I notice she’s playing with a doll that she didn’t have before.
“Where’d that doll come from?”
“Uh, I think it was already here.”
“Mmm, I don’t think so. Did you get out of the chair?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Please don’t lie to me, kiddo.”
“…I want to stop talking.”
Never too early to learn lessons about your 5th and 6th amendment rights, I guess.