Brace yourself, America. Next year’s midterms have the potential to stock the Republican Party at all levels with rabble-rousers that make the Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Partiers of 2010 look like RINO squishes.
Call it the Kook Caucus.
Elections tend to reflect the political zeitgeist. Some coalesce around a hot policy topic: health care, immigration, jobs, crime. Others are fueled by bigger, broader themes: reforming democracy, reining in Big Government, healing partisan divisions, reviving the American dream.
But under Donald Trump, the Republican Party set aside policy and principles to become a cult of personality. The driving concern of today’s candidates, with precious few exceptions, is to stay in the good graces of their exiled, vindictive leader. This requires embracing the fiction that the election was stolen from Trump and that MAGA loyalists are duty-bound to fight to right this wrong.
That lie has spread like a rash across the Republican base, with a big boost from conservative media. Half to two-thirds of the party’s voters believe that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate. Over half believe that election audits will “probably” or “definitely” reverse the outcome, according to a Morning Consult poll from mid-June. (Spoiler alert: They won’t.) And a poll from early June found that 29% of Republicans consider it at least somewhat likely that Trump will be reinstated as president this year. (Not. Gonna. Happen.)