Ever since this morning, political obsessives have been scrambling to find out any bit of information they can on Evan McMullin, a little-known former CIA officer who has decided to run for president on a platform vaguely similar to the one that Mitt Romney ran on in 2012. With no name recognition and no executive experience, there is no chance that McMullin could win. But that isn’t the point of the exercise. The McMullin candidacy, which is being pushed by the remnant of the NeverTrump…
The most important election of the year, apart from the one occurring on November 8, takes place today. That’s when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan goes up against the vice president of a water filtration company, Paul Nehlen, in the first serious primary challenge that Ryan has faced in the 18 years since he was elected to Congress. The odds for Nehlen are long. Of nearly 5,000 primaries held between 1992 and 2012, only 31 challengers toppled the incumbent. Nehlen also seems a little…
In Walt Whitman’s famous poem “Song of Myself,” the unnamed gestalt narrator boasts that he “contains multitudes.” There are few actual people about whom that can be said other than Donald Trump. The billionaire real estate developer has encouraged some of the worst racial and religious characteristics of the American Right but he is also the first truly 21st-century Republican presidential candidate. He made it official in the speech he delivered accepting the GOP’s nomination Thursday night in Cleveland. That dual identity was on display…
Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Who would have believed that when we started this journey on June 16, last year, we — I say we because we are a team — would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican party? And that the Republican Party would get 60 percent more votes than it received eight years ago. Who would have believed it? The Democrats…
But if Trump’s working-class supporters were voting as much for the man as for his message, they were also clearly voting against a party leadership that pays them lip service while ignoring their concerns. Some of these concerns are rooted in racial anxiety, and an older generation’s inevitable fear of change. But many of them are rooted in basic human vulnerability — a very personal exposure to stagnant wages, family breakdown, military quagmires (America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America) and…
The evangelical divide over Trump has been widening for months, but it was only in recent weeks that the pro- and anti-Trump camps definitively split, with an increasing number of conservative evangelicals coming out forcefully against the candidate whom GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called “Cheeto Jesus.” The breaking point came on June 21, when Trump—ironically in an effort to appease the religious right—met with nearly a thousand evangelical leaders and announced a 25-person “evangelical advisory board” to help him reach conservative Christian voters. Almost…
When populism exploded again with the 2008 financial collapse and TARP bailout, the next generation of Republican leaders — led by Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan, the self-named Young Guns — took the Gingrich playbook and ran with it, exploiting and fueling populist anger at the political establishment and the new black president to take back power. The theory was that a deliberate strategy to make all government action in Washington look disastrous, whether by stopping legislation or delegitimizing the process and its…
People form their opinions about a party based on what its platform includes. Political scientists Elizabeth Simas at the University of Houston and Kevin Evans at Florida International University have found that in years that parties adopt particularly conservative platforms, voters tend to see the nominee as more conservative too. “Voters are in fact picking up on the parties’ objective policy positions,” they wrote in a 2011 paper. That means that a platform like this one could have lasting impacts on how the Republican Party…
Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country. […] According to the…
Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famously criticized for his ability to convince others to believe anything he said through a combination of hyperbole and bravado. One Apple employee called the effect a “reality distortion field” in 1981 and the term persisted ever since. It’s quite clear by now that conservative philanthropists and grassroots donors have been living in a reality distortion field as well, the creation of a cadre of political consultants who have failed repeatedly at their jobs and yet manage…