Republicans are having the time of their lives and they’ve never felt this way before, at least not since 2010.
The GOP has taken the Senate and now they’re ready to stop historic climate deals, provoke war with Iran and demand maximum deportations.
How’d they do it? They took advantage of massive crises (which have mostly disappeared from the headlines), upped their digital game and added a little voter suppression. Sprinkle all that on $400 million from the Koch brothers’ network and the lowest voter turnout in 72 years and BAM!
You have a GOP wave that’s almost unprecedented in its scope.
So the GOP must be pretty optimistic about 2016.
Republican House candidates got more votes than their opponents in 2014 — millions more as two-thirds of Americans sat home. But their House majority is so solid that they could keep the House of Representatives with a large majority even when Democratic candidates get more votes, as happened in 2012.
The GOP can be almost certain they’ll keep the House until at least 2022, especially with the Democrats’ sudden unpopularity. Why not play the same game with the presidency, which is far less of a lock?
It’s an old idea explored by both parties but never consummated. Now, it’s merely being suggested for consideration by the National Review‘s Jim Geraghty:
Starting in January, Republicans will hold state legislative majorities and the governor’s mansions in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Nevada. If some or all of those states passed laws allocating their electoral votes by districts, all of these purple-to-blue states would allocate their electoral votes in a way that would make it extremely likely for Republicans to win at least half of them. And without half the electoral votes in those states, it would nearly impossible for the Democratic nominee to win.
Under this plan, the Democratic candidate could win Michigan by 9.5 percent — as President Obama did in 2012 — and only win seven electoral votes while whichever Bush the GOP is running wins nine.
Michiganders are used to Republicans controlling our state houses while winning fewer votes and this would just take this sort of undemocratic deflation of a Democratic majority to a national level.
It’s the kind of plan that makes perfect sense when you look at the wack pack of GOP presidential candidates for 2016. It’s been kicking around Michigan’s GOP for years and Governor Snyder is using the same shifty language about it as he did with the anti-union law he helped rush through during the state’s last lame duck session.
If Republicans thought their ideas and candidates were popular, they wouldn’t be making it harder to vote. If they thought that two years of a GOP Congress was going to win over a majority of American voters, they wouldn’t be considering how to swipe the presidency.
Republicans have two undeniable strengths. They recognize that with policies benefit so few people that their only hope is to outspend their opponents and keep the mass majority of left-leaning Americans from voting.
And if that doesn’t work, their last hope is to make sure your vote doesn’t count as much as theirs.
[Map via 270 to Win]
