Must-Read: Norm Ornstein quite a while ago had a good line about why moderate Republicans have never fought to keep their core moderate voters engaged in the party by, for example, threatening to walk to the moderate Democrats if their core voters’ concerns are dissed: “It’s almost like you are in a religion. You look at misbehavior on the part of the leaders of that religion, and you are shocked and dismayed, but you are not leaving your religion. And you are still going to go to church: you just can’t give up something that you held in a lifelong way…. Democrats are just different… don’t have the same discipline…
: Trumpism Is a Natural Consequence of the GOP Refusing to Moderate on Taxes or Immigration: “On one level, yes, Trump is an outlier…
…BuzzFeed’s editor in chief sent a memo to his staff temporarily suspending the conventions of View From Nowhere journalism to say it’s perfectly okay to call Trump a “mendacious racist” because “there’s nothing partisan about accurately describing Donald Trump.”… But as Brian Beutler put it in July, Trump is frightening Republicans in part because he’s ‘showing… what it takes’ to run and win as the party of disaffected white people in an increasingly nonwhite country…. They’ve committed to… a strategy built around the notion that the 2012 election featured a pile of ‘missing’ white voters who could be activated to push the GOP to victory without it needing to do anything to broaden its demographic appeal.
When this idea was initially being debated inside right-of-center circles, the smartest conservative thinkers specifically warned that attempting the ‘missing white voter’ strategy without meaningful gestures of economic moderation would lead to something ugly. There has been no meaningful move to the center on economics, and–as predicted–the results are ugly…