The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election
This settles it, IMO. Republicanism, not just IMPOTUS' rabid base, is a cult.
The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election
Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.
By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 4, 2020
Can we talk about Never Trump for a minute?
Its various iterations—The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump—made some fine commercials and a lot of noise. They raised a lot of money, especially TLP, which is now going to morph into a multi-platform media network that likely will become a permanent (and very conservative) factor in elections going forward. Starting from scratch, TLP raised $60 million. Republicans Against Trump got started late, but they hoovered up $10 million. This is nice work if you can get it.
The problem is that, despite their fat bank accounts and some terrific publicity, these people didn't materially affect the presidential race at all. Their entertaining commercials got great run, but they didn't move 10 votes. They certainly didn't materially affect the Republican side. What data we have at the moment indicates that the president* got more of the Republican vote this time than he did in 2016. He certainly got more votes generally than he did four years ago. Take them all in all, and Never Trump is about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. The problem for all the rest of us is that they should be.
Never Trump should have been a haven for Republicans and conservatives revolted by the notion that their party and the government had been appropriated by a vulgar talking yam. As should be obvious, there just aren't that many people like that. Most of the Never Trump movement is on salary to the Never Trump movement. Everybody else is completely With The Program. The president* has utterly subsumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular and, win or lose, he's not going to go anywhere.
If Joe Biden becomes president, this president* will be the center of resistance to him. He's already established among his followers that any result that produces President Biden is prima facie illegitimate. That feeling will be set in concrete among the president*'s followers by the turn of the New Year. There is no viable counterweight to him within or without the party. Unless he ends up destitute and/or in jail—and neither one is necessarily a longshot—he's going to continue to barge into Republican politics and scatter everything like monkey poo. A well-financed, clever opposition should be viable within the Republican infrastructure and should flourish there, if the Never Trump propaganda is to be believed. Taking the party back should be a saleable pitch.
But, outside of glossy magazines and network green rooms, Never Trump has no constituency, and it certainly isn't going to build one based on Tuesday's results. Behind this president*, the Republicans held their Senate majority and increased their share of the House. As for the president* himself, if he loses, it will be by a sufficiently narrow margin to leave his outsized influence intact. There's not enough snark in the world to prevent that.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34576561/never-trump-republicans-lincoln-project-2020/
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Most of us know old-school, decent, McCain-style Republicans. While I can imagine them not voting for Hillary, I find it very hard to believe that at least 10% of them wouldn't vote for Biden.
And as energized as Democrats were, and with the platform principles of the Democratic party being more popular than the GOP's (even if they had any other than "what Trump says"
, I just don't believe the race could have been this close. Not after a quarter of a million people dead and millions out of work.
in the history of this nation, something moved some votes (in addition to the abject insanity of the past 4 years). It will be interesting to see the final popular vote total.
I doubt that Biden ads even got airplay on Faux, and if they did, nobody was listening.
But the TLP ads were different, they could fool people into listening because they didn't know if they were "for" Chump or against him. People had to follow the train of thought to find out, and that's the trick - that's how you get them on your side for 30 seconds.
Also they got a lot of airplay on Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social media as well. Maybe it's all we needed to get some of those Faux voters who wouldn't have listened to Joe Biden or anyone else.
