July 25, 2023 12:02 PM UTC

When Company Loves Misery

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• by: Colorado Pols

[mantra-pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left” width=”60%”]“Can you imagine how mad we’d be at Shad [Murib, the Chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party] if he were attacking sitting Democrats? I would be furious with Shad. I’d be like, ‘What the hell are you doing?'”

  — Gov. Jared Polis on State Republican Party Chairman Dave Williams (via the Get More Smarter podcast)[/mantra-pullquote]

Misery loves company, as the saying goes. For state Republican parties dominated by MAGA extremists, the opposite is also true.

Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams — whose attacks on current Republican elected officials are just one of his many bizarre moves since becoming Chairman in March — is featured today in the conservative National Review in a story about the sad state of Republican parties nationwide.

As Jim Geraghty explains:

The seemingly frozen-in-amber GOP presidential primary is getting most of the attention and headlines, but under the radar, in at least a quartet of key states, the state Republican parties are collapsing — going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms. Even worse for the GOP, these aren’t just any states — Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota all rank as either key swing states or once-purple states that would be tantalizing targets in a good year.

Meanwhile, the Georgia state Republican Party is spending a small fortune on the legal fees of those “alternate” Republican electors from the 2020 presidential election. If Republicans are disappointed with the results of the 2024 elections — for the fourth straight cycle, mind you — a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party or the basic blocking and tackling involved in helping GOP candidates win elections.

We’ve covered at length in this space the current plight of the Colorado Republican Party under Williams — a party that would need to make some drastic improvements just to earn the right to be called a “dumpster fire.” Remember when former President Donald Trump pondered the possibility of using nuclear weapons to bomb hurricanes? The Colorado GOP is the political party equivalent of that idea.

[Side Note: It’s still difficult to fully comprehend the sheer lunacy that was the Trump administration. Future American students will miss test questions about this moment in history because they’ll think, “That can’t possibly be true.”]

Anyway, back to our main story: Colorado Republicans can take some sort of solace while observing the wreckage of their party by understanding that they are not alone. Republican Parties in some of the swingiest states in America are the equivalent of a train derailing into a landfill before being hit with a meteor and getting swallowed up by a sinkhole:

♦ Just like Colorado’s GOP, the Arizona Republican Party is burning money so fast that it might be contributing to a record streak of nearly a month of 110+ degree temperatures in Phoenix.

♦ In Michigan, at least four county Republican parties are fighting openly and firing off lawsuits. That beats Colorado, where earlier this year the State GOP and the El Paso County GOP sued each other. The Michigan GOP is also leaving its longtime office space, which is also something that Colorado Republicans can understand.

♦ We know that the Colorado Republican Party has been struggling to raise money, but at least things aren’t as bad here as they are for the Minnesota Republican Party…which has less than $54 in the bank.

That’s not a typo. We double-checked:

♦ And then there’s the Georgia GOP, which HAS money but is trying really hard to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Similar to Colorado, the Georgia GOP is blowing most of the money it does have on high-priced lawyers. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The Georgia GOP spent more in the first six months of 2023 than it paid out in all of 2022 to represent “alternate” Republican electors targeted amid Fulton County’s probe into whether Donald Trump and his allies committed crimes while trying to overturn his 2020 defeat.

Newly filed campaign disclosures show that the party paid out more than $520,000 in legal expenses in the first six months of 2023. That’s about 75% more than what was paid out in 2022 and five times what the party spent for legal expenses in 2021, according to disclosures.

Now, it is theoretically possible that this is all part of a sinister coordinated plan to lull Democrats into a false sense of security ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election.

More likely, this is a simple case of the combustible mixture of incompetence and idolatry.

As Geraghty surmises for National Review:

When a political party adopts a mindset that prioritizes loyalty to a particular figure — in this case, Donald Trump — over all other traits, eventually it tends to run low on those other traits. We see the consequences of this mentality in the condition of several state Republican parties…[Pols emphasis]

…In these states, we are seeing the self-marginalization of the Republican Party. No outside force came along and forced these state parties to spend money, alienate traditional supporters and donors, pick nasty fights with their own lawmakers, turn loyalty to Trump into the preeminent litmus test on all issues and disputes, and alienate and repel once-persuadable swing voters. No, the people who took over these parties chose this path.

Yes, the pre-Trump Republican Party had its faults, and there’s no getting around that. Perhaps you remember it as being boring, stuffy, and predictable, with the state and local parties largely being run by nice old ladies who liked to wear big hats. But those allegedly boring types also tended to get the basics right: get more money coming in than is going out, pay attention to down-ballot races, and avoid infighting and messy public squabbles. Prudence, diligence, coalition-building, and cooperation — sure, those traits might not quicken your pulse, but they are required to get the job done. You cannot bellow, snarl, table-pound, and rage your way to an effective state or local party organization. [Pols emphasis]

You can’t? Oh. Well, shit.

The modern obsession with all things Trump is a common explanation for why State Parties are in such bad shape. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D-Boulder) made this same argument on the latest episode of the Get More Smarter podcast when discussing the problems that plague the Colorado Republican Party:

“Obviously, the national standard-bearer is part of the problem. It’s challenging because it’s not traditional conservatism. You could obviously fix a [traditional] conservative party.

“It’s a kind of cult of charisma and nationalism. It doesn’t have a cohesive ideology.”

Geraghty has reached a similar conclusion:

The modern, very Trumpy Republican Party attracts certain people and repels certain people. It attracts people with passion, a sense that the fate of the country is at stake, and an eagerness to denounce any Republican official they deem insufficiently devoted to the cause. They also often adamantly insist that the 2020 election was stolen and see conspiracies at work everywhere. This same party repels the old guard and anyone with the old guard’s positive traits. [Pols emphasis]

These state party leaders are not interested in attracting the votes of anyone they deem insufficiently dedicated to the MAGA vision. That includes a lot of suburbanites, white-collar professionals, soccer moms — the kinds of voters who are fine with voting for the likes of Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Georgia governor Brian Kemp (who’s at odds with the leaders of his state’s GOP), Ohio governor Mike DeWine, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. Sometimes you hear this rejection of past Republican voters expressed explicitly, as when Kari Lake declared at a rally shortly before the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!”

A movement driven by a sense of a culture war requires enemies, and a lot of members of the MAGA crowd are perfectly happy to cast the old Republican base of boring, sensible, prudent suburbanites as one of its many enemies. [Pols emphasis]

In Colorado, Williams has been very clear about his vision of a Republican Party that has no patience for anyone who doesn’t own a red MAGA hat. You could argue, in Williams’ defense, that whatever the State GOP has been doing in recent election cycles was also disastrous. This is inarguably true; the next Republican to hold a statewide office in Colorado will be the only Republican holding a statewide office in Colorado.

With that recent history in mind, maybe Williams is right to take a different approach. Why not try more MAGA? What’s the worst that will happen — they won’t win elections?

Of course, losing elections isn’t the bottom of the barrel in this case. For example, Williams is asking the Colorado Republican State Central Committee to vote on Aug. 5 on a proposal to CANCEL the 2024 Republican Primary Election altogether. This leads to an entirely different sort of political question: Is it better to have a bad Republican Party, or no Republican Party whatsoever?

This isn’t one of those interesting philosophical ideas anymore. We might actually find out the answer sometime in the next 18 months.