2024 Rundown: Deflect, Project, Obstruct

The Republican Election Strategy

2024 Rundown is a series of articles where I discuss the ongoing political strategies playing out during this election year. The goal is to explain why different issues are being handled the way they are and why politicians and pundits are focusing on specific issues or phrases.

We start with the general GOP election strategy.

Republicans are stuck with Trump, at least for the moment. Even if Trump is overtaken as the party frontrunner, the GOP is still working with Trump/MAGA voters. Not only are MAGA voters willing to unseat Republicans who aren’t following Trump’s playbook even if it means reducing the party’s power in Washington, they’ve also chased away other voters who don’t share their extreme views.

This puts the Republican party in a tricky situation. They feel the need to keep their current extremist base happy, but they can’t win majorities or the White House without moderate and independent votes too. 

Trump and the MAGA controlled House of Representatives do not have much of a record to campaign on.

Trump increased the national debt by 40% in a single term. US world standing plummeted while he was in office. Over 200,000 jobs were offshored under Trump and he left office with fewer American jobs than when he began, millions less. Even crime is a problem for Trump’s record, murders had a tragically historic rise in 2020

Under Biden, the Stock markets are higher, oil production is higher, GDP growth rate is higher, crime is down nationwide, infrastructure projects are happening across the country, all of Trump’s lost jobs have been replaced and millions more created, unemployment has been continually under 4%, manufacturing jobs are returning to the US, even the economy has turned back around with inflation down to normal levels and prices coming back down. 

Then there is the House of Representatives which is the least productive House in over 50 years having held over 700 votes but passing only 27 laws, several of which were trivial things such as a ceremonial renaming. Most major laws passed had more Democrat votes than Republican, despite the Republican majority.

The GOP simply cannot campaign on actual records. Nor can they claim that things were better when Trump was in office or when Republicans have a majority.

Obstruction:

This is why Republicans, especially far right Republicans, have been trying to obstruct all Democrat legislation. Calls to shutdown the government for “fiscal responsibility” are routine since they took the House majority in 2022. The US narrowly avoided a shutdown during debt ceiling negotiations and as a result, MAGA Republicans ousted then Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his position in retaliation for working out a deal with the Democrats to keep the country operating.

They sought another shutdown with the ongoing budget negotiations. It is still a possibility as there is no finished budget despite the deadline having been October 1st of last year. And there is a new call for shutdowns in regard to what they claim is President Biden “not upholding border and immigration laws” despite the fact that they cannot name a single law he isn’t upholding.

Democrats worked with Senate Republicans to try and come to bipartisan immigration reform before the holiday break, and during the holiday break members of Biden’s administration met with Mexican leadership to see if they could come to any agreements between the two nations to improve the immigration situation. Far right Republicans decried both of these efforts as it undermined their strategy to stall the issue for as long as possible.

Projection:

Another key strategy of this year will be projecting the sins of the Republican party onto the Democrats in order to downplay the crimes and anti-democratic actions of the GOP.

Several Congressional Republicans have admitted that the Biden impeachment inquiry not only lacks any evidence, but it also doesn’t need any because it is simply to distract from the fact that Trump was impeached twice. They want to downplay any discussion of impeachments against Trump.

That is also why numerous Republicans are referring to the Southern border as treason, peaceful protests as insurrections, and saying anything they can think of is evidence of Biden leading a fascist authoritarian Banana Republic government. All of this is to downplay the seriousness of these terms so that as they show up during Trump’s numerous trials, they don’t hit as hard since it will seem like both sides are doing horrible things despite it being only Trump and his associates committing crimes of this severity.

For the same reason, they routinely declare that migrants crossing the border is a national security risk. The real national security risk is all of the national security documents that Trump took when he left office. Trump then lied about them, hid them, showed them to people who lacked clearance, and left them in the bathroom of a building that Chinese spies are known to have had access to.

It is a despicable strategy but in all honesty, Republicans don’t have any other option when their leading Presidential candidate has been found in a court of law to be a rapist and a fraud, is facing 92 serious criminal charges, and attempted to overturn a fair Presidential election before riling up an insurrectionist mob to attack the Capitol building. The only option they have is to somehow make the litany of crimes and charges seem like it isn’t a big deal.

Deflection:

Projection isn’t enough on its own, Republicans also have to deflect from their crimes, lack of productivity, and the fact that they have no party platform besides “Trump is great”.

The new narrative the far right is using is that the hundreds of insurrectionists who have been found guilty and sent to jail, aren’t bad people, they are in fact political prisoners. Or as Representative Stefanik said on Meet the Press today, they’re “hostages”. A bold lie at a time when there are actual American hostages being held in Gaza.

Then there is the ongoing narrative that Trump isn’t actually a criminal despite all of the evidence and that over a dozen of his associates have already been found guilty of crimes. No, Trump is a victim from the “weaponized justice system”. There is of course no basis for that argument but repeating a lie often enough does get some people to believe it.

And that least productive House of Representatives of our lifetime? That isn’t the fault of Republicans, it is the fault of the Democrats. That is of course despite the fact that Republicans never need a single Democrat vote to pass a bill in the House. They even claim it is Democrats who unseated Kevin McCarthy from Speaker despite the fact that it was Republican Matt Gaetz that initiated the vote and that it required Republican votes to pass since again, Republicans have the majority in the House.

This highlights another part of the Republican strategy. They will pass a bill in the House such as H.R.2 which not only isn’t a serious bill to solve the issues on the Southern border, it has no chance of passing the Senate. 

Republicans do this so they can say that they are the ones trying to solve the border and that Democrats refuse to. This is of course not the truth of the situation.

Republicans know that the inner workings of government are too obscure for many voters to understand. Instead they hold up a bill they passed and say the Senate Democrats refuse to solve the issue.

Immigration isn’t the only issue that is being approached this way. The Republican’s so-called Parent’s Bill of Rights was a bill that passed the House but was dead on arrival for the Senate. It has never become law. But you will see numerous Republicans list it when discussing what they’ve accomplished in their current term. Again, they realize most voters don’t track all of the aspects of a bill so when they hear that a bill passed, they think that means it is now in effect when it isn’t and never will be.

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These are the general strategies you’ll see play out over the course of 2024. It will be tiring. There will be endless lies and misinformation. Despite how apparent this strategy will be and how unfavorable most of the Republican positions are to the majority of Americans, 10s of millions of people will still line up to vote for those who are corrupt out of a misguided loyalty that puts party above country.

The best thing we can do is combat the misinformation with facts, and do so in a way that destroys the facade of their political campaigns.