The 2020 election is over. It’s a new day with new rules, like totally ignoring how the Republican Party was surging in voter registration all of last year in key states. The Capitol Hill riot that occurred on January 6 is being weaponized by the Left in two ways. Congressional Democrats have impeached Donald Trump again for reportedly inciting a riot, as the president had addressed the Save America rally prior to the mayhem. The second is trying to craft yet another media narrative about how Trump, this incident, and his failed 2020 re-election bid somehow spell the end of the GOP. We’ve seen this movie before. In 2008, it was the end of conservatism as the Obama era began. In two years, the Tea Party wave crashed into D.C. and engulfed the Capitol. Bill Maher is no conservative obviously, but he’s seen this movie too. Watergate was supposed to be the end of the GOP, as was Bush’s flyover of New Orleans. It never happened.
Over 74 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2020, the most votes for any incumbent president ever. These people aren’t going away—we’re not going away. Yet, we’re seeing these stories about the shrinking GOP and voter registration defections popping up (via the Hill):
More than 30,000 voters who had been registered members of the Republican Party have changed their voter registration in the weeks after a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked the Capitol — an issue that led the House to impeach the former president for inciting the violence.
The massive wave of defections is a virtually unprecedented exodus that could spell trouble for a party that is trying to find its way after losing the presidential race and the Senate majority.
It could also represent the tip of a much larger iceberg: The 30,000 who have left the Republican Party reside in just a few states that report voter registration data, and information about voters switching between parties, on a weekly basis.
Voters switching parties is not unheard of, but the data show that in the first weeks of the year, far more Republicans have changed their voter registrations than Democrats. Many voters are changing their affiliation in key swing states that were at the heart of the battle for the White House and control of Congress.
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Almost 6,000 North Carolina voters have dropped their affiliation with the GOP. Nearly 5,000 Arizona voters are no longer registered Republicans. The number of defectors in Colorado stands north of 4,500 in the last few weeks. And 2,300 Maryland Republicans are now either unaffiliated or registered with the Democratic Party.
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In all of those areas, the number of Democrats who left their party is a fraction of the number of Republican defectors.
That’s it. It’s not the best news for sure, but it still pales in comparison to the GOP voter surge last year. Katie wrote about it all. Even NBC News covered it.
Now, after the Capitol riot, the GOP voter bleeding seems to be clotting. In Arizona, the Democrats failed to overtake the GOP. The same happened in Iowa. This coincides with Donald Trump’s recovery in the polls regarding his standing with GOP voters. In fact, a solid chunk of the party wants Trump to be a major force in shaping the party’s future, with Republican women contributing mightily on that front.
The funny thing about voter registration is that people can switch back before the 2022 midterms, especially when the incumbent administration is doling out policies that are abject failures. Second, it’s not always cut and dry. In Western Pennsylvania, it’s a Democrat haven regarding voter registration, but the white working-class folks here and elsewhere across the country have been voting Republican more reliably for years. All it takes is one bad bill to reverse course. And while the midterm season has begun, we still have an eternity before the knives come out in that cycle. A lot can happen and as Democrats figured out in 2020, demography is not destiny. Joe Biden got 84 million votes and the presidency, but also a Congress with a 50-50 Senate and a very slim Democratic majority in the House. Oh, and there were virtually zero gains in the state legislature races across the country. So, let’s pump the brakes here. The odds of eating pavement on predicting GOP doom is very high, as it has been in the past.
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