Culture Wars And Seuss Won't Save The GOP
Misunderstanding Politics
One of the things about me is despite the fact that I'm a (probably unhealthily) terminally online idiot is that I'm actually hilariously offline compared to most everyone else on Twitter. This isn't to say I'm better than anyone, I just don't care about anything except like 4 things, and these days unless something is about English soccer, Jordan Spieth, curling, or direct electoral politics, I probably tapped on giving enough of a shit to learn about the dumb controversy of the day. So, I'm being quite honest with you when I say I'm really not sure what happened to Dr Seuss.
My vague understanding of this is that the estate doesn't want to publish a few of his children's books anymore because they're racist and stereotypical in a way that doesn't hold up anymore, and now everyone on the right is losing their shit. Do I have this right? I think so. Do I care enough about this to check a single article about this story? No. So why am I talking about this? Because Erick Erickson has entered the chat, and gave this an electoral politics angle
Holy mother of God this is a bad take. First off, the Seuss story is kind of hard to stack up, because it's a whole lot of people nobody has ever heard of. It's hard for people to really blame Democrats for a story when the main players in a story are some lawyers, and when the names Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, or Chuck Schumer don't ever show up.
The bigger point - that nobody will care about COVID relief when they go to vote - is actually wrong as well, because it's a bill that will literally hand most Americans money. This isn't some esoteric bill to change some regulation to allow for some local government change, this is cash in people's wallets. That won't be forgotten easily. And, if you think people will object to it on some form of fiscal responsibility nonsense, the main four English speaking democracies have all had extremely generous cash transfers from the government to citizens in need, and all four of them are either seeing leaders mostly given the benefit of the doubt on the handling of the pandemic, or saw a President almost win an election that everyone thought was almost unwinnable. Giving people money in a pandemic is good politics.
The broader point Erickson wants to make used to be true, actually - that a full culture war would help the GOP. It was true in 2012 when Mitt Romney won Ross County, Ohio by just over 1%, a county Trump won by over 30% last year. It was true when Republicans used to be the party that really underperformed with cultural conservatives, and had a pool of voters of low-or-no propensity whites to go fish in. Now they've got those voters, and they're starting to - I stress, starting to - run out of those voters to flip. The problem for the GOP is that in doing so, they're bleeding well-off white social liberals.
Erickson's argument would make sense if Gwinnett or Forsyth or Cobb didn't exist, or if they hadn't just lost Maricopa on route to losing Arizona, probably for a while, based on the way demographics work. It's a good strategy when you have Ohio and Iowa as low hanging fruit to go get, and Georgia and Arizona are fairly safe. But now the GOP has their states with white cultural conservatives, and they have control of *checks notes* nothing, federally.
Take a look at these maps, and you'll see the story. Voters used to be more fickle. Now, they're not. The GOP don't have some huge well of support they can go get in rural and regional Wisconsin, but they do have a lot they can lose in the collar. If they go all in on Dr Suess, they will eventually lose the Wisconsin 5th, which is running towards Democrats faster than Packers players run to do the Lambeau Leap for the first time.
The GOP won in 2016 and almost won in 2020 because they managed to stitch together two coalitions by the skin of their teeth - Trumpist cultural conservatives and rich whites. You can hit a sweet spot for a moment or two, but you either stay still in the middle and fail the new voters inspired by the idea of cultural war or you pander to them and you speed up the bleeding in places like Southlake and amongst people who love charity poker games.
Erick Erickson has never understood the GOP's political incentives properly - this is the man whose website Red State called on the GOP Senate to confirm Merrick Garland before the 2016 election because they thought Trump had no chance to win. He has never understood the politics of the people he purports to be representative of. Erickson's a con artist, a grifter, and a fraud, and listening to his political instincts is akin to listening to me try and seduce a woman - a cry for help if one has ever existed.