• The GOP's platform is pretty bad, but I think different people have different concepts of what bad is. The worst element of the platform to me (other than the religious stuff) is some of the language around debt. It's tricky to bridge this gap.
The problem isn't the opposition to the debt, it is the opposition to taxation enforced through Marxist style tactics (Grover Norquist admires Lenin's tactics and has said so), that prevents any kind of action from happening on select areas.
Massive deficits and debts are not the answer to this problem, they are a symptom of the larger failure whereby too many voters are living in a fantasy world regarding how much things cost and the need to pay for them. This is especially true in suburban sprawl where the density is too low to be sustainable and thus require massive debt to constantly prop them up.
• We probably materially disagree, but I am an anti-institutionalist, and my hope is the GOP pivots towards creating parallel institutions, or destroying and *possibly* rebuilding. The church used to be one such bulwark, and it hasn't yet been replaced.
"Possibly" rebuilding.
Fundamentally, while I don't share Hobbes view that people are basically animals that need to be controlled (though in moments of sheer blood curdling rage it is hard not to fall off the wagon and slip into a Monarchist stupor at points), I do believe in the Burkean construct that people are capable of ruling themselves but at the same time are prone to irrational behavior, stupidity and violent excess and thus their power and ability to carry out their worst impulses must be reigned in or checked by "institutional" forces to ensure stability and balance (the only way a system based on freedom can work without collapsing into chaos).
This is why I firmly support, Federalism, Separation of Powers, oppose Executive power, support the Senate as constituted, the unelected and un term limited Supreme Court, judicial review and the Electoral College. I also support representative democracy and thus the concept that Representatives should act as a filter for extreme, criminal, unconstitutional or the like impulses of irrational behavior, especially so for the Senate (Less so for the House, where they should be closest to the people's will).
Deconstructing the institutions, much less without replacing them, is the path to rivers of blood and ultimately revolution, followed in turn by either a counter revolution leading to an authoritarian regime or a totalitarian exponent of said revolution.
1. We will probably disagree on this topic, but a lot of the voters who didn't show up for the GA senate runoffs or flipped back to democrat were the same people who didn't show up for the CA recall or flipped back to democrat. Trump's coalitions are different from the rank-and-file GOP's, and I am reminded of the 2016 election (when Trump and Toomey won PA with different coalitions). I think GA was doomed the second the GOP didn't pass the second round of checks, anyhow.
Trump's coalition is just too narrow and too off putting even to populist sympathizing voters. If you cannot craft a governing majority then you need to re calibrate it to achieve that objective and Trump cannot adjust that way.
2. Obviously Trump has an ego.
At some point, maybe its the loss of a complete governing majority in just four years, maybe it is disappointments in the midterms and all that Biden gets because of it, or maybe it is a second Biden or heaven forbid a Harris term, sooner or later the price for Trump's ego becomes too much to accept. In my opinion, we already crossed that point long ago.
We cannot afford, regardless of your angle ideologically, to spend the next several years operating as a vehicle for Trump to express his grievances both real and imagined. Its time to move on.
5. Different people think Trump made different mistakes.
And that needs to be assessed, the same way it was after 2012. Remember a lot of people pushed their open borders agenda after Romney lost and in 2013 even talk radio was giving a pass to their boy wonder Marco Rubio. People on this forum were telling me that it wasn't 2007, "people don't vote on immigration". "Most Republicans support comprehensive Reform". Then in June 2015 Trump took an escalator ride.
Over the course of the period from 2013 to 2016, the causes of the 2012 defeat as well as the appropriate action were hashed out and decided.
We cannot do that now for risk of "not being Trump's friend anymore".
Like you said, some of these come from the populist angle, some come from the moderate suburban angle. I think as long as Trump or someone else tries straddling the line, the party will be worse for it. Not all suburbanites are Romney-Clinton voters, but the convention was a love letter to them. The GOP performed worse in Oakland and Montgomery counties, but they should focus more on the fact that they didn't perform well enough in Bucks and Macomb. Not saying you disagree, but I think the party needs to consider that "moderate" to one group is different from "moderate" to another.
A love letter from a horse, is still a love letter from a horse. No convention was going to make up for the tangible actions Trump took as President and the issues this caused with voters in those areas.
At the end of the day, I don't think there are many alternatives. Unless and until you basically accept and adopt Bernie Sander's style campaign finance laws, business will always butter the GOP's bread and the GOP will always default to what business wants. This will always limit the appeal to working class voters.
Furthermore, the religious right has no where else to go and thus will remain with the Republicans and try to pull them more socially conservative every primary as a result. This will change slowly as evangelicals decline as a percentage of the vote, but in primaries they will have outsized influence because of low turnout.
Its the same old conundrum back to 2012 that screwed Mitt Romney and prevented him from moving to the center on economics for fear of losing donors, and prevented him from moving to the center on social issues for fear of alienating the base.
Lastly, there is only so much that Republicans can gain from minority voters especially in the current era, where Democrats are by far and way the champions of the "woke crap", Republicans support basic immigration enforcement and business keeps dictating the economic agenda through the donation gravy train.
This kind of locks things in place, so the only way to break this is to recover some of the ground that Trump lost in the suburbs and with college educated whites. That means a balancing act is the only way to win and the key will be who can just just the right number from each group to pull it off. I don't expect it to go back to being more Republican than non-college whites, but I do expect it to be higher than Trump levels.
There is already some evidence of that down ballot where Republicans, particularly in the Midwest outperformed Trump in the suburbs in multiple elections from 2016 to 2020.
Edit: Somehow this post got slice at the end and I didn't catch it a couple of days ago.
