House Republicans had a bad day

“It was the last vote for Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the conservative hard-liner who was all but banished from the party after he insisted that its leaders stop spreading lies about the 2020 election and accept that former President Donald Trump lost. He resigned from Congress on Friday, leaving his seat empty for now.

Buck voted “no” on the spending bill, and said he’d have voted “hell no” if possible. But despite his unassailable fiscal conservative credentials, he lost his stature on the right for insisting his party reject the stolen-election claims, reflecting a new litmus test.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/house-republicans-had-bad-day-012737762.html

College-educated voters aren’t saving Nikki Haley — yet

“even as Haley’s support has grown among these types of Republicans, she’s still far from Trump’s levels of support. Instead, Haley has found herself on par with DeSantis, who started the cycle in a much stronger position but has steadily declined. Even among college-educated voters, where Haley has experienced the greatest growth, she’s trailing Trump by about 30 points nationally and is only ahead of DeSantis by about 5.”

https://abcnews.go.com/538/college-educated-voters-arent-saving-nikki-haley/story?id=106236805

Nikki Haley’s “rise” and the Republican flight from reality

“We live in a world where nearly 80 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Donald Trump. These voters are, in many cases, authentic Trumpists: About 70 percent of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen. New research by political scientists Larry Bartels and Nicholas Carnes found that House Republicans who opposed Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election were considerably more likely to lose in a primary or be forced into retirement than Trump-supporting peers.
Trump is not some kind of aberration, a flash in the pan akin to candidates like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in previous cycles. He and — crucially — his worldview are so popular among Republican primary voters that they can’t be beaten by throwing money at someone like Nikki Haley.

That means the 2024 election is not a competition between an ordinary Democrat and an ordinary Republican. It is a choice between an ordinary Democrat and a Republican running on an increasingly open platform of tearing down American democracy. Instead of acknowledging this reality, AFPA has simply chosen to live in a fantasy land where the GOP is still the party of limited government libertarianism — and where Democrats are, implausibly, Trumpism’s mirror image threat to American democracy.

It’s easy to understand the reasons for this flight of fancy. From the point of view of someone who deeply believes in traditional small government conservatism, this election truly is an agonizing choice.

With the exception of free trade, Trump’s last term largely served the super-wealthy’s interests in economic matters — passing a massive regressive tax cut and slashing environmental regulations. But he also poses an existential threat to American democracy, promising a term of instability that could shatter the political calm necessary for the economy to function.

Biden, on the other hand, has worked to bring stability to American democracy. Yet he also has moved to the left on economic matters, in ways that threaten the billionaire vision of an American night-watchman state. In a contest between Trump and Biden, the superrich can’t get what they want the most: political stability paired with a continuing assault on the welfare state.

The support for Haley is a way of avoiding what they see as a terrible choice. It’s a desperation play designed to stave off what they see as certain calamity, an 80-yard Hail Mary thrown to a receiver in sextuple coverage.”

https://www.vox.com/23979441/nikki-haley-afp-koch-republican-billionaire-trump

How Ranked Choice Voting Would Sort the Republican Primary Field

“Trump would still be the runaway favorite. But the process of winnowing away the weaker candidates reveals something interesting about the Republican field: It’s not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who seemingly has the best chance of consolidating the anti-Trump vote. It’s former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

That’s the main takeaway from a unique poll of the primary field released Friday by FairVote, a nonprofit that advocates for the adoption of ranked choice voting. The survey included about 800 Republican primary voters and operated under the principles of ranked choice voting: each participant was asked to rank the GOP field from first to last, and the candidate who finished in last place in each round of vote-counting was eliminated, with their votes reassigned elsewhere depending on the respondents’ preferences.”

“Things get really interesting after former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is eliminated in round nine. The bulk of his support flows to Haley, who surges into second place with 20.3 percent of the total.”

[If you did the ranked choice process until there were only two candidates, the results were: Trump 62.3%; Haley 37.7%]

https://reason.com/2023/10/06/how-ranked-choice-voting-would-sort-the-republican-primary-field/

Trump’s become a runaway train in the GOP primary. Here’s why.

“They’re more conservative than other Republicans. More likely to be men. Less likely to have graduated from college.
And they’re way more confident they’ve made up their minds, even though the first primary or caucus is still four months away.

That’s the coalition former President Donald Trump has assembled in asserting his dominance over the Republican presidential primary.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/16/trump-gop-poll-voting-00116382

The Religious Right’s Grip on the GOP Is Weakening. That’s Working to Trump’s Advantage.

“Back in 2016, Trump ran away with the Republican nomination despite a crowded field of candidates, many of whom had real religious bona fides. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a member of a Southern Baptist Church in Houston, often quoted scripture during his stump speech. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted a Bible verse a day. Yet, despite lack of any religious credibility, Trump won half of the votes of Republicans who attended religious services weekly in 2016, while Cruz only got only 30 percent of their votes and Rubio earned 11 percent.
That was significant, but it would have meant little had he not earned huge support from Republicans who weren’t religious. During the nomination process, two in five Republicans described their religious attendance as “seldom” or “never” according to data from the VOTER Survey, a longitudinal study sponsored by the Democracy Fund that repeatedly interviews thousands of Americans. Among those who said that they never attended religious services, two-thirds were Trump voters in the 2016 Republican primary. Cruz, by contrast, managed just 16 percent of this group. Among those who described their attendance as “seldom,” Trump secured 57 percent of the vote while Cruz only tallied 22 percent.”

“In 2016, 39 percent of all Republican voters attended church less than once a year. In comparison, just 36 percent said that they attended religious services at least once a week.”

“In 2008, 44 percent of Republicans reported that they were in church at least once per week. By 2022, that number had slipped to just 35 percent. In comparison, the share of Democrats who attended weekly only declined five percentage points (23 percent to 18 percent) during the same time period.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/12/republicans-church-trump-00113565

Republican senator who voted to convict Trump speaks out on his third indictment

“Murkowski added that Trump “is innocent until proven guilty and will have his day in court,” and encouraged people to read the indictment “to understand the very serious allegations being made in this case.””