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No tightrope between reality and conspiracy, only a chasm

NPR this morning described Republicans as walking a tightrope between the reality of Trump’s election loss and dangerous conspiracy theories about a stolen election. This weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is anchored on the conspiracy side. A relatively few national Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Meghan McCain have tried to anchor themselves in the hard reality of an election loss. They won’t be at CPAC.

There is not “tightrope” between these two perspectives, only a yawning chasm. The Republican Party is split between them. Most of its committed supporters, the “base,” are on the conspiracy theory side. No more than 30% or so of regular Republican voters think the election wasn’t stolen and that Donald Trump incited the riot at The Capitol January 6.

This is good. If it persists, it will ensure the nomination of nut-jobs like Marjorie Taylor-Green, the Georgia QAnon star, in 2022, for both the House and Senate. Senators like Cruz and Hawley are not much better. Their votes against accepting the Electoral College votes from key states, despite the many court decisions upholding the election results, will haunt them as verdicts are delivered against the rioters over the next two years.

An incumbent president normally suffers a setback in the midterms, but if Biden gets his $1.9 trillion Covid relief package the odds are good for a decent economic recovery by November 2022. The risk will be on the inflation side, which the Federal Reserve knows how to counter. Trump never really took full credit for the vaccines. Even he found it difficult to do so while claiming the pandemic was a hoax. As it happens, they are arriving for most Americans on Biden’s watch, so he will garner the political benefits.

Trump will try to make a come back with his speech Sunday at CPAC. His audience will cheer and he will try to “primary” any Republican candidates who don’t toe his line about the election “steal.” But the country has moved on. Biden has come in for precious little criticism and projects an image of solid thoughtfulness. Even the non-Trumpian Republicans are not signing up to the Covid relief bill, but it is what most of the country wants, including the gradual increase of the minimum wage to $15/hour.

What Trump still has going for him is what he always represented: the anxiety of white people, especially less educated males, about America’s demographic and social changes. People who still believe the election was stolen blame it exclusively on cities with large Black and LatinX populations. Trump and his followers find it hard to accept that those votes count as much as their own. The only solution for them is to block Blacks and LatinX from voting, which is precisely what they are trying to do in many states with legislation aimed to suppress voting.

That is a looming battle for Biden. The Administration and Democrats in Congress need to ensure that the ways in which voting was eased in 2020 because of the epidemic are preserved for 2022. A new voting rights act should include statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Once it is clear to Republicans that they can’t regain power without appealing across racial and ethnic lines, those who stand on the wrong side of the chasm will fade and those Republicans who believe in democracy, no matter the race or national origins of those voting, will prevail. That would be a happy day.