MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday compared GOP politicians at large to “rich kids living off their parents’ largesse,” thanks to the Electoral College, which effectively frees “the Trust Fund Republican Party” from “the hard work of persuading voters.”
As a result, this means they are able to run increasingly “anti-social,” “maladjusted psychopaths” without worrying about actually winning the most number of votes.
Hayes kicked this line of thought off with a look at “how dysfunctional, how malformed the current Republican Party is.”
But Hates didn’t just pop off, he came with actual receipts, starting with Donald Trump, “at 78 years old and degrading before our eyes.”
“You may wonder, like I do, like we all do, I think, how we got here? I think the answer is kind of staring us in the face. The way America’s elections and political institutions are structured provides a massive advantage for Republicans,” he argued.
Hayes noted the inherent unfairness of the U.S. Senate, which as he noted gives Wyoming, with a population fewer than 580,000, the same number of senators as California, which has nearly 40 million people. Kamala Harris, Hayes noted, is almost certainly going to win the popular vote in November regardless of how the actual election shakes out. Trump, for instance, lost the popular vote by 3 million but still became president after narrowly winning a couple of bitterly divided swing states.
“So when you have these two structural advantages, and they’re enormous, right? One house of Congress, the Senate, and the Electoral College, which elects the president, plus an extremely polarized electorate, you wind up with what I like to call the kind of ‘trust fund Republican Party.’ It’s like rich kids living off their parents largesse, who never have to actually, like, get off their duff and work for a living,” Hayes said. “Republicans don’t need to get off the couch and do the hard work of persuading voters to get to 50 plus one, because the Constitution is effectively subsidizing their lifestyle.”
“And that’s how you wind up with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket,” Hayes continued, arguing that because of these advantages, “the Republican Party can run terrible candidates, and it can lose the popular vote by 3 million … and still stumble backwards into power.”
The silver lining, Hayes then noted, is that the same intra-party forces, enabled by the electoral college, that allowed Trump to become so powerful within the GOP also allows “truly awful candidates” in down ballot races, which he said could cost them winnable races.
As examples, he named election denying Arizona senate candidate Kari Lake and Holocaust denying South Carolina senate candidate Mark Robinson, discussing some of their more off-putting behavior and comments at length, especially Robinson. You can watch the video for the full list of weirdo stuff, but spoiler: It involves porn, pizza, and extremist opposition to things many people support.
Robinson, Hayes went on, is an example “of the Republican instinct to nominate these kinds of guys, the most extreme anti-social candidates, and they have to be defeated at the ballot box over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.”
“Think of it this way, Donald Trump could utterly disappear from public, never appear in public once again, from now until election day, still have a pretty good job winning the White House and Republicans flipping the Senate, like a coin flip, maybe. And that makes it all the more important that, again, the country’s true democracy coalition does the hard work of preventing that outcome. Because the reality is, winning a clear majority is not enough,” Hayes said.
The Republican Party, Hayes explained, “has won the popular vote one time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Say it again, only one time since the collapse of the Iron Curtain have Republicans managed a national majority in a presidential election.”
Hayes concluded by saying, “democracy will not be on secure footing in this country until the Republican Party internalizes the lesson that nominating extreme, dangerous, maladjusted psychopaths and hoping the quirks of our elections bail you out is not enough.”
Leave a Reply