The Civil War Has Begun.
Republican Party leaders on Wednesday began picking up the pieces of their movement, trying to figure how to put them back together.
The GOP was blindsided Tuesday, but also revealed. The Democrats' ground organization was beyond anything they'd imagined, pulling in new voters with stunning effectiveness. It exposed a major weakness in the Republican approach to winning elections, practically and intellectually.
Some delicious choice cuts below the Doily from Hell:
"I don't think anyone on our side understood or comprehended how good their turnout was going to be," said Henry Barbour, a Republican committee man from Mississippi. "The Democrats do voter registration like a factory, like a business, and Republicans tend to leave it to the blue hairs."
But I thought Republicans were the ones who ran government like a business??
Of course Erick Erickson chimed in:
"Frankly, the fastest-growing demographic in America isn’t going to vote for a party that sounds like that party hates brown people," Erickson said.
Um...no, Erick, the fastest-growing demographic isn't going to vote for a party that DOES hate brown people. Big distinction.
You think "Civil War" is too cliche a metaphor? They certainly don't:
"The battle to retake the Republican Party begins today," railed Richard Viguerie, a veteran of the conservative movement, who called on "the failed Republican leadership" to resign, and then named the leaders of the GOP in the House and Senate, as well as the head of the Republican National Convention.
And as for Citizens United, the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson? Well...
"The billionaire donors I hear are livid," one Republican operative told The Huffington Post. "There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don't know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing."
Update: As
nicejoest pointed out in the comments (and as I pointed out after Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Linda McMahon flushed something like $200 million of their own money to lose CA-Gov, CA-Sen and CT-Sen respectively in 2010), there could be an additional delicious irony at play as well:
What if that $400 million being doled out to printing companies, TV stations, staffers, phone companies for robocalls, production companies, video editors, graphic designers, radio stations, etc throughout the swing states ended up providing the very economic stimulus necessary to improve the local economy to the point that the voters stuck with Obama???
Food for thought, anyway (in fact, I've put this into a graphic suitable for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, etc. if you'd like):