The following diary is based on a comment a bunch of people begged me to make into a diary:
A reader asked (paraphrased): “Why don’t the Never-Trumpers, like Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Joe Wilson, and David Jolly, carry more weight in the GQP-GOP?”
You have to understand the nature of the GQP community to understand that.
1) The GQP-types largely run (administer) the GOP, the national party headquartered in Washington (as the DNC is also headquartered in Washington). They only pay lip service to caring about democracy, lines of authority, how donor money affects policy, or the appearance of a conflict-of-interest, much less the actual thing. The GQP-GOP rank and file assume ‘corruption’ has been happening anyway and its just the ‘elites’ that are clever enough to keep such influence hidden, and now it’s “their turn” to be “just as corrupt” as the elites they’re sure always are.
When TFG was potus, he spent those 4 years quietly putting ‘his people’ in charge of running the national party. These are people closer to Boebert, MTG, Gaetz, and Gohmert, (basically the Freedom Caucus) than Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger, the last 2 openly anti-Trump republicans left in the House Republican caucus.
2) Those GQP-type representatives are almost ALL from gerrymandered districts. Which means those districts are designed to insulate representatives — and the hijacked GOP — from any ‘controversy’ from the outside world about the decisions they make on behalf of their district constituency which, as members of Congress, inevitably have effects far beyond their particular districts. But ONLY district voters count for them, so reps don’t care and don’t listen to the outside world. They have their ‘gang’ of chosen district voters and that’s all that matters to them. *[Yes, we’re empowering political ‘gangsterism’ in America by allowing partisan gerrymandering to remain legal, and that’s bad for Democracy]
The thing to remember about a gerrymandered district is that it is no longer representing a population of people based on a metric of ‘shared resources’, like bridges, roads, water treatment infrastructure, schools, etc, which creates a natural constituency that cares more about how those things are administered than what Party you belong to.
But, when the metric for a district map is ‘partisanship’, or reliability of remaining a partisan no matter what, that map cuts through and destroys those natural constituencies around geographically-shared resources, and replaces them with constituencies of rank partisanship.
Based simply on demographics married to Big Data, which illuminates where partisans reside irrespective of any geographically-shared resources, those partisans have little to say when reality strikes, like the massacre of children in schools, people in malls, or grocery stores, and the call goes out demanding a response from representatives and their voters. It falls on deaf ears in a manufactured constituency designed around hard partisanship instead of empathy, or care, for shared resources and vulnerable members of a community using those resources, like a school, or a library.
Gerrymandering is how we get bizarrely-shaped district maps, that capture voters on the basis of partisanship rather than any proximity to shared resources that need voter input for determining the responsible administration of those resources.
We laugh, lament, and otherwise ridicule these Freedom Caucus dopes running the GQP-GOP, but they’re taken dead seriously within their districts, because they represent people just like them. In fact, gerrymandered districts are usually so rigged as to turn what should be an Election district, and turned it into what can be called a Primary district. Because the election against, say, a token Democrat, no longer matters, the primary has already determined who will defeat the token Democrat, before a single election vote has been cast.
And that’s why non-Trumper, former Republicans, like Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Joe Wilson, and David Jolly don’t carry more weight in the GQP-GOP. It’s not their party anymore. Their conscience has determined that their former Party is so extreme that it no longer speaks to them as a legitimate political party.
They recognize (as we do) that their former Party has been hijacked by unscrupulous gangsters funded by Big Money donors that demanded the Party take advantage of the old gerrymandering loophole that’s always, and uniquely, existed in American democracy, but weaponized with modern technology (see, Thomas Hofeller, redistricting researcher) to turn the ability to gerrymander a district map into a national strategy to use a minority of voters to undermine the national voting majority. They called it “REDMAP Strategy 2010”.
Gerrymandering is legalized cheating of the American electoral infrastructure. It’s like allowing casinos to use marked cards and weighted dice. We pass laws licketysplit to prevent that kind of ‘customer abuse’. But we fail to see the same dynamic at play when it comes to our votes.
The GQP-GOP are still a minority party on the national American political scene, but they’ve managed to artificially elevate enough representatives on the state and federal level into positions of public power through the application of donor Wealth, to change American politics in an undemocratic way. It’s caused the Vandalism of American politics, where the merits of legislation no longer matter. Not even bi-weekly mass shootings by deranged teenagers able to purchase weapons of war can change the partisan extremism spawned by partisan gerrymandering. We are all held hostage to their nihilistic partisanship, which eschews ‘compromise’ for confrontation, which is tacitly accepted by the dark money donors that fund the Republican Party as ‘just politics’. And we’re on the verge of making those undemocratic changes to our politics permanent, unless we stop them in November.