Slate has a very detailed account of the infighting in the Michigan GOP. It's a doozy of a read. Generally speaking, it's fair to assume that the election could come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada...again. Biden looks to be doing well in Wisconsin, at least in part because Wisconsin has started to restrict abortion rights in ways that Michigan and Pennsylvania haven't. Michigan is important because there are quite a lot of Palestinian-Americans in the Dearborn area and Biden is vulnerable there.
So, when you read about the utter chaos and dysfunction in the Michigan GOP - with QAnon nutters and the likewise conspiratorially minded running the show - it makes you wonder about whether the GOP can pull in one direction long enough to once again break the Blue Wall of the Upper Midwest. In fact, it's doubtful that this level of crazed dysfunction is unique to Michigan.
I thought this graph was interesting:
Michelle Smith, another old-guard Michigan GOP veteran, has a simple theory about what’s going on: Trump’s sudden rise and surprising 2016 victory attracted a new cohort of activists who had not previously been politically engaged and did not, on some level, understand that it is possible to lose an election. “I’ve suffered losses before,” Smith told me on the morning of the convention. “A loss is a loss. But they say, ‘I got off my couch—why didn’t we win?’
A lot has been said about how Trump mobilized Karl Rove's "missing white voters" from 2012 into his victory in 2016. It is worth recalling how abnormal his victory was - narrowly eking out wins in traditionally Democratic states because of "her emails", latent misogyny and his ability to pay off Stormy Daniels. These hardcore Trumpists simply don't grok how politics works. It's purity tests all the way down. Winning elections in America is about expanding your coalition, but for the zealots in the GOP, it seems to be about restricting it to the true believers.
This is a description of where they are coming from (bolding is mine):
I asked Hall if she didn’t think there was something a little counterproductive or unusual about putting so much energy, in a presidential election year, into a conflict with a state leader that the presidential nominee helped put in place. She reminded me that she got involved in politics because of election integrity, mask mandates, and the loss of medical freedom, not because of Trump. He’s often described as the leader of a cult of personality. But for some modern Republicans, he appears to be more like a symbol of tribal affinity—a symbol of a deeper allegiance to conspiratorial beliefs, or to beliefs about having been treated unfairly by the rest of society. (The number of new Michigan Republicans who have criminal convictions or fraud accusations in their pasts—for the record, Angela Hall does not have any!—is striking.) “I’m very wary of putting my hope and trust in one person,” McMahan told me. “But I also see that he’s the only candidate that we have right now that could become president. I don’t like that there’s only one person, though—I would love it if we had some backup.”
When you describe the hard core of Trumpism, it really does reflect Trump's personality. It's deeply conspiratorial, it's crime-adjacent, and willfully opposed to things like wearing a mask during a pandemic that killed more Americans in a couple of years than in all the wars in our history combined.
The idea that this is somehow unique to Michigan beggars belief. This is why I do think Biden is going to win - as close as the election seems now. The larger question is what happens if Biden wins - not just whether these self-styled patriots try another January 6th. What happens to the GOP when Trump is in prison or dies?
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