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With the House GOP in full meltdown, Democrats could offer a way out
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Not in districts where Republicans win by narrow margins. Only in districts that are reliably red. Not every Republican seat is perfectly safe.
Losing Republican votes is more deadly than losing Democrat votes that you never had to begin with.
Just look at the last damn decade man. Literally every moderate Republican has been forced out of office in the last decade. The remaining moderates know what will happen if they fall on the sword like you think.
Its safer for a purple-state Republican to go MAGA than for a purple-state Republican to pretend that any Democrat would vote for them and try to reach out to the left. Losing 10% or 20% of the MAGA voters is suicide, and possibly even puts up a primary challenge to kick you out before you've even reached the main election.
The problem with your analysis is that it fails to take reality into account. A Republican congressman in New York (can't remember his name) specifically called out the extreme end of the party as SpaceGhost pointed out above.
House Republicans in particular are not a monolith and the numbers are very tight.
I think the argument here is that a moderate Republican who works across the aisle gets primaried in his district at the next election by a MAGAt, who wins the primary on the (few) angry Republican voters in a low-turnout Primary. Sure, that MAGAt goes on to be demolished in the General and a Democrat wins that seat, but the end result is the Moderate Republican is kicked out of office.
That's a risk, yes. But some of them have kept their seats because they crossed the aisle and the Democrats in their districts didn't work that hard to unseat them. So no, it's not a foregone conclusion. I'll concede it's becoming more common, but we don't need a lot of Republicans to defy their leadership. Just a handful.
Yep. But asking a congress-critter to put their job at risk by working with the Other Side (tm) is usually a bridge too far. Unless we intend on supporting the aisle-crossing Republicans by, say, voting for them in the primary, it's a bit hard to expect them to risk that cushy job (and all the payola and influence that comes from it) by working with us. I'm HOPING that 6 of them work with us, for sure, but I'm EXPECTING them to not break ranks with their MAGAt colleagues.