To launch the New Year, Politico Magazine brings us an interview with an outgoing one-term Republican congressman, bearing a message that should be of interest not only to Republicans but to Democrats as well. He's Peter Meijer of Michigan. He was one of the ten Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection of January 6, 2021. He was therefore one of the congress critters Trump was really gunning for in the 2022 Republican primaries.
Trump endorsed a Republican who was an election denier, spreader of conspiracy theories, an anti-feminist and Trump loyalist. The Democrats quietly threw money into the GOP primary at the end, in support of the Trump-backed nominee, figuring he could narrowly win that race but would surely lose the general election.
That was a correct if cynical calculation. Trump's guy won the GOP
primary by 3.6% (4k votes) and then lost the general by 13% (43k votes) to a Dem. So now on his way out the door, Meijer unloads on both Trump and the Dems, and he makes some good points.
Michigan’s Peter Meijer torches Trump, Democratic ‘cynicism’ and won’t rule out another run.
www.politico.com
Wren: You were upset about the Democrats interfering in your primary by boosting your challenger.
Meijer: I don’t know that I’d say upset. The hypocrisy was so transcendent, just the cynicism. I think my rule of thumb is Republicans should probably not pick the person the Democrats want to be the candidate. If the Democratic incumbent is popping a bottle of champagne when they realize who their opponent is going to be, we probably didn’t make the right choice.
Wren: Where do you think the Trump fixation in the Republican Party is headed?
Meijer: I think in a lot of the media there’s such a Trump fixation. He tapped into something that predated him and that will remain after him. In some places, he delivered, but the positive-to-negative ratio started to shift pretty dramatically, giving into some of the most unchecked impulses. We don’t really have the moderating effect of the water cooler in American life, right, where you’re like, ‘I think this thing is important out there.’ I don’t think there’s a race of lizard people who are controlling our lives.
My frustration is [conspiracy theories] lead folks on the right to go down these rabbit holes and chase their own tails. Meanwhile, some of the really serious, severe things that are critical for us to get ready for the future of the country: competing with China, dealing with our deficit, dealing with entitlement reforms. These are not easy things that we can like, manage in bite-sized chunks.
So much of the energy is ultimately expended down avenues that are just hamster wheels. I think that gives Democrats a tangible advantage. We saw that electorally, when they can at least pretend to be speaking to issues and not seem crazy, even if they are unwilling to change their policy outcomes that are not making those issues better. At least rhetorically, they seem to be coming from a more reality-grounded place.
Yeah. And for the Dems, the operative word and caution there is "rhetorically"....
The Dems lucked out in 2022 primarily because some of the R candidates were off the wall crazy. Some of the R congress critters who were run out of town on a rail in 2022 by Donald Trump over "disloyalty" were good partners to Dems on efforts to push bipartisan legislation across the finish line.
The Democrats will not always be so lucky, and if Republicans like Meijer show up to run again (he has not ruled it out), the results in 2024 may swing back to favor reasonable Rs more heavily, just when the Ds will need to be spending more money on the Senate side, where they have to defend 26 seats.
The Dems need to ensure that the Biden administration's key legislation gets implemented and noted as such in the media between now and primary season 2024. The Ds have just about run out the string of talking a good game and not being able to deliver, or not being able to get so-called "left leaning" media to quit pitching controversy on page one, and start writing more feature articles on policy implementation, like in the business pages.
The Republicans might be on the verge of leaving the Trump era behind, but the media remain entranced by the idea that the MAGA-related circus still sells papers. Otherwise how explain, for example, the most misbegotten headline I've seen the WaPo deliver in awhile, the one over yesterday's take on George Santos, where the headline was "
The talented Mr. Santos: A congressman-elect’s unraveling web of deception."
The Dems must be too busy spinning their own take on how they managed to let four blue NY seats in the House flip red in a year when otherwise they did spectacularly well in stemming midterm losses. In the normal course of events that WaPo headline would have been swapped out for something less ludicrous inside of half an hour, just by a few mocking phone calls from administration officials. You can find that mockery in the comments to that piece, but I doubt they're from Biden admin press watchdogs. Maybe they need to quit popping champagne over November results and start reading the newspapers.
And I can't imagine what the Rs make of that headline. One might hope it actually encourages the current RNC to find some George Santos clones and run them in 2024. But somehow I think that Republican voters, at least the ones in NY03, may have turned the page on MAGA nuts before the RNC and the beltway media have done.
We don't know the Republican agenda yet for 2024. They haven't had a platform since 2016 and the ascension of Trump as their standard bearer. But Politico now bothers to interview a Republican official who lost re-election, and not to a Democrat but in the primary, to a wacko member of his own party. There's a message there, for Republicans and "winning" Democrats as well. It's not clear that the 13% winning margin racked up by the Dem who took a Michigan House seat in November 2022 could be replicated in 2024 against a Republican like Meijer instead of the Trump-favored Gibbs. Could be time for Dems to quit celebrating and start trying to ensure they have something for the 2024 show-and-tell that's better than "we almost won the midterms."
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