It occurred to me that there might be an opening in the GOP primaries for a candidate whose message is “I am sane” or words to that effect. I do think there remains within the Republican Party a significant segment of people who are not insane, but have simply failed to accept the fact that the Republican Party is now the party of conspiracists and fascists. You know, they inherited their party affiliation from their parents, who inherited it from theirs, and the idea of not being a Republican is simply foreign to them.
No doubt these folks are a minority of registered Republicans, but I think they exist. They may be interested in voting for a candidate who pledges to return the Republican Party to its saner past, though that past is usually said to have been in 2015 when in fact the party went permanently off the rails in 1980.
Of the Republicans whose names have been bandied about as potential candidates, other than the genius, there are two types. The first, represented at the moment by DeSantis and Haley, are people who are dedicated to appealing to the nutjob base. There may be more of that type waiting in the wings. It is quite possible that they, along with the genius, assuming he’s not in prison, will be dividing up the whacko vote.
The other potential candidates, such as Pompeo and Pence, are DOA, so far as I can see. They will be attempting to appear sane while catering to the base, thereby convincing no one. It won’t help that they embrace stuff like getting rid of social security. Sure, the other candidates probably agree with them on those issues, but they would rather concentrate on whining about the threat posed by the microscopic sliver of the population that is trans, even though trans folks pose no threat to anyone on the planet. That’s a continuation of a strategy that has worked for the GOP ever since Nixon. You always have to have a boogie man. The appeal to racists has been constant, either via dog whistle or out and out racism. But it helps to have new boogie men, because some tend to wear out their usefulness. Back in the 2000s it was gays and gay marriages that were vilified, but most people have gotten past that, so now it’s drag queens and trans people.
Okay, I’ve digressed. My point is that none of the potential candidates who are not totally committed to the conspiracists are ready to campaign against them. Someone who campaigned as a person who would both take back the party from the looneys and promise to leave the programs alone that both Republicans (even the looneys) and Democrats rely on, could take a decent percentage of the Republican vote, while the genius and his ilk split the remainder. While the crazies would certainly garner a combined percentage greater than my hypothetical sane candidate, my hypothetical sane candidate might well get a higher percentage of votes than any single nutjob thereby giving them at least a plurality of votes at a convention.
While it’s true that Bill Weld failed miserably in his 2020 attempt to take down Trump, remember that was a one on one battle against an incumbent. Trump was absolutely assured of every whackjob vote.
The question is: is there currently any Republican politician who is both sane and willing to run as the candidate pledged to restore the Republican Party to sanity. I suppose Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger are the names that would come to mind (e.g, example here), but I don’t think either of them would do and I won’t even get into the question of whether both of them are sane. They are both dedicated right wingers that just happen to believe in the democratic process, to the limited extent that they believe the person with the most votes should win, though they also both believe that it’s perfectly acceptable to make sure certain people can’t vote, and that if they do, it follows that their votes should be gerrymandered into insignificance.
So, depending on your point of view, there is no need to either hope or worry that such a candidate will make an appearance. That’s probably all to the good, since if such a person ever got the nomination, they might have a better chance against Biden than any of the other potential candidates.
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