From nearly a week ago, a fascinating look into California's Republican politics: "RIP, California GOP: Republicans lash out after midterm election debacle."
Said Calif. GOP political consultant Mike Madrid: "I believe that the party has to die before it can be rebuilt. And by die — I mean, completely decimated. And I think Tuesday night was a big step…. We hemorrhaged college-educated Republican voters on Tuesday night. The 'diploma divide' is a very real thing. The smaller it gets, the more monolithic is gets. The whiter it gets. The more populist-nationalist it gets. What you’re seeing in the Republican Party is that it’s the party of white identity politics."
Said a former GOP Assembly leader, Kristin Olsen: "The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time. The Grand Old Party is dead." She "particularly" pointed out "the effects of toxicity of President Trump," noted Politico.
Said former McCain adviser John Weaver, who has worked in the state's politics: "In one fell swoop Trump & Republicans who willingly handcuffed themselves to him have turned Orange County into a GOP wasteland. You want to see the future? Look no further than the demographic death spiral in the place once considered a cornerstone of the party."
Indeed "a growing number of Republicans in the party’s #NeverTrump wing" — did Politico mean the growing #NeverTrump wing? — "insist that a new beginning will rely heavily on a full-throated repudiation of Trump’s caustic divisiveness."
The keenest insight came from Democratic political strategist Darry Sragow: "They have to take down the 'whites only' sign from the clubhouse door. And if they’re willing to allow people who aren’t white into the club, they may be able to recover. I think that the GOP is capable of turning itself around, because it’s a well-established brand. The problem is, the people who manage the party are going to have to be willing to do that. And by definition, they are the opposite of that. They have no interest in that."
The quotes pretty much say it all. I would only add that when reading Politico's account, one may be forgiven for mistaking the story for one regarding the Republican Party nationwide.
Trump's toxicity is a continental phenomenon, and, except for the deep South and a few pockets of whites-only mentality elsewhere, it is the toxicity of the president that is acutely hauling the party to wholesale destruction. The early myth of Trump's 2016 victory as a catharsis of economic anxiety has long been overthrown; it is now universally agreed, based on election analyses, that he won because of racism and what American historians referred to in the 1950s as "status anxiety."
Yet Trump is merely the latest, and most grotesque, manifestation of what has plagued the Republican Party for decades — and ultimately will bring it down. God knows it's trying, but the GOP cannot forever forestall demographic changes in the U.S., and those changes portend the end of the GOP as we have painfully come to know it. As long as the party insists on huckstering its white-populist-nationalist theme, it is doomed.