The GOP’s Pink Sprinkle
Republican delusions of a ‘Red Wave’ roaring across the electoral shore last fall and an impending GOP tsunami in 2024 are far more symptomatic of the party’s terminal condition than McCarthy’s humiliation in the House
By Mark Cromer
At the end of a long and historic week of political dramedy, Kevin McCarthy got exactly what he deserves: the Speaker of the House’s gavel and with it the necrophilic opportunity to lord over the decomposing carcass of the Republican Party’s corrupt caucus.
From almost the moment he was elected as a congressman from California nearly two decades ago, McCarthy has been chasing the Speaker’s gavel with all the luminous-eyed lust of Gollum pining for his ‘precious’ even as the Democrats remained focused on breeding their legions of Orcs throughout their hives in high-priced universities and high-density housing projects.
As a jubilant McCarthy grasped the gavel in visible ecstasy, it’s hard to say whether he sensed the imminence of a Pompei-grade volcanic political calamity that will soon annihilate the GOP and was merely savoring his pyrrhic triumph in the growing shadow of oblivion or whether his desire for power has polluted his perceptiveness to the point of self-deception.
Regardless, the Republican Party now rests in its national deathbed.
I was reminded of this on the early morning of Tuesday, November 8, 2022, as I found myself aboard American Airlines Flight 539 from LAX to Austin, slouching comfortably in First Class and mulling over the political landscape set at full boil more than 30,000-feet below me and pondering the looming fate of the Republican Party.
Even over a steady stream of vodka tonics and going 500 mph at jet stream altitude (figuratively and literally), it was not difficult to discern what was awaiting the GOP as Election Day got underway. I’ve been writing for years about the Republican leadership’s total commitment to ritualistic self-dealing as its sabotage of a nation crescendos to its inevitable implosion and 2022 provided yet another CAT scan that captured the accelerating spread of the malignancy that will soon kill the party.
While I was heading back to the Lone Star State for another leisurely road trip with my fiancée that would take us from Austin’s fabled bar-hopping scene down to San Antonio where we’d remember the Alamo and take in the city’s Riverwalk canals before heading back to Dallas on the eve of the 59th anniversary of JFK’s assassination for Bloody Mary mornings over steak and frittes at our favorite rustic roadhouse—Lee Harvey’s—we were intermittently treated to the news flashes that the GOP’s forecasted electoral hurricane hadn’t just lost category strength but had failed to make landfall at all.
A misfire purportedly of staggering proportions, it couldn’t have happened to a better political party.
As a former activist Democrat who left the party after a quarter of a century in 2006 (re-registering as ‘Decline to State’) in bitter protest over its policies on mass immigration and crime along with its betrayal of the working class, I take no particular pleasure now in writing this but the hard truth must be noted: Democrats ultimately had nothing to worry about whatsoever regardless of the results of the 2022 midterm elections—even had they lost both chambers of Congress in a decisive rout.
At this late stage, even a significant loss last fall would have been but a speedbump for the one-party rule the Democrats are poised to seize, and not much of one at that.
The Republican Party as a politically viable and relevant national entity is simply toast, one that will see its charred and smoking remnant ejected from the electoral Cuisinart almost certainly by the end of this decade. The GOP’s charade of posing as an enterprise dedicated to the national interest is coming to an end even as the Democrats’ long-game strategy is on the cusp of delivering one-party rule over a post-American ‘United States,’ handing to the psychotic progressive cultists what will be, operationally speaking, a national rendition of California.
By 2028 or perhaps 2032 at the outside, the GOP’s ability to win the White House will have been extinguished.
In an essay I penned in 2018 entitled GOP Finis, I noted that for all their caterwauling about the electoral college—the constitutional mechanism which has allowed the GOP to legitimately win the White House despite losing the popular vote for decades—the Democrats are quickly approaching the day when they will go to bed on the night before election day with more than 270 electoral votes safely in the bag and popular vote margins in the eight-digit category.
The single most revealing symptom of the looming fate of the Republicans was not their prospects last November, as it wouldn’t have mattered whether they rolled up higher than expected margins in both chambers by overperforming in several battleground states, clinching some tight races as well as pulling off some upsets in others where they had trailed outside the polling margin of error.
The GOP in fact did just that in a variety of congressional races around the country, notably flipping several House seats in New York that proved crucial to the Republicans retaking the lower chamber.
But even if 2022 had been ‘Surf’s Up!’ for the GOP, the resulting euphoria the Republicans would have experienced would be no more relevant than a dying man’s last and perhaps unexpected garden stroll in the afternoon sun amid his honeyed recollection of glory days gone by—a sweet but only momentary respite from his approaching date with destiny.
The fundamentals facing the Republicans in 2023 remain unchanged: tectonic demographic shifts fuel by the relentless mass immigration the party has long abetted, education-turned-indoctrination that the party has long ignored and governed by a national GOP leadership that remains hopelessly corrupt to its soulless core. Balloting mechanics such as early voting that begins months before election day, bulk-scale vote collection schemes known as ‘ballot harvesting,’ vote-by-mail and poll policies of ‘No ID Required’ will also all play their vital roles in finishing off the Republican Party.
The political death mark on the GOP was clearly visible in the struggle it faced as the final days of the 2022 campaign came to a close, in races where—in the former country that was America at any rate—the Republicans should have been coasting to double-digit, floor-wiping and clock-cleaning victories. Yet as a result of the GOP’s very own and decades-long calculated malfeasance, to say nothing of the high treason, the country where Republicans would have waltzed to electoral victory against the ghoulish gallery of candidates fielded by the Democrats simply no longer exists.
Their nervous bravado aside during the final days of Election 2022, the GOP’s leadership and the amen chorus among its water boys across media platforms clearly seemed to sense this as from Nevada to New Hampshire, from Arizona to Ohio and from Pennsylvania to Florida, the Republicans manically toggled from giddiness about an impending ‘Red Wave’ to spastic bouts of sudden panic over the political doom that has indeed crested their horizon and now fast approaches.
While the GOP’s systemic organ failure was evident across the nation, the depth and acceleration of the party’s cirrhosis was perhaps most obvious in Pennsylvania, where former television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz faced off against Democrat John Fetterman; one of the most bizarre candidates in recent major party history. By today’s Democratic Party standards, Fetterman is simply a grassroots American everyman who speaks the common tongue and proudly dons the attire of the working class.
But in actual reality—meaning measured by any sane metric and clear-eyed, fact-based analysis—Fetterman is a psychotic progressive running a campaign rooted in releasing as many convicted violent criminals as possible (two convicted killers worked on Fetterman’s campaign staff), accelerating mass migration into what remains of the country, expanding access to abortion-at-birth services, expanding codification of anti-white government policies and ensuring that early-life castrations and radical mastectomies are prioritized as ‘healthcare’ among K-12 student services.
The cherry on top of all of that ugly reality is that Fetterman suffered a massive stroke in May of last year that by his own account nearly killed him and by all accounts left him with devastating brain damage. And it was a near-fatal brain hemorrhage that exploded in Fetterman’s considerable cranium before the Pennsylvania primary, which means that Democratic voters knew that Fetterman had suffered a traumatic brain injury and cast their ballots for him regardless.
A late-breaking survey by Marist Poll reported that an overwhelming number of the hundreds of thousands of early voters (58%) had cast their ballots for Fetterman and that Oz also trailed among ‘definite’ election day voters by as much as six-percent. Thus, even following the sole debate in which Fetterman literally blurted gibberish for an hour into the camera—he still led in the polls.
In fact, for most of the entire election cycle, Fetterman was beating ‘Dr. Oz’ across most relevant polling data.
As a second-generation native Californian now in my late 50s, I wasn’t terribly shocked by such utter madness.
I remember all too well legendary Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn suffering a massive stroke that put him in a wheelchair and left him clearly cognitively impaired but never took him out of office during the final years of his four-decade reign. And I also vividly recall Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, a law enforcement legend that I interviewed as a newspaper journalist on the crime beat, who actually died during his last reelection campaign and yet still managed to roll up more than a third of the vote in an era long before so-called ‘early voting.’
On election day in November 1998, one out of every three voters in Los Angeles County cast their ballots for a dead man.
Accordingly, a cognitively impaired psychotic progressive triumphing in a pivotal Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race should probably not be that much of a head-scratcher considering today’s sociopolitical landscape, but either way it undeniably is an auger of the electoral fate now looming in front of the Republicans.
All over the country races with very similar dynamics unfolded for seats in the Senate, the House and for the statehouses.
In New York, appointed Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul rolled to a commanding win with nearly a 6-percent margin over insurgent Republican candidate Lee Zeldin, who had gone all-in on a campaign centered on the horrifying mushroom cloud of crime that has billowed throughout the Empire State. While Hochul’s once double-digit lead clearly evaporated, the fact is that despite her dismissively blasé reaction to the daily carnage on the streets of Gotham, throughout upstate and indeed all over New York, she was handily returned to her digs in Albany.
While the GOP loves to hearken back to the days of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and George Pataki, well, just like America writ large, that New York simply no longer exists beyond fading glimpses to be had of it here and there.
As a writer who started riding the NYC subway in the mid-1980s during the era of Ed Koch (and right around the time Bernie Goetz finally did what so many other fearful riders had wanted to do to the professional thugs that had long prowled the urban rail line with impunity), in later years I experienced firsthand what Giuliani, Bloomberg and Pataki managed to accomplish—both underground and on the streets—by effectively unleashing law enforcement and getting deadly serious about hammering criminals at every level.
But as 2022 limped to a close in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams had taken up residence at Gracie Mansion after the NYPD veteran took the city’s reins at the beginning of the year to much acclaim about a native son and law enforcement professional assuming the captain’s chair. Yet for all the hoopla and at least briefly high hopes, crime under Adams opening mayoral shift has spiraled even more violently out of control.
And the good mayor has declined to take the common sense measures clearly necessary if there is to be even a glimmer of hope left of restoring safety and order in New York: flood the zone with cops, dramatically expand NYPD’s recently restored undercover violent crime task force and deploy them in strength once more with orders to conduct the ‘stop and frisk’ dragnet sweeps that proved so devastatingly effective against career criminals in the 1990s and 2000s and, yes, return to a policy of significant incarceration resulting from an absolute commitment to hunt, confront and remove predators from the streets.
There’s no other way to state the obvious: mass incarceration of criminals works.
The proof of concept for this formula was indisputably established during the 1990s following a quarter-century of surging violent crime and it was ultimately embraced by both sides of the political aisle and by aggressive prosecutors and police chiefs throughout jurisdictions large and small. But the long-fought and hard-earned success in restoring safety and sanity to America’s streets has been thoroughly gutted by the psychotic progressives who, working under the guise of the ‘pro-safety’ Democrats, have erased the criminal justice system faster than they burned down Title IX in a transgendered torchlight orgy of dysphoria or eliminated the southern border to accelerate the demographic relandscaping of America.
Hochul’s prevailing at the polls signifies with absolute finality that a majority of New York’s voters are either simply impervious to the savage reality that now surrounds them and/or are happily intent to be devoured by the unfolding violent chaos—meaning they are indeed Democrats to the death.
Likewise, in California voters returned Governor Gavin Newsom to another term with nearly 60-percent of ballots cast, a margin of victory of more than 2 million ballots. Simply put, despite years of civic collapse in the once golden state, where like New York violent crime has become so wildly commonplace the iPhone and security camera daily captures of it serve as more of a form of obscene entertainment than public alarm bell, voters proudly returned Alta California’s El Jefe to his roost in the statehouse where he can now really get down to business.
As the legions of wild-eyed homeless berserkers that now garrison the state’s collapsing major cities move ever deeper into the suburbs and even into rural areas on expeditions of conquest coordinated by psychotic progressives both locally and in Sacramento via a battleplan disguised as zoning ordinance overhauls and celebrated with their Khmer Rouge chants of ‘Density is Diversity!’ and ‘Community Character is MAGA!’, Newsom’s reign is so secure that he could appear on the balcony of the statehouse sporting aviator shades and wearing a Gaddafi-grade military uniform accentuated with the high-polish brass of a bandolier and toting a gold-plated AK-47 that had been a reelection gift from the Sinaloa Cartel and not worry about political consequences any more dire than some fashion snark from the cadaver of the Los Angeles Times.
Newsom’s November triumph came just a year after he survived a recall effort by effectively the same margin. Two back-to-back efforts to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón—who has served as a psychotic progressive point man in spreading a terror campaign of crime across the county—failed to even reach the ballot in a county where looting has become a popular sport among the fellas and criminals stroll store aisles wielding pickaxes and shouting death threats to any who would dare object let alone intervene.
This is what one-party rule looks like. There is no brake. There is no bottom.
This dynamic has been repeated in races all over the nation. In Washington, where 30-year incumbent Patty Murray landed on Election Day with a narrow three-point lead over vibrant Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley—who likes to remind people she was in grade school when Murray first took her chair in the Senate—a political skintag like Murray was never really at risk of being removed by Evergreen state voters who have acclimated to the endemic civic dysfunction that’s turning Puget Sound into Poop Harbor.
Murray trounced Smiley by a double-digit margin that rolled up nearly 500,000 more votes than her moderate Republican challenger could muster.
With Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane all buckling under a long-running onslaught of crime and cultural rot that’s marked by the zombie hives of hypes and the homeless, Murray’s lackluster career in the upper-chamber should have easily been brought to an end by an energetic Smiley whose messaging was flowered with lots of reassuring commitments to work for ‘unity’ among Washington’s residents. And yet despite all the chaos and carnage and the degradation of quality of life that mirrors the death of Washington’s southern deep blue sister California, voters were happy to remain on autopilot and return Murray for six more years in the Senate.
In Arizona, another young Republican dynamo named Kari Lake managed to achieve a slim lead in the Grand Canyon State’s gubernatorial race that, according to the RCP Average, remained within the margin of error as Election Day dawned. A media savvy former broadcast journalist who exhilarated many Arizonians and much more of America alike with her Cheetah-sleek takedowns of her former colleagues, Lake had to claw her way into the catbird seat against Democrat Katie Hobbs, a pulseless milquetoast cutout who refused to debate Lake on the pathetic grounds that it would give voice to an ‘election denialist.’
Or in the parlance of the psychotic progressives today: ‘a debate would be platforming hate.’
Not all that long ago, Hobbs’ refusal to debate Lake for virtually any reason would have spelled immediate doom for her campaign, and rightly so, but in another glaring sign of what’s actually happening to the Republicans nationally, Hobbs’ game plan of hide n’ don’t seek and sticking to a script of abortion without limits paid its dividend and delivered her into the statehouse.
Lake lost to Hobbs by an eyelash of approximately 17,000 votes, or less than one-percent of ballots cast.
The race for Arizona’s single Senate seat that was up for grabs between incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly and Republican Blake Masters was also ostensibly within whisper of victory, with the former astronaut Kelly banking on Arizonians willing to believe his gaslight declarations that he has been going head-to-head with the Biden Administration over the elimination of the southern border from ‘Day One.’ In actual fact, Kelly has been a reliable foot soldier for Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi’s relentless campaign to finish demographically remaking America.
Like Smiley and Lake, Masters was a younger and more energized opponent that doggedly fought his way seemingly to the cusp of winning, but like so many of his GOP colleagues, he shouldn’t have had to exert much effort at all amid this environment of economic turmoil and social upheaval.
In an Arizona that existed not all that long ago, Kelly would have had virtually no chance of winning re-election standing in the blistering shadow of Biden’s dismal approval ratings and the tidal flow of cartel-fueled chaos exploding across Phoenix and Tucson. But the fact that Kelly has voted in such a lockstep fashion with the psychotic progressives propelling Biden’s presidency reveals what he understands the reality on the ground in Arizona actually is—and on Election Day 2022 he was proven right.
Kelly beat Masters by a five-point spread that saw a six-figure ballot disparity between the victor and the vanquished, a chasm that the 53,000-plus votes cast for Libertarian candidate Marc Victor could not have bridged.
Like California, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania before it, Arizona’s transformation from a usually reliable Republican redoubt into a deep lavender-hued state breaking for the Democrats is beginning to set like cement, as it is in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Glenn Youngkin’s narrow gubernatorial win in 2021 in the commonwealth will also ultimately prove to be little more than an anomaly that surfaced late in the Old Dominion’s transition and one that is unlikely to carry the state back into the Republican’s presidential column.
Virginia hasn’t gone for a GOP presidential contender in more than 18 years—following more than 30 consecutive years of voting reliably Republican from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush—with John McCain and Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney coming up bupkis back-to-back and Trump losing the state decisively in both 2016 and 2020.
The end of the Republican Party is indelibly rooted in the decision by the GOP’s leadership over the past half-century to abandon the white working class that has been the party’s bedrock vote since November 1968. There is no road back to the White House or really anywhere else for the Republicans without this voting bloc and yet far from delivering for them with decisive actions that would address their critical needs while allaying their well-founded fears, the Republicans have spent decades incrementally alienating them.
It speaks volumes that the GOP’s leadership and most of its caucus, even as you read this, refuse to address working white Americans by their name, unlike Democrats who speak clearly to their voter base, making unvarnished appeals to black, Asian and Latino Americans by stating what they intend to do for them as specific groups.
But the Republicans can’t even bring themselves to address the single largest voting bloc in the nation by their name—white Americans—preferring instead to play along with the Democrats Pavlovian game of perpetually denying they are racists.
It all reminds me of Dan Lungren, a Republican congressman from Southern California during the 1970s-80s who I first interviewed in the early 1990s after he had become California’s Attorney General and ushered in the return of executions as part of a series of anti-crime initiatives with teeth that helped staunch street crime. By 1998, Lungren had emerged as the GOP’s standard-bearer in California’s gubernatorial race, a contest that pitted him against careerist Democrat Gray Davis.
While Lungren’s political career had in many respects acquired all the requisite policy positions necessary to trounce Davis as the 1990s rolled to a close in California, there was just one problem: the state Lungren had been born in was rapidly disappearing right in front of him, buried under the rolling waves of mass migration he helped create by sponsoring the utterly catastrophic Simpson-Mazzoli bill in 1986 that granted a massive amnesty to illegal immigrants and set the stage for the GOP’s denouement in California and, ultimately, what once was America.
Though Lungren ran about California in the fall of 1998 telling people that he thought “the browning of California” was a beautiful thing (versus how ugly the once dominant whiteness of the state had been?) but he favored mass legal immigration versus the chaos of the border bum rush, it was far too late and his political fate was appropriately sealed at the ballot box, with Davis obliterating Lungren by a nearly 20-point margin.
As the elections of 2020 and 2022 have demonstrated, the Republican Party is arriving at the decisive point of no return. They can’t beat a stroke-battered Fetterman. They can’t beat a cowardly mouse like Hobbs. They can’t beat a do-nothing slug like Murray. They can’t beat a sneering elitist like Hochul.
Against a blazing backdrop of exploding street crime, rising inflation, successive tidal waves of tens of millions of impoverished migrants pouring across the frontier and even the prospect of nuclear war with Russia over a fanatical commitment to a senseless conflict in Ukraine, the GOP can simply no longer prevail as a viable alternative to the garish freak show for which the Democrats are now national showrunners.
Everywhere one looks in what once was America, the fat ladies are singing.
And in less than two years, the Republican Party’s time may have finally run out.
