Our Baby Alligator is All Grown Up… And Attacking the Neighbors

The 2022 Midterm Elections proved the Republican Party has a complicated problem on their hands. Their primary voters, those die-hard GOP political junkies who likely watch Fox News, listen to Sean Hannity, and read The Daily Wire like it’s part of their job descriptions, chose candidates who provided the red meat they wanted. These candidates went on to lose their general elections bigly, even in a year when the presidential approval rating was as underwater as the Titanic and the economy stank like a 17-year-old boy wearing too much Axe Body Spray.

The problem is not that the chosen candidates were consistently defeated (although that’s a problem – just a different problem than the one I want to address here). This conundrum is that the base voters want the hard-core MAGA stuff and the Republican Party elites… don’t. Even worse, the base voters want the mega MAGA from two places, both from their political candidates and from the right-wing media who cover them. Meanwhile, the establishment wing of the GOP may want off of the crazy train to win elections, pass more tax cuts for the rich, and get back to a more normal, quiet kind of racism, but they have a math problem: they are outnumbered by the base voters who love the angry, grievance-filled politics they’ve come to know in the past 6 years. Accordingly, the 2022 Midterms were riddled with “candidate quality” problems for the Republicans.

Look at these major primary victory numbers as evidence:

·       In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano who rented busses to bring people to the U.S. Capitol on January 6th won 43.8% of his very crowded primary. The next closest candidate was former Congressman Lou Barletta with 20.3%.

·       In Georgia, Herschel Walker, a former football player without any political experience but with many secret children, won his primary with 68.2% and the next highest voter getter was Gary Black who won 13.4%.

·       In Maryland, where Democrats haven’t been able to elect a Democratic governor in more than a decade, Dan Cox won his primary by 52% over Kelly Schult’s 43.5%, even after she was endorsed by the popular incumbent governor Larry Hogan.

·       Blake Masters crushed Jim Lamon 40.2% to 28.1% in Arizona.

·       In Nevada, Adam Laxalt beat Sam Brown, 55.7% to 34.4% respectively.

As Elon Musk might Tweet: Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Lesser primary victories from Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania do not belie this general trend: Republican primary voters wanted the mega MAGA, stop the steal, rage against the vaccine, own the libs type of candidate. They elected these angry folk to be their party’s nominees, derided Mitch McConnell when he proclaimed his party had a “candidate quality” problem and watched as their preferred politicians were routinely thumped in the general elections.

For many GOP primary voters who watched their candidates fall like grandparents during Final Exam week, the surprise was not that their candidates lost, it was that when they did, their candidates did not fight the results. These voters have spent years being told they should distrust the government, disbelieve the “liberal” mainstream media, and dislike the Democrats. Now they do.

Unlike their fellow Republicans in positions of power, these MAGA voters are fearful and furious, anxious about a world that is changing quickly around them without their understanding or buy-in. They are panicked because they have been told to be terrified, all by the right-wing media that stoked racial animus and fear of crime in order to solidify their audience. To turn around and say that there’s nothing to fear but fear itself would be incongruous to everything that has been communicated in the last decade.

Right-wing messaging has done heavy lifting to perpetuate the idea that the illegitimately elected “Biden regime” is trying to take away the American way of life from the “real” Americans. They’ve accomplished this through their selection of stories to run (known as “gatekeeping”) and the way they frame the stories they cover (AKA “framing”). For example, Fox News did not cover the hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and they did not meaningfully address former President Trump’s dinner with white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes. A recent study proved that the impact of this gatekeeping was significant. Researchers paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month instead and found these participants learned a great deal more about news they had not heard of before, and even more they trusted it.

A concurring effect of gatekeeping is that when one set of media outlets cover one set of stories (Hunter Biden’s laptop) while other media outlets cover other stories (Donald Trump’s desire to cancel the Constitution), it is hard to have conversations about common problems. These two topics do not overlap very much.

Additionally, the way the right-wing media frames their stories have compounding influences on its’ audience’s opinions. By using dramatic terms like “deep state” to describe the government and “regime media” to insinuate that journalists are propaganda tools of the administration, they are implying malfeasance without evidence or fact. When outlets reiterate these idioms, catchy as they are, their audiences become fluent with this new language and perpetuate it. This propagation keeps communication on the right recognized and understood, but only within the circle of existing believers.

At the same time, these new phrases become code for something larger than the terms themselves. This summer, as former President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate was searched by the FBI, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” A recent study by researchers at Harvard found that Fox News framed Trump’s 2017 firing of Michael Flynn as an attack against Trump by the “deep state.” Those not well-versed in right-wing rhetoric might not have understood what these words meant; but the right-wing media audience did, and that’s the point.

This is a very different way to look at conservative politics than the way that establishment Republicans do. These elites want to go back to a system where they can play political ball again: make establishment deals with establishment groups and known brokers, raise big money from familiar mega donors, and return to a normal life of corporate backscratching and golf retreats at the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island.

The base voters are not privy to these benefits, however, and instead they’ve been marinating for the past 6 years in the raw media landscape that stoked white resentment and reiterated the fear that the best ideas of yesterday were verboten, the world was moving against them, and their voice was being summarily dismissed by people who were “other” than them.

So, this is the pickle in which the GOP finds itself today. Many have boiled this down to a “Trump problem,” but to me it’s an audience problem. When the novelty of Trump has worn off, and by all accounts it has, a new novelty will come along. Speaking as someone who has owned a TV in the last half century, I can promise you this: the next new thing will not be something quieter, more subtle, bipartisan, and more conciliatory than Trump. When something big becomes ordinary, it tends to be replaced by something bigger.

The Republican base voters – the audience of right-wing media – will not allow a return to the “normal” of before, and thus, going back cannot happen. Because it’s bad for business.

Next week: The old establishment groups and the new MAGA groups and the money.