Plotting the minority of Republicans and levels of equivocation with Trump.

Pollsters are just beginning to examine the Cheney sympathizers. In last week’s CBS News survey of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, most of the 20 percent who opposed her ouster cited among their reasons “There’s room in the party for different views” or “Not everyone should support Donald Trump.” But many gave reasons that will be harder to reconcile with the party’s ongoing campaign to whitewash the insurrection and the lies party leaders told about the election. Thirty-nine percent of respondents who sided with Cheney said “she’s right about the election,” and 37 percent said “she’s right about rule of law.” This core pro-Cheney faction, roughly 35 to 40 percent of 20 percent, adds up to 7 or 8 percent of the Republican-leaning electorate.

House Republicans figure that by the time the 2022 election rolls around, these people will have forgotten a party leadership vote that took place in May 2021. But purging Cheney didn’t solve the GOP’s underlying problem: Trump. In an Echelon Insights poll taken in April, 15 percent of Republican voters said they preferred a GOP “free of Donald Trump’s influence.” In a Navigator survey, when Republicans and Republican leaners were asked whether the party “should continue on the path laid out by Donald Trump” or “make some changes and move in a new direction,” 22 percent chose a new direction. These numbers closely resemble the percentage who have opposed Cheney’s removal in more recent surveys.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Echelon Insights poll found that beyond the 15 percent of Republicans who wanted to cleanse the party of Trump, another 21 percent preferred a GOP that “supports Donald Trump’s America First agenda but is not led by him,” and a further 23 percent preferred a GOP that “builds on Donald Trump’s successes and moves on from his failures.” Polls continue to show that Trump is an abrasive factor within the party, particularly in his treatment of liberals and racial issues. He’s also an albatross among independents: The Echelon Insights survey found that 57 percent of them would prefer a GOP free of his influence.

Parse out some meanings here. Understand, walk into a business with one of those “In Our America” placards and say “I want my Republican Party to build in his successes and moves on from his failures” and await a response. (Go ahead and see if “America First Agenda” isn’t ptesumed to be a code word for, like, “We shoulda fought the Commies with the Nazis as our allies” as opposed to, like, “Get Out of Afghanistan”.). There are items in his four years that could be viewed as “his agenda” that came out in controversy or sudden strike racist charges — oh, executive orders pulling employee racial sensitivity training — which struck me as just too haphazardly dropped to be effective — do you count such things as successes? His biggest success appears to be McConnell’s — three Supreme Court Justices.

On Cheney, we wait to see the caliber of her opponents. I do suspect she can pull a Murkowski or Lieberman and run and win with the Independents (and all six Democrats in Wyoming) after the Republicans nominate their luminary. Currently Trump is leaning that the passe nature of blogs as opposed to Twittering is leaving his online presence moribund — but we see plans on Giant Real World Touring so maybe he will get online in that backhand way.

One more consideration as you reconfigure political parties.

Different states have different customs and what’s prudent in one place might be radical in another.

That is different because it doesn’t mean calling ideas crazy as much as situationally unwise. So trying to be a Hatfield or McCall in Oklahoma would be as unwise as trying to be James Inhofe in Oregon.

Some state Republican Parties do manage to pull this off. Maryland and Massachusetts are both solid blue states with Republican governors; both Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker are well-respected moderates. And Democrat Jon Bel Edwards seems to be a good fit in Louisiana.

Yeah, but good luck replacing the Democratic governors of Louisiana and Kansas and Kentucky and North Carolina with a Democrat. They came in — generally barely — because the Republicans before them screwed the pooch in a manner that couldn’t be shuffled off to the corner or placed into broad context of national politics. For that matter we await a Republican governor in Oregon.

The 35 Republican congress critters who voted for the 1-6 Commission.

• French Hill, Arkansas
• Steve Womack, Arkansas
• David Valadao, California
• Carlos Gimenez, Florida
• Maria Salazar, Florida
• Mike Simpson, Idaho
• Rodney Davis, Illinois
• Adam Kinzinger, Illinois
• Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana
• Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa
• Meijer Peter, Michigan
• Fred Upton, Michigan
• Michael Guest, Mississippi
• Jeff Fortenberry, Nebraska
• Don Bacon, Nebraska
• Chris Smith, New Jersey
• Andrew Garbarino, New York
• Tom Reed, New York
• John Katko, New York
• Chris Jacobs, New York
• David Joyce, Ohio
• Anthony Gonzalez, Ohio
• Stephanie Bice, Oklahoma
• Cliff Bentz, Oregon
• Brian Fitzpatrick, Pennsylvania
• Tom Rice, South Carolina
• Dusty Johnson, South Dakota
• Van Taylor, Texas
• Tony Gonzales, Texas
• Blake Moore, Utah
• John Curtis, Utah
• Jaime Herrera Beutler, Washington
• Dan Newhouse, Washington
• David McKinley, West Virginia
• Liz Cheney, Wyoming

Reasonably certain this includes all ten Republicans who voted for Trump’s Impeachment, and those ten have had their political motivations analyzed already. (Adam Kinzinger wants to be Illinois Governor.) Beyond that, it is interesting to see two Utahns — Mormons well represented in that “Never Trumper” contingency. Curious to note Oregon’s Republican is in there. Also New York, which may because where New Yoek Representative Katko was the Republican with whom the Democrats negotiated the details.

The second to final paragraph of this news story on a historical track getting dropped for lack of diversity, veering into the career of Frederick Douglass and striking this false note:

Douglass also campaigned on the issues of women’s rights. He later ran for Vice President, becoming the first African-American to do so.

I… guess? From wikipedia:

Woodhull’s campaign was also notable for the nomination of Frederick Douglass as vice-presidential candidate, although he did not take part in the convention, acknowledge his nomination or take an active role in the campaign.

Does such count as a run? Victoria Woodhull’s is sometimes slighted in favor of the more respectable and organized bid of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood. Some more on the vice presidential bid of Douglass:

But while Woodhull was clear about her presidential intentions, she never informed her running mate, Douglass, who never even acknowledged he had been nominated. Many have speculated that Douglass didn’t want to recognize the nomination for fear of being associated with Woodhull, who was seen as “a loose cannon and controversial even among radical feminists and abolitionists,” said Harvard historian John Stauffer. […]

Douglass also likely didn’t recognize the vice presidential nomination in 1872 because he was already supporting a different presidential candidate, said Kenneth Mack, a historian and Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. A loyal Republican, Douglass had backed Grant’s run for a second term. During his first four years in the White House, Grant had proven himself a champion of the rights of freed African Americans, having supported several Civil Rights acts in 1870 and 1871, including one designed to the end Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror against Black people in the former confederate states. “And President Grant had supported sending in the Union army to protect the lives and the votes of Black people in the south. So, for Douglass, there was no real choice other than to support Grant.”

I do not understand the point of dropping in this historical footnote, which falls asunder to virtually meaningless under the smallest lean-in.

A little bit of piling on here where in ticking off a litany of bad behaviors defined as beyond any pale you characterize behavior shy if that threshold as beyond any pale.

The headline: Marjorie Taylor Greene vandalized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s guest book and taunted her in a deleted 2019 video.

Question: what does it mean to “vandalize”?

Members of the group filmed themselves vandalizing the congresswoman’s guest book with pro-Trump messages and insults, and demanding that the congresswoman “come out” and “face” them. Greene wrote “you’re a traitor” and drew a picture of the US-Mexico border wall in the book. She also called out to Ocasio-Cortez through the mail slot in her locked door.

Greene and her associates taunted Ocasio-Cortez and her staffers, calling the New York lawmaker a “baby” and referring to her office as a “daycare” and a “college sorority” because of a wall of Post-it messages left outside her office door by supporters.

Greene also encouraged her followers to travel to the Capitol and confront Democratic lawmakers.

I have no idea if every congress critter on Capitol Hill has a “guestbook”, but if they do, open to the public, I don’t see how they wouldn’t be inserted with inflammatory partisan messaging. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene rips them out of hers?

The rest arises to some levels of concern — open to debate the nature of it all — but we do have that basic”decorum” issue. But I fail to see this 2019 yeared “vandalism”. Or does vandalism have a secondary meaning of which I am not aware ?

The funny thing is that Liz Cheney really oughta have been Senator. Lurking below the surface of this 2014 article on her dismal run and flame-out is the sense that Enzi was set to retire — signs along the lines of lack of fund-raising pointed to it — until Cheney wounded his pride by noisally jumping in with her primary bid.

Her Congressional career saw an immediate opportunity to jump to the Senate, but for Republican House lobbying.

Some Republicans tell POLITICO privately that Cheney is their preferred messenger — even more so than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) — at what feels like a low point for the party after a brutal midterm election cycle that decimated their ranks of female lawmakers in the House. Others say they can envision her becoming Speaker Cheney one day.

That’s why it would sting to lose Cheney to the Senate. And the blow to the House GOP would come sooner than 2020; Cheney would have to step down from her leadership post if she seeks higher office because of new party rules that took effect this year. […]

While climbing the House leadership ladder could be an attractive option for Cheney, a high-profile Senate seat would put her in the national spotlight — potentially catapulting her to become a future secretary of Defense or even president.

Today we run into the line of thought by Republicans now dropping her from her “3rd Most Powerful Republican in the House” position. A “we’re not obsessed with Trump — you’re the one obsessed with Trump” line shows up. And for the political purposes of winning seats in 2022, they are probably correct. As against Cheney, and the mass of media positioning and opinion meistering — and the idea that you can’t sweep Jan 6 away and place it on ignore — Trump no longer has a Facebook or Twitter page, but he does have a sparkling new blog!