ultimate top, their sugar daddies and mommies.

For the most part their sugar dadies and mamas think that trump is destroying the Republican Party. You didn't read the article did you?

And they honestly believe that they are going to remain in charge because Putin and their other corporate bosses want to keep them in charge to siphon off U.S. taxpayer income to benefit the GOP elite.

So yes, they'll continue to do what they're doing. They believe they've got the game rigged in their favor.

Haele

Until we see them pay any major price for what they've done at the polls, I think any talk of the "death" of the Republican party is premature.

And now I don't mean taking back some seats of or even just control of the house or maybe the Senate by a few seats. I'm talking state houses, local races.....everything. Until they are winning no elections that won't be "death" enough. It will merely be a holding pattern until they regroup and figure out how to win back again, and ultimately little more than a regular cycle of election victories and losses.

Anyone who thinks the Republican party will face any sort of big picture, longer term ramifications from what they'd done the past 2 years either hasn't been paying attention or is fooling themselves ina big way.

I've heard this type of "death warrant" talk on a regular basis since the Clinton impeachment, since the Bush v. Gore decisions, since the Iraq war, since Obama won, since they obstructed Obama, since pretty much everything they did during the Obama years, and then heavily the past 2 years.

Under Trump's leadership the social conservatives who have been used by fiscal conservative Republican leaders for so long against their best interests are in full rebellion and have steered the GOP in a direction in which the independents who decide many elections are unwilling to follow. In many districts and states Congressional Republicans face two bad choices - they can go against Trump and lose in their Republican primaries or continue to support Trump and lose in the general elections.

Something fundermental has changed. Establishment (financial conservative) Republicans who have been in leadership positions for decades have lost their base of blue collar social conservatives that the have abused and used to get elected for years. They lost them to Trump. Trump has taken taken over control of the Republican Party, but the new GOP does not appeal to many independents or even establishment Republicans. Oh, most Republican leaders will support him for now to try advance their agenda and mostly because the fear Trump’s supporters, but don’t be fooled, the abhor him. They see him as destroying the party they owned, splitting it into uneven halves.

Sooner or Trump will be gone, and the establishment Republicans will try to reestablish their control over the GOP. If Trump is proved to have committed crimes, a large portion of his base will never believe the charges, no matter how solid the evidence and heaven help in Republican leader who turns on him. After he is gone, Trump’s fans will want to continue the party’s populist serge and will not want to return to Republican Normalcy. The real split in the Republican Party will no long papered over.

Every analysis of the data that I've seen shows that Republicans are as supportive of Trump as they have been any president.

And anecdotally every republican leaning "independent" I know of who hates Trump and didn't vote for him are not holding the rest of the GOP responsible. I hear lots of talk about all the Trump supporting Republicans as "having to say that stuff to support their party" or "just doing what they need to, to maintain control". They didn't vote for Trump but voted for every other Republican on the ballot.

Again, I've heard and read all about how they are driving away independents with all of the other examples I gave in my first post. And none of that panned out.

First, the Republican leaning independents who don’t like Trump are not the independents decide elections. They are independents in name only and usually vote reliably Republican. It is the independents who vote either way who decide elections and they are both sick and tired of Trump and Congressional Republicans who refuse to rein him in. That will be evident in the midterms.

I was addressing the Post Trump era. Establishment Republicans who are fiscal conservatives will view the Trump presidency as a disaster and will surely try to reestablish their control of the GOP. However, the socially conservative hoi polli who used to be their reliable foot solders will revolt, wanting to continue the “preserve white culture:” wars which Trump imitated. Since they vastly outnumber the establishment types, Republicans running for office will either cater to them or be defeated in Republican primaries.

On the other hand, the deplorables are far from constituting a majority of the voting populations and in blue and swing states their candidates will in all likelihood be defeated. Their candidates should be okay in solid red states, but those states do send a majority of representatives or senators to Washington. Nor do they alone have the votes to send a candidate to the White House.

I'll be happy to be wrong about this. But all of this I'm afraid is predicated on the idea that these various groups and factions of Republican factions have sincerely held beliefs on any of this stuff and not just about hating Democrats and liberals. I'm not confident that is the case. We've seen these various factions and sub-groups of Republicans and conservatives sell out every value imaginable that they claimed to have, just because they think the Democrat will be worse. I don't think anything has changed.

Again, I'll be happy to be wrong. But I don't think that a few midterm victories around the margins will be any harbinger of a Republican death knell.

They can’t run against Trump
and many of them can’t survive politically if they continued to support him. Catch 22.