If you need a little something to cheer you up, in light of the Comey shenanigans, check out this piece posted on Politico a couple days ago. It was published before the Comey letter was reported, but ultimately it will shock me if that issue has much impact on the polls and the actual vote.
Just a few little nibbles to pique your interest, such as this:
Take, for instance, Republican pollster and commentator Kristen Soltis Anderson. She is in her early 30s and a self-proclaimed fan of the reformicons like Wehner, Yuval Levin, and Ramesh Ponnuru. She feels that, with Trump, the Republican Party has shifted out from under her. “When he said he was a gentleman, that it’s not really sexual assault, that’s been driving me crazy, because people have said that about Republicans for a while,” she said of Trump’s response in the third debate to the dozen sexual assault allegations against him. “Great, you are everything that the left said you were!” It’s not a Republican Party she recognizes, she says; she sees it as an entity that has been perhaps permanently changed. “If Trump wins the White House, then he has redefined the Republican Party, and to the victor go the spoils,” she says. “It’s his party now.”
and this:
Wehner, considered a leading light among reformicons, said this has brought him to a certain realization about his own party, and that the forces that Trump represents are “forces that predated Trump forces and will outlive him,” he told me last week. “The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. It turned out that those forces within the Republican Party were larger than what I had imagined.” He sees “a moral necessity” to hand Trump a humiliating defeat and to scrub out the uglier things he brought to the surface of American politics. But, like Soltis Anderson, he recognizes that splitting the two may prove a Solomonic task. “Is there a way to repudiate the worst of Trump—the nativistic, racist, misogynistic elements—and appeal to people whom he brought because of economic anxiety?” he asked. “It won’t be easy because he has loyal following. If you morally repudiate him—which has to happen—those people may decide they don’t want to be part of that.”
and I will leave you with this:
As yet there seems to be no coherent vision for what kind of future November 9 brings for the Republican Party—or, for that matter, if there will even be a Republican Party they could support. “You’re assuming that ‘establishment Republicans’ are going to be Republicans anymore,” said Juleanna Glover, a GOP lobbyist and former staffer to then-Senator John Ashcroft.
“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the Party survives.”