Column: It’s not even election day, but a Latino Republican radio show is already giddy because the polls are so close
In a radio ad called “The Trump Effect” that ran in June in Philadelphia, one of the hosts says, “In our lifetime, there is no presidential election where there is anything close to an equally divided electorate, and that’s exactly what happened in this election. The GOP is in its death throes.”
Advertisement:
Now that the election is over, the same radio show is excited to see just how close the races are. “Maybe for a few weeks,” host John Rylan says, “we’ll have a little bit of time off, and we can start re-thinking everything.”
But this isn’t just a fantasy exercise. The Trump Effect will be an enduring political phenomenon. It is a new political reality as Republicans look to the long-term future of their party. They are now seeing the electoral results firsthand, and it is causing them to rethink their party’s future.
Last week, my colleague John Avlon, who writes a column for the New York Post, published an op-ed in the print edition of the paper arguing that the GOP is “the best deal.” Trump may not be running, he opined, but his candidacy has done more than anything else to drive down unemployment, boost investment and create jobs. If Trump isn’t the nominee, he writes, “there just aren’t enough Democrats willing to support the deal, so it’s doomed to failure.”
Advertisement:
It’s not just this one newspaper that’s writing this. Last week, a report from the New York Times Magazine called Why Trump Won showed that a majority of Republicans still support the Republican Party agenda. There are, the authors wrote, “few signs that the party’s ideological hold on the country is eroding, and polls suggest that a majority of Republicans would be happy to see the party nominate Donald Trump for president.”
The Times piece focused on support among Republican voters in the states they lost in the presidential election and found that, contrary to what the newspaper claimed, Republican voters are very happy with the GOP agenda.
As Avlon and NYT Magazine report, the numbers from the national poll are not as encouraging. In the