WSJ: “Marjorie Greene is sucking up all the air,” Ms. Chamberlain said. “Trump is gone, he is out of office and out of the day-to-day, but he has been replaced by her.” She pointed to ads in competitive districts by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House of Representatives campaign arm, featuring Ms. Greene.”
The Hill: “Democrats believe that tying the entire GOP to Qanon and Taylor Greene will be a potent midterms issue that further damages Republicans with the suburban voters that gravitated away from the party during the Trump years.”
CNN: “In all their actions of the past few weeks — or more precisely the inaction against Trump and Greene — GOP leaders have signaled their unwillingness or inability to confront those sentiments too forcefully… The pre-Trump traditional Republicans are losing influence, she says, while the party is responding to the hard-core Trump voters motivated by a ‘sense of [cultural] threat, White grievance.’”
ABC News: “As the GOP contends with its future and Trump’s role in it, Democrats are seizing on the deep divisions within the Republican ranks over its right wing and seeking to define the frontline of the party by its most extreme members.”
After DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney announced the committee’s first major TV and digital campaign of the 2022 Election Cycle, which exposed vulnerable Washington Republicans and Minority Leader McCarthy for being too weak to stand up to President Trump and the QAnon mob, Republicans still don’t have an answer for how they will protect the American people from the QAnon mob that is taking over their party.
Here’s what vulnerable Republicans are reading:
WSJ: Impeachment Trial Puts Trump Back on Center Stage for GOP
By Joshua Jamerson and Lindsey Wise
[…]
Nearly three weeks after President Biden stepped into the Oval Office, Republicans are still adjusting to life being shut out of power in the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time since 2010. Republicans on Capitol Hill, where the Senate is beginning on Tuesday its second impeachment trial of Mr. Trump in two years, continue to hone what the GOP represents with Mr. Trump out of office but broadly popular among the party rank and file.
[…]
“Marjorie Greene is sucking up all the air,” Ms. Chamberlain said. “Trump is gone, he is out of office and out of the day-to-day, but he has been replaced by her.” She pointed to ads in competitive districts by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House of Representatives campaign arm, featuring Ms. Greene.
The DCCC has pledged more than $500,000 toward TV and digital ads in five key media markets, targeting vulnerable Republicans, cast in ads as lawmakers who “stood with Q, not you.” It is a reference to QAnon, a far right-wing, loosely organized network and community of believers who embrace a range of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
The Hill: Republicans worry Greene could be drag on party in suburbs
By Julia Manchester and Max Greenwood
Republicans are increasingly concerned that the controversy over Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) could define the party and its candidates in the 2022 midterms, throwing a wrench in GOP efforts to recapture the support of suburban voters.
Democrats have already jumped on the outrage surrounding Greene. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Tuesday launched a six-figure ad campaign tying Republicans to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which Greene has voiced support for in the past, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) referred to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as “Q-CA” in a press release on Wednesday.
On Thursday, the Democratic group House Majority Forward released an ad accusing McCarthy of warmly embracing “the QAnon Caucus,” after the California Republican signaled he wouldn’t move to punish Greene over her past comments.
[…]
The early strategy shows Democrats are looking to get a head start on what will likely be a tight midterm election. The party holds narrow majorities in the House and the Senate. And the party in control of the White House historically has lost seats going into the administration’s first midterm election.
Both parties see the suburbs in particular as crucial in their efforts to win. Republicans struggled to curry favor with voters in suburban enclaves across the country thanks to former President Trump’s low favorability ratings in those areas.
Now, as Democrats look to make Greene the face of her party, she has aligned herself even more closely with Trump. At a press conference on Friday, she argued the party “belongs to him,” something that is likely to fuel concerns among some Republicans about the party’s chances in the suburbs heading into 2022.
“She’s part of the Republican conference, a famous part now. That can’t be good for the Republicans,” said Bill Kristol, a conservative critic of President Trump and director of Defending Democracy Together.
Others say the controversy surrounding Greene amounts to an annoyance for the party, which is working to navigate Washington in its new minority status.
[…]
CNN: Is the GOP’s extremist wing now too big to fail?
By Ron Brownstein
Congressional Republicans have crystallized an ominous question by rejecting consequences for Donald Trump over the January 6 riot in his impeachment trial and welcoming conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia into their conference: Has the extremist wing of the GOP coalition grown too big for the party to confront?
[…]
While Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has called conspiracy theorists like Greene a “cancer” on the party and denounced Trump’s role in the riot, the recent decision by House Republicans to accept the Georgia Republican into the conference, and the overwhelming refusal by House or Senate Republicans — including McConnell — to sanction Trump, suggests the party has very limited appetite at this point for any serious effort to excise that disease. And that could provide more oxygen to the White nationalist extremist groups that have viewed Trump as a galvanizing figure and already gained strength during his presidency.
Through their inactions on Trump and Greene, Republicans “are normalizing, they are mainstreaming, what counterterrorism experts would say is violent extremism: that it is acceptable to use inflammatory rhetoric and encourage violence to achieve your ends and … it is acceptable to engage in public life through conspiracy theories,” says Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary for threat prevention in the Department of Homeland Security for Trump who resigned and opposed his reelection.
[…]
In all their actions of the past few weeks — or more precisely the inaction against Trump and Greene — GOP leaders have signaled their unwillingness or inability to confront those sentiments too forcefully. Blum says that what appears to be happening inside the GOP is “an internal renegotiation that has dramatically changed which coalition members matter.” The pre-Trump traditional Republicans are losing influence, she says, while the party is responding to the hard-core Trump voters motivated by a “sense of [cultural] threat, White grievance.” It is, she adds, “like George Wallace rose from the grave” and imposed his priorities on the GOP.
[…]
The Hill: DCCC releases Spanish language ads hitting GOP on Qanon
By Jonathan Easley
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is putting an additional $100,000 behind its push to tie vulnerable Republicans to the QAnon conspiracy theory and Rep. Marjorie Greene Taylor (R-Ga.), releasing new Spanish language ads Monday targeting three GOP House members in competitive districts.
The ad buy represents the DCCC’s first six-figure Spanish language ad buy of the 2022 cycle and it builds on the $550,000 worth of ads released last week accusing eight Republicans of aligning with the fringe elements of the party that were involved in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
The ads will run in distircts represented by Reps. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), David Valadao (R-Calif.) and Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.).
“QAnon, a conspiracy theory born online. Sent QAnon followers like Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress that attacked the Capitol and murdered a cop,” one of the ads states. “Then Republicans like David Valadao voted to support Marjorie Taylor Greene, letting QAnon win. Congressman David Valadao should have stood with us. David Valadao stood with Q, not you.”
Democrats stripped Greene of her committee assignments last week after past remarks surfaced of her embracing conspiracy theories. Fewer than a dozen Republicans joined them in voting to have Greene removed from the committees.
Democrats believe that tying the entire GOP to Qanon and Taylor Greene will be a potent midterms issue that further damages Republicans with the suburban voters that gravitated away from the party during the Trump years.
“Washington Republicans have made their choice — they chose to cave to the murderous QAnon mob that has taken over their party,” DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.). said.
“Washington Republicans are trying to have it both ways — refusing to hold those responsible for the attack on the Capitol accountable, offering nothing but empty words after years of hyping up lies and conspiracy theories. Voters understand the danger of conspiracy theorists and violent white supremacists, but instead of rejecting the extremism in their party, Republicans have welcomed them in. There is no middle ground, but Washington Republicans actions have made one thing clear — no American will be safe from the QAnon mob if Washington Republicans are in power.”
The DCCC’s previous ad buy targeted eight House Republicans, including Salazar and Garcia, as well as Minority Leader Kevin McCArthy (R-Calif.), and Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Young Kim (R-Calif.), Michelle Steele (R-Calif.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas).
ABC News: GOP on defense as Democrats harness party’s ties to extremism
By Kendall Karson and Meg Cunningham
The start of President Donald Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial over a single charge of inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol arrives as the Republican Party is under siege.
As the GOP contends with its future and Trump’s role in it, Democrats are seizing on the deep divisions within the Republican ranks over its right wing and seeking to define the frontline of the party by its most extreme members.
House Democrats’ campaign apparatus deployed $500,000 for an advertising campaign tethering Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader, and seven vulnerable House Republicans in districts President Joe Biden won last year to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s extremist rhetoric and the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The opening shot by Democrats accuses the swing district Republicans of standing “with Q, not you.”
“Washington Republicans have made their choice — they chose to cave to the murderous QAnon mob that has taken over their party,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They are “refusing to hold those responsible for the attack on the Capitol accountable, offering nothing but empty words after years of hyping up lies and conspiracy theories.”
[…]
“We’ve got to hold these Republicans accountable,” said former Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala, who lost her Miami-based district last year to now-Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, one of the Republicans targeted in Democrats’ new ads.
Democratic strategist Ian Russell called the early pitch to voters a messaging “road test,” and praised Maloney for the early onslaught.
“I think it’s a smart move,” Russell told ABC News on Monday. “Chairman Maloney is capitalizing on the fracture lines inside the Republican Party. They’ve got cracks in their coalition and he’s taking a crowbar to them, and demonstrating to the American people, demonstrating to voters, that Republicans are on the side of dangerous extremists who stormed the Capitol, who hold all these views that are not going to go down well in districts across America.”
As Republicans fend off the attacks from Democrats under the newly installed chair, they are also reckoning with how to reconcile their differences internally in the post-Trump era.
Their ability to unite over the next two years, some strategists say, will be crucial to determining their success in reclaiming the majority they lost in the 2018 midterm elections.
“The Republican brand has been battered by Trump and some of the recent extremism … that’s been an outgrowth of Trumpism,” said Ken Spain, a former top official at the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Republicans need to coalesce around an economic argument that is likely going to resonate with voters two years from now.
[…]
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