By Alexander Lomax
The difference between state politics and county politics is often a large chasm of extremism; state parties are typically much more moderate compared to their county brethren (note: check out our coverage of the Maricopa County Democratic Party here to see some great examples). And true to form, any time it seems as though the state GOP seems to be headed in the right direction, the Maricopa County Republican Party (MCRP) shows that insanity still has foothold on the Republican side.
We have recently found out that the MCRP wanted to run the presidential preference primary…internally. As in, hold an entire statewide election outside the infrastructure of the actual elections system. As in, the state party would be responsible for setting up all the polling centers, performing all of the precinct votes (for a total of hundreds of thousands of votes), and performing all of the quality control.
To look at it another way, the entity which has had a rough go regarding fundraising and has precious little money in the bank would be responsible for building and executing on an entire elections infrastructure…from scratch. Why? Because the pervasiveness of the lies of election security have been so successful within rank and file Republicans in the state that this seems like a logical conclusion to many.
Thankfully for the Republicans, this absurd idea has been shot down and elections will go on as scheduled, but the fact that it even got that far is a sad sign of the times as to where the Party of Trump has gone. They are willing to throw punches at windmills, to incite further doubt in our institutions, spend a ton of money and get an inferior product purely to attempt to placate the former President. Meanwhile, recent chaos in local GOP elections have demonstrated the short-falls of hand counting.
Meanwhile, for the rest of us who believe that Joe Biden is entirely too old to lead a country, for those that think that the progressive excesses of blue states and cities are something to be avoided…where do we go? What options do we have? It is political homelessness defined.
In the epic miniseries Chernobyl, the lead character said “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.” Was he talking about Russia or the modern day Republican party? It’s nearly impossible to tell.