Conservative commentator Erick Erickson pinned the blame for Republicans’ midterm wipeout on the party’s “weirdo right.”
The Georgia-based pundit argued in a New York Times op-ed that voters didn’t ask for open borders, just deportations that look humane, and they wanted a president focused on the economy “instead of gold leaf in the Oval Office” – so they rejected a party that “taxed them through tariffs, drove up gas prices through war” and seemed more interested in construction projects and meme wars than in middle-class struggles.
“They rejected a party driven by social media meme wars, subversive racism, a fondness for dictators and, at the end of the election, a weird fixation on Anakin Skywalker,” Erickson wrote. “Voters want normal people in charge, and they took their wrath out on otherwise normal Republicans who refused to push back against the lunacy, corruption and incompetence within the GOP.”
Republicans spent years cautioning that Democrats would be defined by radicals they refused to confront, but he said that now applies to the GOP.
Erickson described a “post-religious right” that has borrowed “the grievance politics, the identity obsessions and the contempt for dissent of the woke left” and dressed it in “a rather Christless Christian nationalism.”
He pointed to billionaire Peter Thiel spending four straight Mondays before the election lecturing on the Antichrist at a Masonic lodge in Nashville. He also singled out Charles Haywood, a shampoo-company fortune heir whose foundation funds right-wing groups, who has said his preferred government “will not be democratic” and that women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.”
“These are not conservatives,” Erickson argued. “They are progressives with a different set of enemies.”
He said the movement sees Vice President JD Vance as its vehicle, but Erickson argued that he “has cultivated the weirdo right rather than confront it.”
Erickson held up Govs. Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp and Greg Abbott as models of competence over “meme wars and demands for American Caesars.”
“Until the GOP rejects the weird, the fringe and the grievance hustlers,” he concluded, “Democrats will happily remind voters whom the GOP keeps around.”
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