Thread: How much does it matter the MassGOP has kept a failed party chairman instead of picking a state representative? I don't like saying this, but not a great deal. Yes, Shawn would have made things better. But a party is about co-coordinating resources; we have few. #mapoli

So it's obvious to all non-Rs that Jim's two years of Trump cheering, losses, and branding self-immolation didn't work. We contested fewer seats than ever, and raised less money than previous years, and lost MassGOP-held seats. Total disaster.

Jim, of course, as I warned two years ago, took ZERO responsibility for his bad ideas. (Conservative white men *never* accept responsibility for political choices.) He said this was a long term thing, and he needed more time and more dynamite to build the party. Of course.

He doesn't want to win. He likes being in charge of angry white older folks and feeling important. He does make the activists and SC feel good. They love him for it.

Shawn had a plan for "22 in '22" which promised to flip 22 seats in the next cycle. This is like me pledging to run a sub 4-minute mile by 2022. It's silly. Shawn is good, but he has no resources. He has no candidates for those 22 districts. Just more people nobody has heard of.

Look what happened in one of several races the party lost, in Taunton. Shauna O'Connell left a state rep seat she'd held for years to become Mayor. A winnable seat, eh? Shawn would agree. Did we keep it? No, we lost by a lot. Ponder that for a bit.

Our candidate was Kelly Dooner. She is a nice young person. No experience. Nobody had heard of her. She had little money. She faced a teachers union official who ate her alive. Who had organization. Money. Experience. Everything. No contest.

This will happen with all open seats. The Democrats are simply better than us at everything. Better bench. Smarter activists. Better at community, media, and organizing. Far better brand. An open seat draws three Dems who could win the general. We draw nobodies.

What's killing the MassGOP isn't bad leadership. Huge trends , demographics, and culture are doing it. If you look at the data over time for how contested elections go, you will see a slow weakening of the party over many years. There are good year exceptions, but they are few.

We would need many years of anti-national-GOP leadership to fight those trends and create a brand people would actually want to join. But the forces of nationalization are simply too strong. Gov. Baker made progress in helping resist that. But Trump was too potent.

Trump didn't seduce all registered Republicans, but he seduced most of the activists and the leaders who actually are the party. He convinced them that they were a local franchise of his ideas, not a state party with state restrictions. They happily joined him.

Shawn, if he had won, would pause the decline and work with Baker. That would benefit Baker, and perhaps improve the brand a bit. But we'd need years of that to change minds that the MassGOP isn't the scary party on Fox/OANN/Newsmax.

Shawn would have implemented good ideas and programs that would take a while to work. Certainly more than a cycle. Jim has only bad ideas. He has launched many initiatives in the past two years. We never hear how any of them (like his "urban outreach program") go, or the results.

Very few things would help Republicans gain seats. A good party leader can only help, not substitute for them. What are they? 1. National politics stops influencing state politics. 2. Massive in-state resources create state-only party. 3. A system change: RCV or jungle primaries.

I think only a system change can help. For example: RCV would have helped Republicans, because our primaries are destructive and costly. RCV would let electable republicans skip the primaries and keep GOP votes as second choices.

But no Republican saw that. They only absorbed national thinking on the issue, which says, among other things, that all voting changes are bad. Too bad. They should have thought this through and realized we'd have 2 GOP congressmen in '10 and '12 w/RCV, among other pros.

I will wrap up here. Things for the MassGOP are the worst I have ever seen. The chairman isn't the biggest problem. The climate has changed too much. I can't see how we escape it, when the Democrats are so strong. /END