GOP crazies dominate critical 2024 states

Executing Barack Obama on Pay for View ?

Both parties face challenges: for Democrats, Joe Biden's age, inflation and the Gaza War; for Republicans, Donald Trump's criminality and abortion.

On the micro, or state level, the GOP problems are far more severe: high level candidates still into false election denial, others blatantly anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, one even calling for Barack Obama's public execution.

Although it's not clear how much this will affect the national election, the disarray and these loonies could change the odds.   

Up until ten days ago, ARIZONA was one of three or four 2020 Biden states Republicans felt pretty confident about reversing. Then the Republican appointed state Supreme Court validated an 1864 statute that bans all abortions.

This has caused a political nervous breakdown for Republicans. Kari Lake, their right-wing Senate candidate who earlier supported the 1864 law, did a 180.

She and Donald Trump pleaded with the Republican state legislature to repeal the measure, enacted almost a half century before Arizona became a state. They would revert to an abortion ban after 15 weeks with restrictions.

But the GOP has only a thin majority in the legislature and some pro-life conservatives, who believe abortion is murder, are balking. So far, the repeal effort is failing.

Meanwhile Democrats expect to put a referendum on the November ballot that basically reinstates, at the state level, the abortion protections—up to 24 weeks of pregnancy—that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned two years ago.  That measure probably will carry handily, as it has in other states since the 2022 Supreme Court action.

Says former Phoenix mayor and state Attorney General Terry Goddard: "As things stand now it's a great year to be a Democratic candidate in Arizona."

After the 2020 election, in no state did Republicans make bigger fools of themselves than MICHIGAN. Biden won there by more than 150,000 votes but egged on by Trump, Republicans tried to reverse that result even devising a fake electors scheme.

Last year there was as fierce contest for state party chair between two election deniers who had been beaten badly in the previous election, a MAGA uber vs a MAGA ultra.

This year the party dumped the incompetent victor. A former Congressman and ambassador, Pete Hoekstra,  took over as chair. 

There was a renewed sense of possibilities as Michigan's large Arab American community, which supported Biden in 2020, turned on the President over the Gaza war.  If the war continues and these voters stay home or go for a third-party candidate, it might doom the President.

But Hoekstra, who was supposed to help rescue the party from the crazies, has a long history of anti-Muslim tirades. He falsely claimed Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Later as Trump's Ambassador to Netherlands, he had charged radical Islamists had terrorized the country. After first lying about saying that he then apologized and was slapped down by the State Department.

There still are 15 Michigan Republicans facing a trial this year over the fake electors plot.

WISCONSIN Republicans were a close second in the duplicity of trying to overturn a clear Biden victory. The far right MAGA types haven't given up this canard.  

One target is the Assembly Speaker, Robin Vos, powerful and very conservative. His sin: not retroactively reversing the 2020 results which legally he couldn't do.

They also are mad Vos won't impeach the nonpartisan elections administrator. The longtime executive director of the state Republican party, who even Democrats say was effective, was replaced by Trump's 2020 Wisconsin state director who flamed the false fires of a stolen election.

There are a half dozen states Biden won last time that could be in play this year. If he should lose three or four Democrats need offsets, but the only possibility is NORTH CAROLINA, which Trump won by a little more than 1% in 2020. GOP strategists ridicule that, noting the state has voted for the Republican Presidential nominee in ten of the last eleven elections.

Last month though the Republican voters picked their statewide candidates: abortion banning, election denying, conspiracy peddlers. Then there's the ugly stuff. 

Mark Robinson, who was elected Lt. Governor in a low-profile contest, is the gubernatorial candidate. He has made many disparaging comments about women, called homosexuals "filth," and his antisemitic diatribes include embracing there's  a "cabal of Jewish international bankers," and raising questions about the specifics of the Holocaust.  Trump praised Robinson, who is black, and "better" than Martin Luther King Jr., the late civil rights leader "on steroids."

The Superintendent of education candidate, Michele Morrow, who upset the incumbent in the Republican primary, called the state's schools "socialism centers" and North Carolina's popular Governor, Roy Cooper, a "Communist sympathizer." It gets worse. President Biden, she says is a traitor. She wants to execute Barack Obama, maybe in Guantanamo,  and make money off it with a "Pay for View" telecast.  

Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for Attorney General, when he was in the state legislature, authored the infamous bathroom law designating which public bathrooms transgenders may use and barring municipalities from enacting protections for LGBTQ citizens. The measure, which could have cost the state more than $3 billion in business and was opposed by athletic communities, was repealed. 

If there ever are reverse coattails—the bottom of the ticket boosting the top—it would be in North Carolina.