South Carolina - The Latest Masterclass in Republican Weakness
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a hallmark of the Uniparty right
The goal is to win the whole damn thing. If you’re playing one game, like a bowl game in football, then win that one game. But if you’re playing a series, a tournament of some sorts, or positioning yourself to win a war rather than a single battle, then the correct plan is to play it to win it all. Let me give you a textbook example from my college days at Ole Miss.
My Rebels hosted the first Oxford Regional at the end of the 2004 baseball season - a four-team, double-elimination tournament. We hosted Tulane, Washington, and Western Kentucky. The winner of this regional tournament would advance to play in the Super Regional round, a best-of-three series to see who advanced to Omaha to play in the College World Series. We were the favorites, but Tulane and Washington were tough cookies. We, thanks to our #1 seed, played #4 seed Western Kentucky on Friday night to get started. NCAA baseball regionals aren’t like basketball, in which we never had a #16 seed defeat a #1 until only recently, but the #1 seed normally beats the #4 seed in all but one or two matchups every year (losses do happen, because it’s baseball).
Tulane had beaten Washington earlier that afternoon. Our coach decided he wanted to save our ace pitcher, Mark Holliman, to face Tulane in the next game, provided we beat Western Kentucky in our first game. We started our utility star, a two-way player named Stephen Head who pitched and crushed the ball as our everyday first baseman when he wasn’t on the mound. He was a true gamer and a three-time All-American at Ole Miss, and a high draft pick in 2005. Stephen went out there and dominated Western Kentucky, a team from a small conference that usually turns out overmatched when on the field with titans from the big conference. Head threw a great game, and gave up just one run in the top of the second on a sacrifice fly. Simulate this game from the second inning on a computer with them only having one run, and the model will come back with a 99% likelihood the 2004 Ole Miss squad will win easily.
The box score would find it that Western Kentucky’s little lefty, Grady Hinchman, working with an 86 mile-per-hour fastball, carved up our lineup and dodged danger and warning track fly balls to throw a one-hit shutout, sending us to a 1-0 defeat and straight into the loser’s bracket of our own regional, and a premature end to an otherwise excellent season the very next day. That is baseball, and you know it if you’re a baseball fan. But here’s the deal - Coach Bianco made the right call to start Head. Head did his job, gave up a few shanked hits and a sacrifice fly, and couldn’t get a lick of offensive support.
Our goal was to win the whole tournament, and in almost all cases, you’re way better off having your ace to deal with the likely #2 seed for the Saturday night game. It has worked in Bianco’s favor in the years since, but for many seasons following the 2004 heartbreaker, he would always burn his ace against the #4 seed on Friday night, and lose that arm for the rest of the tournament.
This year’s war that must be won is the 2026 race for the U.S. House. The goal is to hold a Republican majority - nothing more, nothing less. The map will snap back to normal elasticity and behavior in a presidential year, but we are in a once every eight to twelve years scenario in which we must brace for the hurricane-force winds of a midterm under the watch of a Republican president. You should know by now that the stats are terrible for the president’s party going back to 1934:
Republicans thought they’d seen it all with the Indiana Senate, which has since undergone a makeover thanks to their treachery, refusing to redistrict the state despite their Democrat counterparts in California and Virginia going all out to max out their blue representation.
“That’s just not who we are,” they say. The party of principles is still, ten years into the Trump era, largely unwilling to get in the trench and sling the mud necessary to bury a movement that wants to shred what remains of the concept of Constitutional Republic. Mike Pence is out there ranting about returning to “traditional conservative values” so the GOP can win Texas, Georgia, and Arizona by more while going belly up in Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, just like old times. None of these people seem to know what the hour is, and that extends all the way to the state legislatures:
Meet South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, representing District 25, who let this disaster out yesterday while standing against redistricting South Carolina to honor the Supreme Court’s ruling that racially-drawn districts should be discarded and redrawn: “Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable.” Is this guy taking bribes?
I had the misfortune of sitting around a table with several South Carolina legislators a few years ago. This was when President Trump was still caught up in the Biden DOJ’s lawfare, and let me tell you, they were rooting for him to go down so their choice for President could go forward. None of them wanted to talk about election corruption, and after a while, I lost interest in the conversation and went on my way.
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