Thread by @SteveSchmidtSES

This is a great piece of political reporting and analysis. It is revelatory and accurate at a surgical level of precision. Every person who cares about winning the 2022 elections for the American Pro Democracy coalition should read and understand what it means. (1)

https://twitter.com/hotlinejosh/status/1402595396216573955

Strategy Memo: There have been three elections in the last 120 years (1902, 1934, 2002) where the Incumbent President’s party has picked up seats in the first mid term election. Presently, Democrats hold the Senate by virtue of @VP’s tie breaking vote while holding the House by

five seats. @ProjectLincoln is operating on the optimistic premise that Democratic redistricting losses will be 12 seats which turns the majority into a functional -7 minority by the morning of Election Day 2022. (3)

.@ProjectLincoln believes this article validates our strategy to provoke chaos and infighting over Trump. We hope to help advance the craziest and most unelectable Republican candidates all over the country into General elections where they can be (4)

electorally crushed. Here is the formula. We want to force every vulnerable Republican out of their spider holes and wherever possible draw them into Trumps revenge and conspiracy fantasies. We want Trump to know the names of the disloyal sheep who lack devotion to his 5)

autocratic madness for the purposes of placing them on Trump’s political kill list. The goal of @ProjectLincoln is to help (proverbially)burn Americas’ large and powerful autocratic movement to the ground. We do not live in normal times. We face the worst crisis in our 6)

democracy since the Civil War and the battlefield is confusing. Since January the Republican Party has contracted to historically low levels. It was down to 34 percent at last checking. This has happened because of the overwhelming revulsion to the murderous attack on our 7)

country by Trump’s mob. This means there are multitudes of voters who voted for Trump who finally left him. I believe Trump was right about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue but in the end we did actually find the boundary of his disgrace for GOP voters and it was 1/6.

The GOP is shrinking. It is getting smaller. It is important to understand basic political physics in order to understand the result of the “shrinkage” ht @IJasonAlexander. When political parties shrink they become more extreme. Extreme movements impose purity tests and those 8)

purity tests lead to purges. See @Liz_Cheney case study. This party is of a particular type. It is the vessel of an authoritarian movement that seeks to come to power via an elections process. It is a fusion party that combines vestigial Republicans with a charismatic leader 9)

that has built a cult of personality around previously fringe groups. In this case we are talking about Proud Boys, white supremacists and other societal cancers. Within this fusion party the chief virtues are willful blindness and delusion among the vestigial republicans about

the reality of their new team. Thus, the desire to move on from 1/6 by adopting the strategy of pretending it never happened suits a deeply seated psychological need as well as fulfilling a political necessity. The necessity is simple. The GQP want to lull the GOP voters who 11

defected to Democrats in 18 and Biden in 20 back by erasing memories of what drove them away and replacing them with fears from the culture war they are waging. The message is simple and anywhere a right wing autocratic movement has ever come to power electorally it has 12

Effectively stoked fear of an imaginary left that is directed by unseen and nefarious forces, usually Jews, but in this case it includes black, brown and Asian Americans. The story is always the same. It is the message of the gangster. I’m here to protect you from those people 13

Who seek to destroy you. Always, always always this is the message. The Fox hate and lie machine is running at full blast. It’s why they won’t run the @MeidasTouch ad that offers Police testimony about the 1/6 attack. They will do anything to make the memory of that day fade. 14

It must not. It defines our present and will write our future if we do not treat the growing Metastic cancer in our democracy before it is too late. The GQP wants to run a campaign about critical race theory, cancel culture and a noxious stew of grievance, resentment and fear.15

Democratic leaders are making it easy by living in a delusional world where cooperation and bipartisanship are always just around the corner. There is an urgent national necessity to account for the attack on America by a Commission and to respond to the full frontal assault 16

Against voting rights on the basis of a premeditated lie that has been nourished by conspiracy theories in the name of Trump: The failure to recognize the nature of this fight and the absolute urgency of the moment might be the reason we lose American democracy for our kids.

Should that happen it will be a tragedy and catastrophe not just for Americans but for all of humanity and history, but by all means keep looking. I hear there is some bipartisanship in those hills #