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ExpressVPN.com slash men. Republicans are on a giant losing streak. They're on a losing streak for

two main reasons. First, Republicans have disconnected themselves from data. Second, Republicans

have embraced the performative over the substantive. First, the Republican disconnection.

Feedback is the only way to course correct when you're doing anything in life wrong. If you refuse to adjust to the data you receive when you take an action, you're likely to continue making the same mistakes over and over and over. And yet Republicans have decided that data are our enemy. Not that data ought to be questioned and examined and taken with a grain of salt, all of which is true. Republicans have entirely obliterated the feedback mechanism. Republicans very often seem to believe that the

echo chambers that we've created are some sort of reality, that the Republican perspective

represents a sort of silent majority, that the more extreme the rhetoric expressed, the less

public support received, the more silent the majority. The problem isn't disconnection, is that nobody will express their support for the Republican

position, which is what they actually believe.

Now, that may be drawn certain issues.

The parents' right movement is a great example, a broiling undercurrent of dissatisfaction

that broke out into the open in Virginia in 2021 that polls weren't quite capturing.

But it isn't true overall.

Republicans have now created an unfalsifiable thesis. When we do something that's kind of

unpopular, it's probably actually still popular because polling doesn't matter. And as it turns out,

the other form of data feedback elections, those don't matter either. That attitude has been

reinforced over and over again by Donald Trump.

Because Trump won in 2016, despite the data, Republicans correctly inferred there were systemic

problems with the data. And that was true in 2016. But then Republicans concluded that all data

were not merely to be taken with a grain of salt. They could be disregarded entirely. And that

was particularly true with regard to Trump. If Trump won, it was because the data were wrong. And if he lost, the data were still wrong and he had won. When Trump won in 2016, it's because the data weren't to be trusted, which was true. And when Trump lost in 2020, it's because the elections weren't to be trusted. This is why Trump can keep getting away with losing. The Republican Party

is the de facto party of Donald Trump's leadership until somebody else rests it away from him.

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