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The Slow Death of the Old Guard GOP

The GOP is ready for change. Big change.

Before I talk about right now, I want to point out a little talked-about fact from the 2016 election. The establishment of the republican party had a dismal performance. The outsiders routed them. Trump took 1441 delegates while Ted Cruz took 551. Establishment guys Marco Rubio and John Kasich took 173 & 161, respectively, but this isn't the whole story.

There were a lot of establishment candidates, and a lot of them did next to nothing in the polls. Guys like Lindsey Graham, Jim Gilmore, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, George Pataki, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum never really got off the ground. Jeb Bush only managed to embarrass his family. Outsider candidates like Trump, Cruz, Ben Carson, and a couple others collectively took over 70% of the votes from the so-called "mainstream" of the GOP.

This is not an anomaly of Trump. Even if you take out his numbers, the outsiders still held their own with the establishment. So who's mainstream now?

Fast forward to today. Sitting Arizona junior Senator Jeff Flake is a traditional, establishment neocon republican politician in about every sense, and he is a top Trump critic within the president's party. He is pro-free trade, pro-immigration, big on defense, and so far he hasn't met a war he didn't like. Did I mention he hates Trump?

In his book Conscience of a Conservative, Flake describes Trump voters as feeling abandoned and ignored, and enamored and entertained by candidate Trump who offers simple answers to immensely complex questions. Let me put that another way. Flake is here to explain that you, the electorate, are too stupid to understand the intricacies of politics, and you voted for the jester.

He goes on in his book to attack those who attacked Obama, and the Congressmen who collectively resisted Obama's agenda.

Flake is up for reelection next year, and is currently trailing 14 percentage points against his republican primary challenger, former State Senator Dr. Kelli Ward. It's almost unheard of for an incumbent Senator to be this far behind this early in the game.

Democrats also consider his seat one of the most vulnerable to a democratic challenger and will no doubt invest heavily in defeating him. His political career is probably over.

So how did Flake end up on the ropes and assailed from both sides? Simply put, he's a dinosaur. The GOP establishment, and certainly Flake, are enamored with fiscal policy and the ideals of the Constitution that they've helped erode, and happily continue to fight a rear-guard action against the ceaseless onslaught of the culture war that the party lost without offering serious resistance.

For the GOP electorate, the jig is up. Most of the electorate no longer cares about GOP economics; they are absolutely sick of forced public sexual degeneracy; they are angry over the loss of cultural identity that accompanies Flake's globalist politics.

They want jobs, low taxes, criminals off the streets, and they don't give a crap about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, except to know it's a scam to make bankers richer than they currently are. And they're right.

The GOP of old seems like a leviathan, ascendant and unbeatable. However this is a facade. The establishment is big, but it's a dying beast laboring for breath. Guys like Flake, Graham, Kasich and others are part of this old guard. The only thing it has today is the only thing it has faithfully served the last 50 years: Money. Money that can do a lot of things, but it can't vote.

Flake and the others talk a great game, but in the end they only serve money. That's why he's going to lose. That's why a lot of them are going to lose. They will change with the times, or they will lose.

Frankly this change can't happen fast enough. We're sick of the GOP. We're sick of the latest degeneracy that's ruining our culture going almost unremarked upon, much less challenged, much less defeated. We're sick of seeing what few good middle-class jobs are left in the country packing up for overseas. We're sick of public and private institutions attacking our values. We're sick of this party of liars, Flake chief amongst them. We're ready for a changing of the guard in the GOP.

contra mundum