THE DESPERATE NEED TO BELIEVE THAT NON-FOX, NON-TRUMP REPUBLICANISM EXISTS

No, this won't work:

Former Olympic decathlete and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner on Friday officially announced her bid for governor of California.

... Jenner, a longtime Republican, is seeking to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election....

She's assembled a team of prominent GOP operatives including Tony Fabrizio, the top pollster on Donald Trump's 2016 and 2020 campaigns....

She's also hired Steven Cheung, a former Trump White House and campaign communications hand who worked on Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful 2003 recall campaign.

Trump's former campaign manager Brad Parscale, a personal friend of Jenner’s, has helped her assemble her team but doesn’t plan to take an official title on the campaign.

So will she get votes from Trump admirers? Short answer: Are you nuts? In today's Republican Party, the True Conservatives hate trans people almost as much as they hate undocumented immigrants. To commenters at Breitbart, the mere notion of referring to her with female pronouns, or as Caitlyn, is repugnant.

It's a He.

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And always will be. If he wants to pretend he looks female he needs a REALLY good doctor to alter his man-hands, shoulders and feet. And skull.
He's not fooling anyone.
Wearing girl's clothes doesn't make you a girl.

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Stealing a line from South Park, "she's" a Transvestite Donkey Witch

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And if he wants to run for office he should stop the masquerade.

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It’s not a masquerade, it’s a mental disorder.

Also...

Jenner publicly voiced support for Trump until 2018, when he rolled back federal guidelines allowing transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice. "My hope in him ... was misplaced," she wrote.

"Certainly she has not seen eye-to-eye with [Trump] on a lot of things," [an] adviser said.

Forget it. You have to kiss the God Emperor's ring or Trumpers won't vote for you. (And that matters, even in California -- remember, Trump got six million votes there, more than he won in any other state. Joe Biden, of course, got eleven million.)

But maybe Jenner wants to appeal to moderates?

Jenner, a trans woman, "is very socially liberal,” the adviser said. "She's running as someone that's socially liberal and fiscally conservative."

Except that, as Lee Drutman of the Voter Study Group demonstrated after analyzing the results of the 2016 election, hardly anyone in the electorate is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Or as Paul Krugman put it,

More generally, the socially-liberal/economically conservative position -- the lower right quadrant in this figure -- is basically the Empty Quadrant of American politics -- except in green rooms 5/ pic.twitter.com/fNXcxLV9bg

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 29, 2019

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So that won't work this year -- and no, Chris Cillizza, the fact that Tim Scott, the GOP's only Black senator, is delivering the Republican response to President Biden's forthcoming address to Congress doesn't mean he's a favorite for the party's presidential nomination in 2024.

"Once President Trump was elected, Scott began separating himself from his party by opposing many of Trump's judicial and administration nominees, often raising comments about past statements or actions on race," reads the Almanac of American Politics about the South Carolina Republican.

In the wake of Trump's comments that there were "some very fine people on both sides" of the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Scott blasted the then-President. "Racism is real. It is alive," Scott said, adding: "What we want to see from our President is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised. ... There's no question about that." ...

But while Scott has not been as reflexively loyal to Trump as many of his Senate (and House) colleagues, he's remained on the former President's good side. He endorsed Trump's reelection bid and spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2020. And he defended Trump following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol...

That careful balancing act has made Scott something of a rarity in Republican politics these days: Someone liked by the Trump base and by the party establishment. ([Nikki] Haley may be Scott's biggest competition for that role in the party at the moment.)

Yes, and how are Scott and Haley doing in the polls? In a recent survey by John McLaughlin, a pollster who's worked for Trump, Scott gets a whopping 1% of the vote from potential GOP primary voters. (Haley gets 2% in a field that includes Trump and 3% in a field without him; without Trump, Ron DeSantis gets 14% and Mike Pence gets 19% -- and even Candace Owens, who's Black but delivers the red meat Scott doesn't, and Haley rarely does, outdoes both Scott and Haley, with 4% of the vote.)

I'm not saying it's impossible for a candidate of color to win the Republican nomination -- but in order to do it, you'd have to focus on the message that liberals are pure evil and have a monopoly on racism, which is the message Owens regularly delivers.

Cillizza thinks Scott can raise his profile by working with Democrats on police reform.

If Scott could find a way to negotiate a bipartisan compromise on such a hot-button issue -- and show he has the ability to deliver GOP votes for the proposal, it would be a major feather in his cap.

But that's not what he's there to do; he's there to make it appear as if Republicans are serious about this issue, and then to make no real effort to reach a compromise, at which point he'll accuse Democrats of negotiationg in bad faith. Every right-wing pontificator in America will then say that the Democrat Party is the party of racism -- did you know Robert Byrd was in the Klan? -- and Scott with mothballed again until the next time he's needed to make the GOP seem like a non-racist party. And if I'm wrong and he were somehow to strike a deal with Senate Democrats, that would be the end of his career as a Republican elected official.

Scott might be DeSantis's running mate in 2024, though I'm skeptical -- why risk alienating base voters who've been fed a steady diet of Tucker Carlson's white nationalism for years? But he won't be the party's presidential nominee. If he runs for president, he won't win a single delegate.