The GOP Normie Minority
March 31, 2026
Digby's Hullabaloo
AI Analysis: Name Calling
Those of you who’ve been around a while will remember Stuart Rothenberg, the election analyst who, along with Charlie Cook, were the original stat guys who predicted outcomes. I always thought he was a Republican even though he was known as a non-partisan. It turns out I was right about that. In this feature on his open contempt for Donald Trump he admits that he always strove for objectivity but did vote Republican all those years.
When Trump came along he could not stay quiet about what he was seeing. Lauren Egan at the Bulwark writes: One explanation for the shift could be that Rothenberg is still matter-of-fact about the way politics works—that he didn’t change but politics did, in the Trump-dominated landscape—and so his more blunt language is just what candor requires nowadays. But that’s not how Rothenberg explains it. Instead, he says he has become more outspoken and less “neutral” because he believes that the times demand he take a stand. “There was always a sense when people were listening to me or reading what I wrote, that I was an honest broker. My job was not to impose ideology on my readers, and that worked fine,” Rothenberg told me in a recent interview. “But then Trump entered the scene.” “I just decided it was more important to try to save the country or deal with Trump as an adversary rather than as a neutral person,” he added. “How can you be neutral about Donald Trump?” [] “He’s
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Technique: Name Calling
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