Headline: “An abnormal Republican Party was treated normally by voters in New Jersey and Virginia”

This was the heading for Washington Post pundit Perry Bacon’s column this morning. It’s the full shocking story in two lines. Voters don’t understand that the Republican Party has become the authoritarian party, the party that failed to remove Trump from office, that tolerates or promotes his Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden, that opposed a full-scale investigation of the January 6th insurrection, and is bent on warping election laws so that Republicans will have an unassailable advantage in future elections. If Democrats can’t change this dynamic within the next year, American democracy will not likely survive.