things like ballot harvesting are extremely easy when you fuck up the rules of voting to the point you just have to dump ballots in a designated mail box.
And then a based mailman throws them into a ditch and gets incarcerated thereafter for his good deeds done for MAGA. It was a messy and somewhat ad-hoc system that had bumps being a large expansion of the absentee-ballots system -- and so was the transition for most businesses to working from home. Yet in both cases, for all of the little growing pains and particulars to learn, the simple truth is that they went far smoother than any doomersayer could predict - and they're here to stay.
I would be willing to take more seriously qualms with the election system if people had managed to substantiate any of them - with pictures, with video evidence, with specific and targeted examples of abuse. I followed a lot of the court cases that managed to get beyond basic issues of "this apparently wasn't a problem with you guys until you needed a cope for losing," and even then there just wasn't much there. I think the one case in Wisconsin concerning ballot drop-offs contravened some amorphous text in a prior ruling, but there was nothing suggesting that the ballots themselves were somehow fraudulent or suspect. As it stands, "well, isn't it theoretically possible that something bad could have happened that somehow missed any and all detection and documentation, and it would benefit me grossly if it were true?" is the prevailing rhetoric.
States that bought into the cope have passed voting restrictions (that they previously dawdled on), and by and large for all of the whining from democrats that this somehow "interferes with democracy," those restrictions will stand and won't really have an influence on the overall outcome. Far more worrying (and wholly unchecked by democrats or progressives or the mass media) is that republicans have started overtaking state-level election official positions, and have seen fit to start rewriting shit carte blanche that will trigger lengthy court battles and rather seriously throw the validity of elections into question - such as the Georgian example of a bureaucratic official being able to completely throw out election results if they happen to feel that they are suspect. Serious political magazines and outlets have been raising hackles, but there's like a dozen people who read those total
The idea of having Paul Ryan repeats is possible, but the base has been at war against those people for a while. I view it as a half-life with them with their strangle hold lessening each election cycle.
Well, the base are also in a sense transplants. The base are dixiecrats brought over from the Nixon days, broadened out in the same way that the democrats have by getting a bunch of apolitical people into politics. Moreso the complaint with the Paul Ryan tax bill is that this faction already wielded significant power in 2016-2018, yet it lacked the political will to actually deliver anything to its constituents. It passed performative politics and not much else of note beyond that tax plan.
I don't expect that a more "unified" iteration of the party getting into power achieves much otherwise, since you still have the obvious internal conflict between conspiratard qboomers and people who just want to resuscitate the manufacturing industry or revitalize decaying infrastructure to both lessen reliance on international supply lines and offer better support to smaller towns and communities - both are slices of that base.
Getting anything done requires a lot of whipping and hog-trading and ear-marking even in the best of times, and it's a wide gulf between passing actual policies that improve the lives of their constituents and passing change-nothing do-nothing shit like "you can't teach sex ed in kindergarten," which is codified virtue-signaling. It also means that experienced players like McConnell, who know how to direct and use political will, are far more likely to get their initiatives done even if they're an extreme minority of those holding office.
Naturally, all of this would be changed if the people being voted into power... were serious people, with serious ambitious, and serious goals and items, who actually understood how the american political process works. Instead, you're increasingly getting entertainers whose political theory and understanding isn't much removed from conspiracy theorists on welfare or mid-30s neets edgeposting about how based an ethnostate would be while waiting for mom to finish up dinner.
DeSantis is a figure to watch in Florida, since he seems to actually grasp how government works and how you get stuff done in-office. If he gets more and more of the reigns, it might inspire more people with real political goals to take the position of leaders, rather than ideology-free culture warriors looking to grift in the same exact way that AOC did on the other side of things.
