The @GOP has responded to catastrophically to #COVID19 because over the decades their party has been reduced to little more than holding voter attention through culture wars and social wedge issues. It's why their only response to Coronavirus was to politicize wearing masks.

Coronavirus is pushing the @GOP to a breaking point because Republican elected officials long ago forgot what actual governance looks like. The GOP of 2020 exists to confirm right wing judges, and not much else.

#COVID19 is an opponent immune to phony GOP grievance politics.

Think about that press conference where Ron DeSantis bragged that Florida beat #COVID19 without listening to those public health eggheads in Washington. Now Florida is leading the nation in a catastrophic re-infection event, and the governor has...nothing to say.

The @GOP has proven you can win elections through division and dogwhistles, but when your party loses its institutional knowledge of governing, that isn't so easily replaced. It takes decades to rebuild that foundation.

In the meantime, the American people pay the price.

I call it the Gaetzification of the @GOP: once Republicans realized they could reliably win elections solely by amping up an unending culture war, the entire party shifted embraced it.

When you can win without talking about governance at all, you stop caring about governing.

This isn't just specific to Gaetz. Can *you* find any clear @GOP foreign policy? Can *you* explain what their position on tariffs is? They can't, either - because those positions *no longer exist*.

The new @GOP is as a media entity, not a policy entity. It makes TV.

And this is the core of how I think about the @GOP in 2020: it isn't a political party, it's a ruthlessly effective viral marketing agency. Its product is a certain type of folksy, anti-intellectual, anti-progress candidate. Their beliefs aren't important, just their ratings.

When you strategize against the @GOP, you hinder yourself if you think in terms of governance or policy or anything that normally motivates a national party.

You go for emotions. You hit the *person* until they're barely coherent with anger. @ProjectLincoln masters this.

You're not going to out-debate the leading personalities in the @GOP media-political party because they know viewers aren't assigning points based on who knows more.

They want to see someone land a punch. Democrats have been bringing debate cards to a fistfight for years.

For some normally @GOP voters, #COVID19 is the first time a Republican failure of governance has arrived coughing and infectious at their door. Voters are - for this brief moment - questioning the Republican brand.

There's no second shot. Don't fuck this up, Democrats.