Politico reports:

Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election have met with defeat in every swing state and in nearly every court where his cases have been heard. But Trump’s campaign to pressure GOP elected officials to support his baseless claims of a rigged election — and his success in convincing a majority of the party that widespread voter fraud occurred — is already showing signs of having far-reaching effects that will reshape the Republican Party for years to come.

State party chairs are tearing into their governors. Elected officials are knifing one another in the back. Failed candidates are seizing on Trump’s rhetoric to claim they were also victims of voter fraud in at least a half dozen states.

As his presidency comes to a close, Trump has not only imprinted his smash-mouth style on the GOP, he has wrenched open the schism between the activist class and the elected class, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican Party officials and strategists in the states.

“This is Hatfield and McCoy stuff, but it’s McCoy on McCoy, or Hatfield on Hatfield,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “To see activists across the country really just with pitchforks and torches at the capitols … it’s just bonkers.”

In the short term, the forces unleashed by Trump threaten the party’s prospects in the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoff. But the infighting also stands to reshape the party for the long haul, with implications for the midterm elections and the presidential nominating contest in 2024.

In recent weeks, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, told the state’s Republican governor to shut up on Twitter in a feud over the integrity of Arizona’s election, which Biden won — choosing Trump over the state’s highest ranking Republican Party official. Ward’s counterpart in Georgia, David Shafer, joined the state’s two Republican senators in attacking the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, while leaving Trump to tear into Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

In Michigan, the state Republican Party chair, Laura Cox, stood by Trump’s campaign as it pressed Republican lawmakers to override the popular vote in her state — something Republican legislative leaders have said repeatedly they won’t do.

Enmity between the Republican Party’s populist and establishment wings has existed in some form for years, long predating Trump. But Trump’s domination of the party has exacerbated the gulf between them, and his persistent demand that Republicans choose sides has left little room for compromise.

He is leaving the party at an unfamiliar crossroads: The outgoing president is a defeated candidate, but unlike recent one-term presidents, he is adored by the base and is the source of a significant expansion of the GOP’s ranks. Millions of Republican voters remain convinced, without evidence, that the election was unfairly taken from him. And Trump will leave behind a party apparatus controlled by loyalists unbeholden to less populist, less Trumpian holdovers.

The result is that many of the party’s field officers in the states are preparing to dig in to ensure that Trump — and his style of politics — remains the party’s guiding light. [Continue reading…]