Do you remember that old Jerry Seinfeld bit about how rooting for a sports team is akin to cheering for laundry? As the argument goes, players come and go (sometimes even to an archrival) but what stays the same is a fan’s loyalty to a team. As Seinfeld put it in the clip below:
“You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt. They hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!”
I thought of that bit recently when I saw comments made by Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire regarding next year’s presidential race.
Sununu, if you recall, just last year called former president Donald Trump “fucking crazy,” and passed on an opportunity to run for president because, as he said at the time, he wanted to devote his time to defeating Trump and believed he would be more able to “speak candidly about issues” if he were “untethered from the limitations of a presidential campaign.”
And now? Well, Sununu would still like Trump to lose the nomination battle, but if he doesn’t then the governor says he will certainly vote for the former president next fall. His reasoning? “I’m a Republican… I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about.”
Even if they’re “fucking crazy,” apparently.
Sununu, like many Americans in recent years, has been sucked into the morass of negative partisanship. More voters now are choosing candidates based primarily on hostility to an opposition party rather than on support for a particular candidate.
In 2016, Trump won the presidency even though more than 60% of voters found him unqualified to be president. Clearly, many voters who were uncomfortable with Trump nonetheless voted for him simply because they disliked Hillary Clinton more.
That’s negative partisanship.
That’s Governor Sununu, vowing to cast a presidential vote for a candidate whom he finds utterly crazy just because he can’t fathom supporting a player from the other team.
Once upon a time in American politics, there were actually elections when a presidential candidate would occasionally win a landslide victory, whether due to an economic debacle or when one of the major party candidates seemed too far out of the mainstream (see 1964 with Barry Goldwater, or 1972 with George McGovern).
For that to happen, a fair number of people had to vote for a party they might not typically support. For some percentage of the voting population, however, this choice was deemed necessary because the alternative felt unacceptable. Those days don’t exist anymore, or at least not in our current era.
The reality today is that no matter how far out of the mainstream Donald Trump ventures, no matter how much legal jeopardy he amasses, no matter how much of a threat he may pose to the foundations of American democracy, the majority of the Republican party will remain in his corner. Because, from this perspective, anything is better than a Democrat in office.
Or, to put it in Seinfeldian terms, we’re voting for laundry.
There are some Republicans who have, of course, broken from the former president because of his outlandish stands or out of fear for what a second Trump term might mean for the country.
Chris Christie, notably, has suggested that Trump is a wannabe dictator and is pounding the case against the former president every day on the campaign trail. Trump’s former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, has called his former boss “unfit for office.” Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows said Trump is “the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”
There are others, as well, including former Congressman Adam Kinzinger. But no one has been more clear-eyed, steadfast and relentless in this respect than former Representative Liz Cheney. Ever since January 6, 2021, she has been unwavering about her fidelity to the Constitution above president or party.
Cheney was shunned by the GOP and lost her Congressional career because of this stand but she has never vacillated. In recent interviews, she asserted that the nation is “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that her own party presents a threat to democracy if it wins full power in 2024.
In a rebuke to those like Sununu who believe partisan victories matter above all else, she is adamant. "You can't both be for Donald Trump and for the Constitution. You have to choose."
You have to choose. It’s not always the most comfortable position for someone who has become accustomed to voting for laundry, but when the choice might be between democracy and authoritarianism, well, maybe it’s not the worst thing to wear different clothes for one election.