The GOP isn’t moderating, it’s swinging right.

Don’t expect a redeemed Republican party, the 2020 election has triggered a further rightward drift.

The Republican party is a political zombie, no matter how many times you kill it, no matter how many catastrophes it presides over or how out of step it is with 21st century mainstream America, it keeps coming back from the dead, thanks the America’s minoritarian antidemocratic institutions. And let’s not forget, all the while, it gets more and more extreme.

This is happening yet again. Those that believed a Trump defeat would somehow snap the GOP out of its 40 year worsening fever dream were deeply naïve and deeply wrong; the party is moving further to the right. The Texas Republican party is flirting with the rhetoric of QANON, the party is ignoring the incoming impeachment trial, and opportunistic officials are vying to be the inheritor of Trump’s still furious base.

That huge Trumpian voter base hasn’t gone, and isn't going anywhere. That by itself is enough incentive for Republicans to continue to embrace the radical right and the assorted QANON conspiratorial cranks. The party is beyond help, has been for a long time, and it’s about to get even worse.

The question isn’t hoping it moderates, it’s about consistently beating it into the ground at the ballot box. Three things need to be done here.

Democrats need to fight for reform, the scrapping of the filibuster and the electoral collage, and a more proportional system of electing to the House and crucially the Senate. Democrats fight elections with both hands tied behind their back, let's see them change it.

An absolute must if for the new Democratic government to actually deliver for working people and their base over the next two year, showing that they aren’t just making empty promises, and if the working class in all its diversity turns out for them, they’ll repay by delivering policy wins.

Finally, Democrats must wield the images of the capitol siege and clear extremism of the GOP to run attack ads demonising and exposing Republican candidates and scaring off floating voters. Republicans did this with Democrats very effectively by lying through their teeth; there’s buckets of real material with Republicans.