Republicans backed a racist, whimpering totalitarian, and cry "socialism" in the face of tough New Jersey native Analilia Mejia, who today won the Democratic Primary in CD-11 by convincing voters of her strong opposition to the sitting GOP leader.

They're going to have to do better than that, seriously.

Much, much better.

They can start by doing penance, the old-fashioned way.

Hard penance.

In 2017, then-U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11) furrowed his brow to a question about Trump and muttered something about wishing dear Donald wouldn't tweet so much.

A short time later, Frelinghuysen quit his 2018 reelection bid.

That was the same year that Tom Malinowski, running in CD-7 against incumbent U.S. Rep. Leonard Lance chastised the Republican incumbent by noting that Trump's transgressions go beyond his tweets.

"We have a problem," Malinowski said pointedly.

Mejia knows we have a problem.

She knew it then, and she knows it now, and so do the people in CD-11, which for the record occupies a space closer to AOC than Trump's version of the GOP.

The hard-nosed, hard-working Democrat communicated better than anybody in the CD-11 contest the horror of that problem and made her case for why her strong, working-class advocacy best serves the people as a profound Trump counterweight.

Republicans can draw the blinds and complacently fire off the socialism air horns.

But Mejia's public objection to the Trump Administration's murderous and cowardly maintenance of immigration policy that unjustly punishes the most vulnerable among us, and her forcefully present objection to a President who pardoned 1,500 desecrators of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6th, 2021, when Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick of New Jersey lost his life - people who now - conceivably - hide behind the masks of ICE, go to the immediate heart of the matter.

Mejia won at the heart of the matter.

This is not an ideological parlor room anymore.

These are the streets of America.

Mejia won because she owned the streets. The supposed leafy little safe comfort zones of New Jersey suburbia, the place Philip Roth once retreated to, away from the industrial center of his home city of Newark, no longer exist.

They don't exist when at any moment, men in masks and toting guns might show up on your doorstep.

Anywhere.

At any time.

Certainly, they don't exist in isolation and apart from the people scrubbing cars in the car washes, cleaning the floors in the office parks, mowing the lawns of the private properties, or pumping gas. They don't exist in isolation from the country and our innate idealism, bound up in the rule of law and the sacredness of our First Amendment. They are, our streets, the public province of America, not apart, like Trump - never in a fight in his life as he lamely putters on his private golf courses and tries to plaster his cruel name around the world for a terrible price - but combined, together, out here, like the vast and hard and tough-minded country itself, like the strong and dignified working people at our core.

Whatever her ideological predisposition, Mejia in this primary now completed represented before the voters, peacefully and with conviction, this supremely American ideal of liberty, justice and equality and E Pluribus Unum, in the face of unimaginable retreat by the GOP, which shrinks into Trump-enabling oblivion amid hollow howls of "socialism" while Trump obscenely depicts former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michele Obama as apes and publicly advances his Epstein economy.

Republicans, pick up your game.

Get back to your core values.