You’ll have to do more than that to convince me that heart disease, cancer, accidents and stroke, and the old and obese that they may strike more often, are skewed toward right wingnuts. I can’t speak for rural red America, but there are lots of urban blues who also have those conditions.
In other words, I think Covid is an outlier in this respect.
The not-so-invisible hand working against Republicans, such that time and tide are against them, is the increasing percentage of non-white voting citizens.
I agree with that–bad health is everywhere. The assumption in the essay is that Trump has more support in rural America. It’s true that obesity is worse in rural counties. Probably most relevant is that rural hospitals are decreasing and, I believe, less prepared to handle sudden increases of COVID patients.
Plus, Covid patients take up bed space for other folks. And rural hospital’s transfer their overflow and critical patients into the cities, but there are reports in Kansas City that our critical care hospitals are full up and not accepting any/many transfers.
I do this kind of weird math - minus the Covid calculations - in my head with regularity. If voting patterns remain as rigid as they’ve become, the national electorate swings leftward by about two million every four years. This does not constitute short term guarantees (see: Virginia).
I believe every Republican strategist recognizes this trend and it is the compelling reason behind every political move they make.
Wouldn’t a more logical course be to see which way the wind is blowing (which they do), and take advantage of the political shift to make their party more attractive instead of trying to control the wind?
They seem to have given up on that. Dubya was positioned to bring Hispanics into the Republican party, what with a Mexican-American sister-in-law and namesake nephew. But they went another way post 2012.
There’s a trade-off between saying things which appeal to non-White voters and turning off the MAGA crowd.
The Republican Party exists solely to convince the majority of the population that the rich are just like them, and that they too can be rich some day, if only those (tailored to audience) weren’t trying to get something for free. Because if they ever fail to do that, the majority will drag the rich out of their mansions in the Hamptons and hang them all from street lamps.
There is plenty of room in the middle, between adulating the rich and assassinating them, that would make most of us perfectly happy. One example: just stop subsidizing them.
It’s not easy finding conservative thought pieces where they acknowledge the coming demographic issues but it’s not impossible either. In particular, Rod Dreher and the gang at The American Conservative are pretty straight forward about the strong possibility that the right has permanently lost the two generations of voters who will dominate US politics for decades.
TAC’s response to this is to hunker down into small but steadfastly conservative enclaves (the “Benedict Option,” I believe they call it) and ride out the storm until new conservative generations appear in reaction to leftist abuses.
But yeah, in the meantime they’re going to use an unrepresentative political system and legislative shenanigans to hold onto power for as long as they can.
That’s bad enough, but even worse is installing corrupt officials in the Secretary’s of State offices who are not dedicated to a secure and accurate count. Trump will win with 98% of the vote, and they will feel no shame at all.
Not even, really. There’s plenty of social conservatism to be found in the religious sectors of Latin American culture. All the GOP needs to do to arrest its slide is stop being dicks to brown people, and they can even the scales for the foreseeable future.
That they are unable to do this is basically everything we need to know about their true motivations.
Agreed. Even now, they could become a functioning party and recover a percentage of the independents that they’ve been steadily losing for years. They are committed to fascism at this point, it seems to me.
