We’ve all seen pictures of his inauguration crowds, as compared to those of past presidents. Of his various sparsely-attended rallies. We have all the talk about the Dems stealing the election from him-yet not followed through by massive (& spontaneous) million-people demonstrations in his favor. Those that do show up at these things don’t seem to be traditional middle-class types, but those belonging to the extreme RW fringe.
So there’s a true enigma for the past four years. 73 million perfectly willing to vote for him. Yet most don’t, in the end, seem to have any real passion for the guy, at all, despite all of their stated bluster on various media and social sites.
The ratio of people who say they’ll go out with torches and pitchforks, or demonstrate, to people who actually will, is usually something like 10,000 to one.
I think many Trump voters are voting for the Senate, rather than Trump himself. IMO, the logic goes as follows:
If you want conservative judges, you need a Republican president and a Republican Senate. The president chooses the judge candidate, and the Senate gives consent. If the Democrats won the presidential election, which they did, they will not nominate a conservative judge, but a Republican Senate can stop that. A Republican president with a Democratic Senate could not nominate judges either. I think some of these Trump voters were committed Christians, want an end to abortion, and don’t like Trump. They had to vote him in to get what they want.
In addition, putting a third conservative justice on the Supreme Court has effectively given a long-lasting victory to the Christian conservatives anyway. Even with Trump golfing in Florida, the Supreme Court could overturn Roe vs Wade over Biden’s objections.
The right wing online eco-system (social media, youtube, news media) got sunk too deep into their echo chamber that they projected Reagan levels of popularity onto Trump because they wanted to believe it to be true. Trump lost the popular vote by 3,000,000 in 2016 and carried two key swing states by 0.23% and 0.77% (Michigan and Wisconsin). They ignored the data preferring to preach to the choir.
On a general note though population growth, higher levels of youth engagement and higher overall turnout are something that is obvious by the data too. Forget 2020 ━ in 2004 the two candidates both surpassed the highest vote tally in US presidential history. George W. Bush got 12 million more votes in 2004 than 2000. Did his job performance really warrant it? Absolutely not. John Kerry got 12 million more votes than Bill Clinton in 1996. Was he a really charismatic candidate? Absolutely not. But both 2004 and 2020 featured incumbent presidents who had a stigma against their name for the way they got elected (losing the popular vote) and that built up huge enthusiasm to want to vote them out. Therefore it built up huge enthusiasm on the other side to keep them in and shut the naysayers up. The people in the middle decide the election.
One of my favorite bumper stickers from before that 2004 election said
Redefeat George Bush
The funny thing is, if you squint enough you can make that into a statement of support for the guy. IOW: Winning the EV while losing the popular worked last time so let’s do it again in those few key swing states!
Looking at the cars I saw this on, that’s almost certainly not the interpretation they meant.
Have you met Trumps base? they’re very passionate. The GOP has been a party that paid lip service to white nationalism but then governed as plutocrats for decades.
Trump is a bonafide white nationalist. He hates the same people the GOP base hate. Non-whites, foreigners, liberals, democrats, feminists, muslims, civil rights activists, etc. He also shares the hatred of democracy that his base feels passionately about.
Donald Trump is the first GOP candidate in decades who shares the nativism, racism and hatred that the GOP base does, rather than just paying lip service to it to get elected (like Romney, McCain, W Bush, Dole, etc did).
If you haven’t met passionate Trump supporters its probably because you haven’t really been to the places where they congregate or they don’t feel comfortable expressing themselves around you.
I’d wager, perhaps wrongly, that about 30 million Americas are Trumps base who truly embrace his fascism and white nationalism, the other 30-40 million voters are enablers, low information voters, people who vote because of guns/abortion/judges/taxes/etc.
Mass? No, but I have seen small gathering of deluded (and of course non-mask wearing) MAGAites on two local government street corners, waving their flags and insisting trump had really won.
I must say that I’m very surprised at how quickly the Trump signs, car flags, and MAGA hats disappeared here in SoFL after the election.
It was a foregone conclusion to all but the most deluded that he wasn’t going to carry our county, though FL itself was certainly up for grabs and Trump in fact won it.
But before the election we also had lots and lots of very enthused Trumpist partisans and Trumpist rallies and parades and loudspeaker caravans and … Who 99.44% just went dead quiet on Wed Nov 4.
I don’t follow the local news in sufficient detail to say for sure there aren’t occasional street corner haranguers or 10-person mini-demonstrations. But none of my more connected neighbors has mentioned anything about such things either.
Losing has a way of dampening enthusiasm. Plenty of his voters know he lost. Even some true believers are going to think “guess there’s no beating the Deep State” and mostly give up.
As bleak as things sometime look from the progressive viewpoint, prospects appear to be even more grim for the America first, “don’t change anything about the greatest country in the world” crowd. They just voted in record numbers for the guy they see as the savior for the “nation as we know it” and their opponents turned up with seven million more votes. If you were an athlete and your team lost to what you considered a beatable opponent after playing the best game of your lives, you’d be pretty discouraged.
Now, one thing this election caused me to do was to re-evaluate my views on demographics and how inexorable they were in favor of the Dems in elections to come. Things change in ways that are hard to anticipate. But if you’re a Republican right now, at least a realistic one, you’re really concerned about the way certain states and certain demographic groups are trending. Sure, Donald picked up a couple of points with Hispanic and black voters (what a disappointment you are, Florida Cubanos) but overall Pubbies continue to lose those groups by large margins. Women and college educated voters are moving ever more leftward, too, and all of those groups are growing as a share of the electorate.
This may have been the Pickett’s Charge of the right wing crazies. While they can fight on for years yet, some of them (who knows how many?) have to be thinking that there are no great permanent victories for them on the horizon.
From the Trumpers I know, many aren’t actually seeing it that way, even though your viewpoint is accurate. They see it as “Trump would have won if it weren’t for the pandemic” (ignoring the fact that the pandemic was largely due to Trump’s refusal to contain it) and “Democrats cheated on a huge level.”
In other words, if they could just prevent Democrats cheating and have no pandemic, Trump would have ‘rightfully’ won big and so their prospects are in fact rosy indeed, just hampered by shenanigans. Their future focus won’t be on gaining votes, but rather, putting a stop to Democratic cheating.
I think that’s very true with much of the uninformed rank and file and even prominent GOP leaders will voice those same ideas. But they are probably saying the opposite privately and the smart people in the party, those responsible for actually constructing a winning election, know the reality of the matter and that they have big problems going forward.
I might suggest that one big mistake they’ve made is with their reliance on voter suppression. Those tactics have been brought out into the light in recent years and the backlash from those affected is considerable. Republicans may have reached the point where they can no longer suppress as many votes as they motivate to oppose them. If we actually are at that tipping point now, they’re in even bigger trouble in the cycles ahead.
Add note: with each passing year we get closer to 2032, when 140 million eligible voters born since 1980 will be supporting Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s run for the White House. Twelve years is an eternity in politics but I think that prospect scares the shit out of Republican strategists.
I agree. The Republicans are caught in a demographic bind. They’ve tied themselves too much to giving special treatment to rural white men. It’s alienating every voter who isn’t a rural white man (and it’s alienating a lot of us who are rural white men). But if the Republicans try to expand beyond their rural white male base, that alienates the rural white men who signed on with the Republicans because they were promised special treatment.
Voter suppression has become a necessity for the Republicans. They simply don’t have a majority supporting them; the only way they can win elections is keeping the majority from voting (or keeping their votes from deciding the outcome).