Exactly, it makes no sense from a demographic perspective!
Look at this quote from my local newspaper, The Orlando Sentinel:
An NBC News poll showed that just 50% of people who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 were vaccinated. Of Republicans in general, 55% were vaccinated. By comparison, 91% of Biden voters and 88% of Democrats are vaccinated, the poll found.
You see what I see, right? 50% of Trump voters are vaccinated. 91% of Biden voters are vaccinated. Just as an anecdote, 80% of inpatients at our local hospitals are unvaccinated, and an even higher percentage of fatalities were unvaccinated. Banning school mask mandates or other helpful health measures will disproportionately hurt Republicans. So why do it?
It appears that when Trump recently said during a speech that people should get vaccinated he got booed.
While Republican governors have mostly come out for vaccinations, the Southern ones don’t seem to be really pushing for it, perhaps due to fears of being primaried. And if you downplay Covid in order to be against mask mandates it is hard to then say getting vaccinated is critical.
ISTM that they’re only picking this fight because they want to hurt Biden and then run against Biden’s failures. The same playbook behind refusing to expand Medicaid.
Pretty much. And they’re willing to bet that a few hundred or even a few thousand deaths among their voters won’t be enough to cost them their next election.
Yes, welcome to the modern dark ages.
The greatest empire in the history of humankind is about to fall with a reformation/renaissance due in hundreds of years (Visigoths and Goths to the right, Lombard and Vandals to the left please – or in this case White Evangelical Nationalists to right, White Supremacists including Proud Boys to the far right). Religious extremism controlling the peasant population who defer to their masters who tell them what to believe and how to vote.
As Loki taught us in the first movie – humans (at least it seems, the ones on the American right) want to be ruled and told what and how to think. We have the absolute RIGHT to be free from masks and vaccinations!! And we will defend those freedoms to the death – Do you hear us, to the death!
(Wait what did we just say? But the Church which in this case is the personality cult known as Trumpism has told us how to feel and think and believe in these matters making our lives simple and restoring greatness!!)
In my observations, recently Republicans can ONLY be against things, they can only obstruct and try to defeat, they have no ability to be for anything. Current Republicans are only “for” resisting the Democrats as ThelmaLou points out.
Yup, they showed this by obstructing just about everything during both Obama terms, and accomplishing exactly nothing during the trumpy years.
And yet right now, everything they do is about getting elected and keeping Republicans in office. Besides promoting covid, the thing they are most passionate about is voter suppression. Why? To what end? In fact, to no particular end at all.
Well, they did, thanks to Mr. McConnell, manage to steal two of the three Supreme Court seats they filled. But yes, except for destroying things they accomplished NOTHING, you are correct!
Mr. Paul Weyrich begs to differ! Creating a boogie man to blame every Democratic politician for, and suppressing voter turnout is fundamental to the cause as demonstrated here:
Most of these people are in states that are currently deep red. They don’t have to worry about losing to a Democrat, they have to worry about losing the primary to someone who is further right and a better Trump ass kisser than they are.
As for voter suppression, they saw what happened in Georgia, and they realize that if they don’t do something now they might start losing some of these states. They may be evil, but they’re not stupid.
Except maybe for killing their voters, but rather a bunch of Republicans die than lose the primary.
I’m afraid that my only quibble with your analysis here is that I suspect a number of Republicans “misunderestimated” their constituents’ commitment to passionate rejection of vaccines and masks as part of their Burn Everything Down tantrum.
They thought that some residual instinct of rational self-preservation would kick in once the vaccines became widely available and dropping case numbers confirmed that the vaccines worked. They didn’t realize how many of their constituents were in full-on “I’m not going to do anything the government tells me to do, so there!” temper tantrum mode.
And now they can’t try to lead their constituents toward any modicum of rational self-preservation because their party is having its GOP Perpetual Crazy-Ass Competition. If you try to stand up for anything that the most toxically deranged of your supporters are opposed to, you’ll get Cheneyed.
Don’t assume that Republicans are attempting to win free and fair elections or that they’re trying to compete in the marketplace of ideas; they are not. They are trying to get power - that is it and nothing more. They’re done trying to court “other” voters; they will stick with their kind, who will not so much put them over the top in elections, but validate their illiberal power grabs. We’re potentially 1-2 election cycles away from having an election reversed by way of constitutional trickery, which would fundamentally change American democracy forever.
I think 2022 will be a dress rehersal, and 2024 will be a shit-show of epic proportions that will see a Republican elected after votes are thrown out wholesale. After that, there will be “show elections” and a few opposition members will be allowed to hold a token number of seats. As long as they don’t get too “uppity”.
Because the inmates are running the asylum. This is not cold, calculating political savvy. It’s an attempt to stay on the right side of the crazy cultish mob they’ve incited. They define themselves as hating and opposing democrats. If democrats are for it, they’re against it even if it hurts themselves more than anyone else. It’s really that simple.
They’re also basically children throwing a tantrum and reflexively opposing anything that they’re supposed to do. Like a 3 year old fighting against eating their vegetables, they’re not going to do whatever the responsible adult / expert in the room tells them to.
If any of them act a little bit sane they’re excommunicated like Liz Cheney. They’re all just trying to ride this wave to personal power and enrichment.
I know! Next thing you know they’ll be advocating for a quasi military quasi coup and the imprisonment of their political enemies . . . oh wait, that was you…
Let’s not call it a coup; let’s call it a constitutional convention in which great minds assemble to recognize that a racist, elitist, aristocratic constitution has expired and that it’s time to create a new nation.
This is really the only thing that makes sense to me. I’ve struggled many times to figure out why someone like Abbott or DeSantis would think it’s a good thing to promote a policy that will almost certainly lead to some of their constituents literally dying.
The only thing I can come up with is they have realized that the powers that are controlling their base (which are basically Facebook trolls and Youtubers at this point, as well as far-right news media) don’t really care about that stuff. Those entities want views, clicks, shares, etc (and of course the foreign agents have a whole different set of goals). And these entities will punish any politician that opposes the world-view they are pushing.
Notice how the vast majority of these extreme positions are destructive to the very core ideas of American democracy. Things like local control, free and fair elections run by local election boards, private business being able to require their employees follow health guidelines, even free speech and separation of powers. If these positions prevail, you have an American that is sicker, weaker, and less democratic. I wonder who that benefits…
So basically you have something like 30-40% of the country that is directly controlled by these media interests, some of which are run by foreign governments. And you end up with Donald Fricken’ Trump, whose one shining example of success was getting these miracle vaccines produced in record time, getting booed for promoting them. You have Republican governors banning local school board control of the health and safety of the children in their school, just to keep the mob at bay. And you have multiple states putting in place levers that they claim they will never pull but are now sitting there for when these same media entities provoke the mob to overturn a future election.
The cold, hard political calculus of this is that it doesn’t matter what most people think. It doesn’t even really matter what most Republicans think. All that matters is who will turn out to vote in 2022. Even aside of the current raft of voting restrictions, turnout in a midterm election averages about 40% of eligible voters. It was up substantially in the last midterm election (2018) because of Trump, but with him out of office turnout is likely to plummet. It will particularly plummet among independent voters who might be persuadable with a more moderate message.
So who is going to turn out to vote next year? People who are angry. And the anger right now is all on the anti-mask, anti-vax side. I’m getting heavy 2010 vibes for the next election – a Democratic administration forced to clean up the mess left by the previous guy (and doing so pretty successfully) gets massively punished at the polls by surging turnout among radicalized Republican voters wearing funny hats (Tea Party tricorns/MAGA caps).
