Yup. And I’m from Evansville (well, since 2022), where we elected our first black mayor and our first woman mayor, Stephanie Terry. The city has had both Democratic and Republican mayors over the past 20 years, so it’s not as though the Democrat automatically wins. Further, the city is less than 15% Black. This also struck me as a very good sign.
First, they have no grand vision or strategy, just as the conservative politicians and industrialists in Germany had none in the early 1930s. They operate out of self-interest and fear. Trump was not immediately on their radar because he wasn’t even running. There was nothing they could do to take him out of power. Then, in the Republican primary, some did support Haley and others.
Now, however, they all need to do something, or they will soon have nothing left. This is where the fear and self-interest need to work. And I think, belatedly, they will.
I think that you’re taking away the wrong lesson from the above though. YES, especially on abortion, there was a large pushback, that provided a major upswell of Democratic support.
BUT, the lesson Republicans learned was not to mitigate the Madness, but to cheat harder. See Ohio’s multiple levels of legislative fuckery over enshining abortion rights in the state Constitution.
We can be cautiously optomistic, sure, but for every individual, or local success or step forward, the state governments red areas are pushing illiberal, undemocratic, reactionary laws to provide for permament minority rule. And with the damage done to our federal judges and the SCOTUS during Trump’s era, there is not going to be any reversion to a more balanced take anytime soon.
I agree with other things you are saying here, but what is my “wrong lesson”?
Yep, the GOP has given up on democracy. The political and civil order is hanging by a thread at this point.
No, we will probably have American Revolution 2.0 pretty soon. If Trump wins, that will happen very soon. If Biden wins, the Cold Civil War will continue, and only a collapse of the GOP can avert catastrophe.
By wrong lesson, I meant that you look to the positive, local steps and postulate that a GOP collapse is likely whether it be by losing to Biden or by the fat cats deserting him.
Instead, the GOP is leaning that after years of slowly losing, it’s better to break the system than adapt. Which was what they said they were going to do after the Obama/Romney post-mortem, but they got Trump instead. And as pointed out repeatedly, sure, maybe they figured they could work around Trump in 2016, but staying craven in 2020 was chosing what the new normal would be.
Or to put it differently, as I did in another thread: Sure the GOP will “collapse” but that’s because for 4 years now it’s been a skinsuit hollowed out by MAGA from the inside. MAGA will shed the skin, inherit the memories, voters, and war chest of the Republicans, and stand up in it’s place. It’s likely not going away, and may end up stronger than ever. Which, as you suggest, means we’re likely stuck for the forseeable future of various degrees of cold/tepid/warm civil war.
It’s disappointing that Jesus, who was famously oppositional to political authorities of any stripe, has flip-flopped like this. I had thought better of Him.
While the piece leans very hard left, I did like this line:
It’s bold decision making like that, which encourages financial contributors to stay home. Firstly, they don’t believe Trump can win. Trump didn’t win last time and he’s less popular now.
Yeah, it’s an opinion piece … so the author doesn’t need to show his work.
Still … I’d be interested in knowing why Biden is behind Trump in so many (not to say “all”) head-to-head polls. How might the author answer that question?
At this point, none of the polls are considering EVs (Electoral Votes – I had to think twice about that acronym, since I’d just been reading one of the electric vehicle threads) but few of them do anyway, even close to the election. At any rate, no way Biden gets 98% of the California vote. In 2020, Trump got more votes in California than he did in Texas.
I’m just bringing that point up because of the flaw in Clinton’s 2016 campaign that focused more on popular votes than electoral votes. Also, EV’s are not proportional because of smaller states outweighing the larger ones. Oh and winner take all throws it off as well. I say all this to point out any poll that looks at the nation as a whole is pretty much worthless. If it weren’t we’d have Presidents Tilden, Gore and Hillary.
The conventional wisdom on polls right now is that a significant percentage of those who are asked are imagining their ideal candidate getting the nomination instead of the clear forerunners, and this affects Biden more than Trump at this point. Once the nominations are set, the polls will look different.
Personally, I think the polls have even less value at this point than the above logic would imply.
Biden has the disadvantage of being old and having to own his record, good and bad (though it is mostly good). Trump has nothing to offer that he didn’t in 2020 except election denial, insurrection, dementia, poverty, and many, many indictments. I simply don’t believe it’s possible for him to win now when he lost in 2020.
It shouldn’t be. But then again your predictions about the Rs moving on from him are what should have been happening 1/21/21 with no hesitation on anyone’s part. Yet here we are 3 years later.
