SO, I saw the headline this morning that 78% of Republicans think Trump 47 would be better than Trump 45. As usual, the initial personal impact is WTF? Who are these people? After The Big Lie, J6, the indictments and now 34 convictions? Really?
The numbers aren’t quite that bad, however. You can search for lots of data on political affiliation, and I don’t want to get bogged down in arguing who has the best numbers, or leaners, etc. The Republicans are about 27% of the population, and Democrats are about the same. Independents and others make up 40%+ of voters now.
From here we apply simple math:
.78 x .27 = .21
That means about 1 in 5 Americans think this. 78% of Republicans sounds like a big number. It seems like a scary number of people who look at the current snippets of the Orange Shitgibbon and think, “Damn, can’t wait for us to get some more of that.” I am reminded of the years when Gulf War II and Afghanistan were raging, Hurricane Kartrina and the wheels were falling off and I heard that around 25% thought W was doing a great job—these are those same shitheads. There are always going to be a frightening number of people who make their political choices based on flawed logic, denying reality, ReichWing Media Isolation and their natural tendency toward just plain assholishness. This is really nothing new.
I would like to posit that there’s another group in there. Let’s call them the I Hate Politics Group. I don’t know how large the number of Trump supporters come from this group, but it's not small. They liked Trump because they don’t follow politics because they hate it. They think solutions should be simple and politics are bad because all politicians are self-serving. This group was largest in 2016, it got smaller in 2020 and its smaller now still, but in states where the winner may have a margin of thousands of votes or less, they still matter. Trump appeals to them simply because he’s not a politician. They want the system broken, and he’s their narcissistic kamikaze. They’re not thinking about much else. If we defeat Trump, and he gets his just deserts in the next couple years, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t come back. None of the Republican Trump wannabes made much of an impression on them in the primaries.
Trump is the crack of politics. If he wins, he’ll take the whole country down with him, or he’ll lose and he’ll leave what’s left of the Republican Party high and dry. We need to make sure in this loss, we salt the earth around this movement. It’s going to take years.