Here we go
I'm back. I miss blogging as a creative outlet, it's an exciting election cycle, and I got enough of a nudge from a friend to dust off the blog, so here goes.
Donald Trump is a felon, a liar, a narcissist, and generally a bad person. His supporters know this and they don't care. They can justify and minimize all of those things in an attempt to rationalize supporting him. For some of his supporters, it's a single issue - guns, abortion, affirmative action, still being mad that Obama ever got elected in the first place and seeking vengeance, whatever. But I think most of Trump's supporters are actually not single issue voters. I think most of his supporters today find a 2nd Trump presidency attractive for the same reasons they found the 1st one appealing: they're mad. There are any number of things in their lives that are not going as they'd hoped, they are struggling to live the middle class life they had hoped for, they're doing all the things their parents did and still getting a raw deal, so they're mad. And he's mad, so they identify with him. Trump provides the right-wing masses with a variety of enemies to blame for their ills, and since the right-wing masses are not-so-big on fact-checking, truth, or understanding the complex forces that truly are stacked up against the middle class, it is super easy, comfortable, and convenient for them to just accept the list of nemeses that Mr. Trump yells to them from so many podiums and social media accounts. His anger, and name calling, and scapegoating is "cultural heroin," to borrow the term JD Vance (at the time, a "never Trump" Republican, my how things change) used to describe it.
Here's why this is significant. That underlying anger is driven by very real struggles of the middle class today. Biden has addressed very little of the structural issues that feed it, and even the ones he has, the right-wingers will never give him credit for. It is flawed logic to assume rational behavior among the die hard Trumpies; that, 8 years on from a Trump presidency, they see that he failed to deliver on his biggest promises (where's my wall?), that they now see him for the liar and now convicted felon that he is, that they've come to their senses in any way about the fact that Trump is only ever out for what's best for Trump, and right now a 2nd term helps him avoid federal prison a bit longer, sell a few more merchandising deals for bibles, and funnel more of our tax dollars to his hotels by over-charging the Secret Service for stays there.
Members of the cult of Trump just don't care. They will not listen to reason or facts, only to their dear leader. As such, Harris & Walz should spend exactly zero resources trying to win them over. They are a lost cause. The best the VP can hope for here is to win over enough of the centrists, enough of the independents, to tip the scales in her favor. I think she has to focus on women, young voters, and anyone in the middle class willing to listen to reason. Hillary assumed she would win the female vote, which was both arrogant and inaccurate. She won 98% of Black women, 65% of Hispanic women, but just 54% of white women. Yep, over 40% of white women in this country voted for the "grab 'em by the @#$% and then go cheat on your 3rd wife with a porn star" guy. The guy who was notorious for hanging out in the dressing room at Miss Teen USA, then bragging about it to Howard Stern. There are 168 million registered voters, and that means 36,000,000 white women decided Trump was definitely their best choice, over Hillary. You can guarantee Kamala's people are aware of this, and they know full well she has to earn those votes if she wants them.
She also has to deliver specific policy plans that are realistic, and anything that starts with "urge Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that ... " is a non-starter. I think starting with consumer prices and inflation was a solid choice - we're all feeling pain at the grocery store that seems to have lingered well beyond pandemic supply chain issues. But government mucking around with market pricing is almost always a terrible idea. The smarter voters, the ones who aren't lured into Trump's fact-less fantasy world, are going to ask the VP some tough questions about how exactly she plans to address pricing.
One of the biggest challenges to performing any kind of objective comparison on policy is that Trump changes his policy stances as the wind blows. Dude used to be 100% pro choice, now it's a states' rights issue and he won't commit to protecting it. First he was going to have severe consequences for the insurrectionists of Jan 6th, now he plans to pardon them on day one because they're political prisoners. He tried to ban TikTok as president, then signed up for an account. He's waffled on social security cuts and his position on the affordable care act, both in the last year. It is a fact-based statement to say that Trump changes his policy stances to whatever he feels is politically expedient at the moment. Which means a substantive policy debate, and even an accurate policy comparison, are unlikely to happen.
Here's a tracker of where things stand today on policy.
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