Will the GOP alienate voters by being the party of Trump?

[SLD]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/co...trump-risk-further-alienating-others-n1266571

Ok. So the gist of this is that the GOP risks alienating voters, especially swing voters, over the issue of Donald Trump. They’re owned now lock, stock and barrel by Trump. To go against Trump is a sacrilege that will not be tolerated from now until quite some time in the future. So that means they will lose electoral support from now on.

I call bullshit. Trump is arguably the best thing to happen to the GOP. He has energized voters, and more importantly people who have never voted before. He won over 74 million votes in 2020, far more than any other Republican candidate. Say what you will about his supporters, but they are enthusiastic about him in a way that no one has ever managed to be in the Republican Party. I can’t think of any candidate who has so captured the hearts and minds of his supporters as Trump has - throughout US history. So many, many people love Trump and will do whatever he says. And as long as he’s around, he will be a magnet to the Republican Party. And they will win elections as a result. You don’t win elections by pandering to the middle. You win elections by riling up the base. And that’s definitely what Trump does. He will run again in 2024 - provided he’s not dead. No Republican would think of challenging him. He will win if the economy is facing headwinds. Or if there’s other issues facing Biden. Or even if Biden steps down and Harris runs in his stead.

I also predict that the GOP will take over the Senate and House in 2022. Well 2023 actually. And they will do so with Trump at the helm, loudly calling the shots from his roost in Mar a Lago. The voters they risk alienating are insignificant and already have long since been alienated by him.

So I see Trump controlling the GOP for the foreseeable future. His ghost will haunt them for decades after he’s gone. They will pine for his glory days as they did for Ronald Reagan. I doubt anyone could fill his shoes. But I predict that the future is likely to be difficult going for the democrats as a result. They can still win, and will win a lot, but it’s not going to be easy. The future could be also very dark, possibly even violent with him around.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The great danger is someone embracing the Trump-esque mindset... and being competent in doing so. Trump is an idiot and he has convinced people that a pandemic was over-exaggerated, harmless, etc... and now some of those people are even refusing vaccination!

Imagine if someone had those people's ears and were competent with politics and policy. It'd likely be a point of no return in America.

 

[Politesse]

But does he have the votes? He's lost two presidential elections now, by the numbers, and is currently mouldering away in a very marginalized if idolatrized role, as encroaching senility swiftly moves in on him. His most dedicated core of voters are both old and unvaccinated. Can he or they even hope to be functional long enough to take the White House back?

 

[Elixir]

But does he have the votes? He's lost two presidential elections now, by the numbers, and is currently mouldering away in a very marginalized if idolatrized role, as encroaching senility swiftly moves in on him. His most dedicated core of voters are both old and unvaccinated. Can he or they even hope to be functional long enough to take the White House back?

Yeah, that.
And let’s not assume that the 74m number survived the 1/6 debacle intact.
But more of a gorilla in the room - will he be in jail by 2024, or will there still be a dozen or more pending criminal and civil cases proceeding against him?
Hard to know, but my spider sense is tingling in a way that makes me doubt his viability as a 2024 candidate.

 

[Gospel]

Nah, the GOP won't alienate voters any more than they have been by making Trump the Emperor of the conservative platform. The GOP was a room on fire and Trump was an Elephant entering said room and bathing itself with gasoline.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Their point shaving through "voter fraud" laws might be zeroed out by T's behavior:
> give him enough time and a new round of rallies and he can infect more of the unvaxed among his moron hordes
> let him rant enough about the Big Steal and some of them will need a triple bypass brought on by rage stress
> angry white people like T are reaching the actuarial limits anyway -- we can replace the Trumpanzees with young dread-locked voters. Yeh mon. (Really, this should be the Stacey Abrams moment -- they don't want you to vote, so VOTE. This is a cow tipping moment; time to grab Trump by the udders and watch him sag into the dirt.)

 

[Politesse]

But does he have the votes? He's lost two presidential elections now, by the numbers, and is currently mouldering away in a very marginalized if idolatrized role, as encroaching senility swiftly moves in on him. His most dedicated core of voters are both old and unvaccinated. Can he or they even hope to be functional long enough to take the White House back?

Yeah, that.
And let’s not assume that the 74m number survived the 1/6 debacle intact.
But more of a gorilla in the room - will he be in jail by 2024, or will there still be a dozen or more pending criminal and civil cases proceeding against him?
Hard to know, but my spider sense is tingling in a way that makes me doubt his viability as a 2024 candidate.

No, he will not be in jail. No one who has ever read a history of the Reconstruction would ever expect that. Treason and sedition are celebrated attributes in this country, provided it is a rich, white landowner who commits them. Prosecuting such individuals is always "too controversial", "too political", an electoral rather than ethical question whose answer is obvious: too much loss for too little gain. So a deal is made, and the Rebel walks free, sometimes with more land and power than they started with. The rhetoric shifts, but it never truly changes. And sometimes it doesn't even do that much.

 

[Ford]

Ok. So the gist of this is that the GOP risks alienating voters, especially swing voters, over the issue of Donald Trump. They’re owned now lock, stock and barrel by Trump. To go against Trump is a sacrilege that will not be tolerated from now until quite some time in the future. So that means they will lose electoral support from now on.

I call bullshit. Trump is arguably the best thing to happen to the GOP. He has energized voters, and more importantly people who have never voted before. He won over 74 million votes in 2020, far more than any other Republican candidate.

The "well he won more votes than..." is a fairly weak argument. That's like saying the stock market is so much higher than (fill in the blank). The stock market tends to go up in the long term, and the number of votes for Trump vs any previous Republican isn't really a good metric. Biden got more votes than any other Democrat AND any other Republican. The important point is that he got 7 million more votes than the bigliest vote getting Republican.

Say what you will about his supporters, but they are enthusiastic about him in a way that no one has ever managed to be in the Republican Party. I can’t think of any candidate who has so captured the hearts and minds of his supporters as Trump has - throughout US history. So many, many people love Trump and will do whatever he says. And as long as he’s around, he will be a magnet to the Republican Party. And they will win elections as a result. You don’t win elections by pandering to the middle. You win elections by riling up the base. And that’s definitely what Trump does.

And yet he still lost. Not only did he lose the White House by a margin of electoral votes he himself described as a "landslide" when it happened in 2016, he lost the popular vote by a wide margin. Trump also lost in key swing states, lost some previously solid red states (AZ and Georgia come to mind) and as a result lost the Senate.

I also predict that the GOP will take over the Senate and House in 2022. Well 2023 actually. And they will do so with Trump at the helm, loudly calling the shots from his roost in Mar a Lago. The voters they risk alienating are insignificant and already have long since been alienated by him.

Typically, the incumbent President's party loses in the mid-terms. So naturally one would expect that outcome again, but this situation is shaping up to be very different. When Obama (and Biden) lost Congress in 2010, it was partly because of the energized "Tea Party" base of the GOP, but it was also because all the "Hope and Change" hadn't happened. It was unrealistic to expect that he could right the economy in just a year following such an historic downturn, but that's what the voters want...left, right, and swing. They want results, and are impatient. Hence, the rise of the Tea Party caucus.

This upcoming election may be very different, and timing plays into it quite a bit. Unless the virus comes back with a vengeance (brought on by vaccine-resistant Trump supporters) or some other unforeseen disaster strikes, the economy is set to have at the very least a strong recovery, and at best a boom. Mitch McConnell already warned people to not credit Biden with the approaching boom, so he clearly believes that's what is coming. By the 3rd quarter of this year, the country will be in a helluva lot better shape than it was in November of last year, and by November of 2022? It will have been a full year of economic boom, people back to work/school/sporting events/concerts etc., and the Democrats/Biden would be very smart to take credit for all of it. The pandemic was the worst disaster to hit the country in the memory of almost anyone alive today, and the psychological effect of recovering from that disaster could be akin to what happened after WWII...at least domestically.

What will the Republicans have to run on in 2022? Trump. No matter how fired up his base gets, there's only so many of them...and as November 2020 proved, not enough to win.

So I see Trump controlling the GOP for the foreseeable future. His ghost will haunt them for decades after he’s gone. They will pine for his glory days as they did for Ronald Reagan. I doubt anyone could fill his shoes. But I predict that the future is likely to be difficult going for the democrats as a result. They can still win, and will win a lot, but it’s not going to be easy. The future could be also very dark, possibly even violent with him around.

Trump is now an albatross around the neck of the GOP. The party is locked in an abusive relationship. They know he's bad news for their future, but they're afraid to leave him because of his anger issues. The smarter leaders (and I'd say that includes McConnell and the soon-to-be-not-a-leader Cheney) know that the best way forward would be to ditch Trump and rebuild their party, but they're caught between a rock and a hard place. Even without his Twitter account, Trump can inflict a lot of damage and a lot of chaos on them if he feels slighted. He'll whip up primary challengers to the apostates, tell his supporters to not vote for anyone who draws his ire, and at some point in the election process he might go back to holding rallies. The voters - apart from Trump's base - will see two competing choices for 2022: One that's led the country out of a crisis and into an historic recovery, and one that's in disarray, wracked with infighting, and running on hatred and fear.


What really worries me is that yes, his supporters have already proven they will get violent if they don't get their way. Militias, white nationalists, and lunatics are openly advocating violence, and I would not be surprised if we had another domestic attack like Oklahoma City or another attack on the Capitol.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Responding to Ford at #8 above: well said and I hope what you say proves out. They are getting angrier, stupider, more radical and more violent, and the stupid part is that they don't seem to realize how boxed-in they've become.

 

[Gun Nut]

Considering political party affiliation is exactly like sports... You are born into your family's favorite team and rarely does anyone ever switch... I think new Trump supporters are being born at a higher rate than new Democrats.
But it's not exactly like sports. By the time these Trump babies are old enough to vote, he'll have died of old age... sports teams don't age quite like that. The Trump political team was born dying. It was only designed to serve one person.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Considering political party affiliation is exactly like sports... You are born into your family's favorite team and rarely does anyone ever switch... I think new Trump supporters are being born at a higher rate than new Democrats.
But it's not exactly like sports. By the time these Trump babies are old enough to vote, he'll have died of old age... sports teams don't age quite like that. The Trump political team was born dying. It was only designed to serve one person.

I was thinking about something along these same lines. There is the Trump supporter and then there is those who for them, this is akin to a sporting event. They want their team to win even if their leader is Aaron Hernandez. Even if their team conducts itself like the Houston Astros.

 

[ideologyhunter]

On MSNBC just now: Republicans are polling at SEVENTY PERCENT in the belief that Biden did not fairly win the election. Ship of fools. May they fly their freak flag high and sail straight into an iceberg.

 

[untermensche]

The great danger is someone embracing the Trump-esque mindset... and being competent in doing so. Trump is an idiot and he has convinced people that a pandemic was over-exaggerated, harmless, etc... and now some of those people are even refusing vaccination!

Imagine if someone had those people's ears and were competent with politics and policy. It'd likely be a point of no return in America.

Trump's natural racism and hatred for minorities helps him.

He proposes racist xenophobic nonsense like a wall with Mexico from his core.

He understands the mind of the closeted and ignorant racist in the US that just wants to roam free and express their racist hatreds.

 

[ZiprHead]

Biden's approval rating is at 64%. Looks like the only people disapproving are the hard-core TQP.

 

[Bronzeage]

The 2020 election was a steam boat race where the GOP started out low on fuel. As they neared the finish, they were burning the deck boards trying to catch up. They not only lost the race, they don't have a steam boat anymore.

The reckoning for the aftermath of the 2020 election is still to be made. There will be many criminal and civil trials in the coming months. The facts established in these trials will take away whatever claim Trump had on the Presidency and lay bare all his lies.

A leader can ask for sacrifice and most can get some degree of it from their supporters. One thing a leader can't expect is for their supporters to go out in public and look stupid. They might not support the other side, but they won't show when needed.

 

[Elixir]

Biden's approval rating is at 64%.

So, between favorable electoral maps, gerrymandering, targeted suppression efforts and voter intimidation campaigns, Republicans should win back both chambers of COngress in '22 and be well positioned to take the 2024 Presidential election in another "landslide". They just have to remember the guns this time.

they don't have a steam boat anymore.

"We don' need no stinking steamboats"

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Responding to Ford at #8 above: well said and I hope what you say proves out. They are getting angrier, stupider, more radical and more violent, and the stupid part is that they don't seem to realize how boxed-in they've become.

Usually we see a spike in gun sales when the Democrats take power because the right is afraid of gun bans. Now I wonder how many sales we are seeing to people afraid of the QOP.

 

[SLD]

This article shows Trump’s enduring appeal:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/liz-cheney-and-the-big-lie/

Nothing matters, but Trump. The election was stolen, and the evidence is overwhelming. The big lie is that Biden won.

Trump will not be indicted. That’s a liberal wet dream. If anything, Florida won’t extradite him to New York. An indictment would likely boost his standing.

Absent some major health crisis, he will come back in 2024. The only issue is whether the economy is doing well 3 years from now. While I expect that the economy will continue to grow for a good year, maybe 18 months, after that it’s anyone’s guess. But at a minimum it won’t be surging like it is now. People are naive if they expect him to go away or just to lose to a Biden or Harris because you think he’s an insane dickhead. He is. But he’s a dangerous insane dickhead who could easily win a gain if Biden or the economy has a misstep.

 

[Gun Nut]

This article shows Trump’s enduring appeal:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/liz-cheney-and-the-big-lie/

Nothing matters, but Trump. The election was stolen, and the evidence is overwhelming. The big lie is that Biden won.

Trump will not be indicted. That’s a liberal wet dream. If anything, Florida won’t extradite him to New York. An indictment would likely boost his standing.

Absent some major health crisis, he will come back in 2024. The only issue is whether the economy is doing well 3 years from now. While I expect that the economy will continue to grow for a good year, maybe 18 months, after that it’s anyone’s guess. But at a minimum it won’t be surging like it is now. People are naive if they expect him to go away or just to lose to a Biden or Harris because you think he’s an insane dickhead. He is. But he’s a dangerous insane dickhead who could easily win a gain if Biden or the economy has a misstep.

So, what are the odds that he will avoid conviction of a crime (disqualifying him from taking office) AND avoid a "major health crisis", over the next 3 or so years?
How old was his father when he died?

 

[SLD]

This article shows Trump’s enduring appeal:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/liz-cheney-and-the-big-lie/

Nothing matters, but Trump. The election was stolen, and the evidence is overwhelming. The big lie is that Biden won.

Trump will not be indicted. That’s a liberal wet dream. If anything, Florida won’t extradite him to New York. An indictment would likely boost his standing.

Absent some major health crisis, he will come back in 2024. The only issue is whether the economy is doing well 3 years from now. While I expect that the economy will continue to grow for a good year, maybe 18 months, after that it’s anyone’s guess. But at a minimum it won’t be surging like it is now. People are naive if they expect him to go away or just to lose to a Biden or Harris because you think he’s an insane dickhead. He is. But he’s a dangerous insane dickhead who could easily win a gain if Biden or the economy has a misstep.

So, what are the odds that he will avoid conviction of a crime (disqualifying him from taking office) AND avoid a "major health crisis", over the next 3 or so years?
How old was his father when he died?

His father was 93 and his mother was 88. He's got decent genes, I'd say. He looks like shit of course. But he will not be convicted. There are no present federal investigations against him, and if New York tries to indict him, Florida won't extradite him so he will not be convicted. And conviction of a crime does not bar one from the Presidency. Just impeachment and removal only. And to his supporters, it would just be proof of his martyrdom. Just like Adolf's!