I'd love to see how my demo is captured: Trump disapprovers who ID as conservative/liberatrian and didn't vote for Trump in 2016, 2020, or 2024, but also dislike Democrats in general more than Republicans. I conisistently vote for GOP in Congress (though to be fair my state and Congressional district tend to be liberal).
Another direct consequence of the two-party system. They might disapprove of Trump, but with only two parties, they don't have a way to "protest vote".
I read (and no longer can find the cite) that a big cause of Democratically partisan voters voting Republican is caused by gerrymander. That people who don't have strong party identification slowly drift to voting for the party who controls their region. It's simple herd mentality. All their officials are Republican, all their media is Republican, all the local influencers are Republican. So as a result they see Republican all over the place and start voting that way. I would assume that if it becomes a democratic gerrymander that these voters would drift into the Democratic Camp after 3 to 5 years if not sooner.
By the way, I would be interested on your take on my substack pages. I'm amateur at this. I'm also writing today an article on why you do not trust any poll.
I think some Republicans can be flipped. My wife's family are Orange County Republicans. My wife stayed Republican for years after she stopped voting solely based on party. Trump finished here as a Republican in 2015. Only 2 of the nine siblings still vote Republican.
I think devotees of both parties are probably pretty locked in at this point. Every election becomes a turnout contest—which is why political ads these days seem to specialize in “rage farming.” Let’s face it, Kamala Harris lost less to Republicans than she did to “none of the above.” Lots of folks on our side sat the 2024 election out, and we got Trump as a result. Let’s hope the same game works in reverse when 2028 rolls around. If a high percentage of Elliott’s “closet Republicans”are too dispirited to bother to vote, that could still easily sway the results.
We only needed about 150k more votes, strategically placed in the swing states to carry the 2024 Presidential election. Just how close that election turned out to be certainly got lost in all the noise afterward.
As I noted below, Elliott’s insightful research on the electorate has demonstrated that the bulk of “independents” are mostly apolitical folks who don’t actually vote all that often unless they get animated by a particular issue and see that one of the parties is offering what looks like a solution.
I’ve seen several post-mortems on 2024 and they all posit different reasons our loss. For me, the most convincing one is probably that the aftermath of the post-pandemic inflation spike turned out to be lethal for the Harris campaign. The best support for that view is probably the natural experiment that’s happened subsequently. As we’ve all seen, many of the voters who put Trump into office in 2024 turned on him very quickly when he also failed to address the basket of issues we lump into “the economy.”
When the election is as close as it was, there are many perfectly feasible explanations.
The Pew validated voter data is interesting. Harris carried as much of the white vote as Biden. Fewer men, but enough women to balance it out. Of course sampling error is always an issue for crosstabs, even for an 8k total sample.
I think you are right about inflation, and the population over indexing on inflation, for example compared to 1984.
I think sexism was also a thing. The studies that show voters are mostly past that are all about lower offices. There is serious hesitancy in some areas about the idea of a woman as Commander in Chief, especially among ex-military.
That said, there are probably a half dozen other items that could have flipped enough voters to change the election. Biden, Harris's selection, the campus protests, etc etc.
I live in one of the infamous “swing states” so I saw pretty much the full gamut during 2024. There certainly was a toxic stew of stuff to deal with. Despite that, I still had fairly high hopes for Kamala going into the election. I consider myself a realist when it comes to public policy (been doing this stuff for a long time), but Trump 2.0 has been much worse than my low expectations. Peace…
Yes there are large segments of registered voters who are locked in to one party. But there are plenty of voters who swing from one party to the other. A halfway step to defecting to the other party is to stay home. It's emotionally safer than going all the way to voting for the other side.
I think what Elliott’s previous research has demonstrated is that those generally are his “low information” voters who are just too busy trying to stay afloat to spend much time on politics. The solid phalanx of strongly engaged supporters are about equally divided between the Democrats and the Republicans at roughly a quarter of the electorate each. 35%-40% of the electorate that we label as “independents” would be better referred to a “apolitical.” Voting isn’t the central focus of their lives but they’ll turn out if there’s both a pressing issue and party to seems to be speaking to it, but they’re not reviewing detailed policy white papers to make up their minds.
Not sure how you'd go about this, but I'd love to see you dissect a similar phenomenon among those who persistently vote Democratic, even though many, perhaps most of those voters will say they disapprove of the Democratic Party. I think our ability to understand this is impeded by focusing on "progressive" vs "centrist," while Dems (and left-leaning Unaffiliated voters) actually are more focused on "DO things to fix real problems" vs "do nothing/support status quo/don't offend donors." If we elect a Democratic majority to Congress in 2026, and Dems in Congress STILL don't get it together to DO things, frustration with that will be a huge factor in 2028.
A major lesson I've taken away from analyses of the 2024 election is the importance of those who voted against the party in power because they are angry that the American economy is not working for themselves or close friends. That dynamic helped swing the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections.
That points to a message that's not just the common kitchen table top conversation about the price of groceries or gas but a broader class based message about the failure of coddling "investors" to fulfill its promise of raising all boats.
Why did so much of the wealth America creates end up in the hands of a tiny number of billionaires? The system is rigged to give them a free ride while forcing working people to pay most of the taxes to support our common needs. We need to take power back from greedy billionaires. Return to the tax rates of the golden 1950s. Make them pay their fair share so the money helps all of us thrive.
Except that the reasons aren't the same (and not what you stated). In 2016 (and 2024 to an extent), it was backlash against immigration, wokeness, and a changing America. In 2024, it was mostly inflation. In 2020 (and why Trump is underwater now), it was against Trump/MAGA ineptitude/cruelty (also inflation now).
So a President that can take credit for low inflation, fights immigration and wokeness, and is moderate and competent would do well. In other words, Obama. Obama would have won each of those elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024 if he could have ran even though inequality was just as high under him.
Good question...could be they might be anti-abortion, white Christian evangelical, or otherwise anti-'woke' so would never vote Dem no matter how bad the Republican...
Debunking the Framing via "Democracy for Realists"
While Morris provides valid empirical microdata, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s framework in Democracy for Realists challenges the theoretical assumptions underlying how this data is framed and analyzed. From their perspective, Morris accurately measures a phenomenon but misinterprets the underlying mechanics of voter psychology by granting too much agency to the electorate.
1. The Illusion of the "Cross-Pressured" Voter
Morris frames these disapprovers as "cross-pressured" voters navigating a tension between their distaste for Trump and their conservative/GOP anchors. Achen and Bartels argue that genuine ideological cross-pressure is rare. In their view, voting is an expression of social identity, akin to religious affiliation or sports fandom, not an arithmetic calculation of candidate approval versus policy preference. A voter expressing "disapproval" of Trump to a pollster is engaging in cheap talk; their eventual vote for the GOP is not a reluctant, cross-pressured compromise, but a standard expression of tribal loyalty.
2. Ideology as a Post-Hoc Construct
Morris treats "conservative self-ID," "Republican ID," and "2024 Trump vote" as distinct, parallel anchors. Democracy for Realists demonstrates empirically that ideology is usually downstream of partisanship. Voters do not choose the Republican party because they are principled conservatives; they adopt the "conservative" label because they are socially socialized as Republicans. Treating conservative ideology as an independent variable overcomplicates the data. The reason the "Republican" label does the heavy lifting in Morris’s charts is because it is the root social identity; the others are merely post-hoc rationalizations.
3. The Trap of the "Folk Theory of Democracy"
Morris’s piece serves as a corrective to pundits who expect Trump disapprovers to vote Democratic. However, Achen and Bartels would argue that by treating "candidate approval" as a primary metric that ought to influence voting, Morris is still implicitly validating the "folk theory of democracy"—the flawed idea that voters rationally evaluate candidate performance and vote accordingly. Democracy for Realists posits that approval ratings are highly endogenous to partisan identity. A Republican disapproving of Trump is essentially a statistical noise artifact; it does not indicate a rational reassessment of the party, which is why their generic ballot vote remains unchanged.
Consensus and Conclusion
Pro: Morris is empirically correct that polling analysis must look beyond topline candidate approval. His microdata successfully isolates the exact point at which voters defect (the shedding of the specific party label), providing a highly granular view of voter behavior.
Con: The analytical framing grants too much theoretical weight to stated ideology and candidate disapproval. It treats voters as independent agents weighing competing anchors, rather than members of a social group responding to deeply ingrained tribal cues.
Consensus: The empirical data in the article and the political science theory of Achen and Bartels ultimately point to the same structural reality: partisan identity completely overwhelms rational candidate evaluation. Morris’s "closet Republicans" are not an anomaly requiring complex anchor-based explanation; they are the standard baseline of an electorate where social identity dictates political behavior.
The second break down makes it clear that there is variance based on the party ID.
It may be that this is noise (10% of half of 2% of a 8k sample set has a pretty big MoE).
But the trend line across the various marker results are pretty consistent.
The other critical point is that this isn't actually party ID. It is what people tell pollsters. The number of self identified Republicans has dropped substantially since Jan 2024. These people turn into R-leaning independents in the data, which puts them in a different slice of the marker based analysis.
This leaves open the question of how people gain or change their partisan identity. True persuasion, which change people's minds about a particular issue or more broadly a party, can be successful but takes time and concious strategy.
There is often an assumption that voters' opinions spring from their personal experience or that of close friends. That assumption is a mistake and ignores the power of media to persuade and especially media pushing a particular bias. Fox News is the classic example of news media with a loyal captive audience where Fox moved from traditional spin of events a couple decades ago to inventing events entirely and now present a bizarre delusional worldview that hooks their audience with threats and villains and defenders. Propaganda works when done well.
Democrats and the broader left have nothing comparable to the right wing messaging effort. I'm not suggesting they match the right wing with lies and distortions but the left doesn't have a basic coordinated strategy for messaging at all. They seem to think that they can go dark between major elections and dump all their money into ads two months before a general election and change minds stewed in four years of rightwing messaging.
My point is the assumption that voters' opinions come from the lived experience of those around them is wrong and completely missed the impact of the media and messaging around them. That belief set can be changed but takes time. And Democrats don't seem to understand that but just stand surprised at the low favorability of the Democratic brand after years of daily attacks with no effective response.
I was about to write essentially what Ed just wrote in the adjacent comment. Lest we forget, Trump's 2024 win was very narrow, and those folks who now regret voting for him appear to be many. If only 15 or 20 percent vote Dem, they will undergird an already "blue wave" scenario....
Not specifically about the post but....I suggest you switch to a san-serif font for the body of your articles, easier to read. And serif fonts for headers. Compare your article with these comments, and you can see the difference. Also suggest increasing your font size a bit.
I live in the suburbs where there are a lot of old-fashioned Republicans. Some of them are "never Trump" voters who will still support GOP candidates down ballot. It's one reason I am fairly pessimistic about Iowa's U.S. Senate race--I think these Trump disapproving Republicans will find Ashley Hinson palatable.
Brilliant! So the next question is what "anchors" Republican identity? The two obvious options are whiteness or greed.
It's whiteness that drives Stephen Miller's mass deportation agenda, which is described in the corporate media as "appealing to Trump's base" - the sanitized version of the KKK.
Greed seems harder to sustain for Trump, because the only people who've gotten rich under Trump are Trump, his family, and his cronies. Trump supporters who bought Trump's memecoin or stock thinking they would get rich all got poor.
It's not that simple. My values and morals fit the Republican party before Trump. They don't fit Trump, and they don't fit the Democratic party. In a sense, I'm politically homeless.
So who should I vote for if I don't agree with most Democrats and I don't agree with Trumpy Republicans? The leader of the party I've called myself a member of for decades would call me a RINO - but that doesn't make me a Democrat.
So I look for the best candidate who has some indication he or she has real principles I might agree with. That's unlikely to be a Democrat, even if it's increasingly less likely to be a modern Republican, either.
Do you agree with lawless thugs killing people in the streets? Do you agree with warehousing people in inhumane conditions? Do you agree with gutting public health to the point where child mortality is greater than most developing countries, measles, which had been eradicated, spreading unchecked, and our food supply riddled with pathogens?
Do you agree that Haitians are eating dogs and cats? Do you agree that the entirety of the country of Iran is nothing but scum? Do you support genocide? Do you love paying $4 a gallon for gas? Do you really really really want more inflation?
Are you okay with half the country being disenfranchised? Do you agree that women should not be able to own property vote, access any kind of health care without the permission of their husbands, and have no access to any kind of relief in the form of divorce?
Are you good with the United States being a pariah state? Do you just love that no one trusts us and that our allies are moving on without us and we have no access to any kind of intelligence anymore? Are you good with bombing children? Do you think that bombing desalinization plants, which are the only access to any kind of water most of the Middle East has, is an excellent idea? Do you think the only criteria for being in charge of hundreds of troops is that your loyal to one man is a good idea?
If you answer no to any these then you are not a Republican. You're an actual human being who isn't a member of the cult and okay with all of that and even more.
Your choice is clear because Democrats don't do any of that. Yes we do have a questionable relationship with APAC and Israel, I will not deny that, but we're not doing all of that other stuff and we are trying our best to stop it. And the fact that you can't make that choice tells me that in your heart of hearts you are a cultist too. You love that Republicans have been gutting public education in order to subsidize private schools with state taxpayer funds for decades. You love that Republicans give tax breaks to people who will then take that money out of the country so they don't even have to pay any taxes on it. You love that businesses get to buy politicians and you love that those politicians get to pick their voters instead of the voters picking them. Because Republicans have been doing that since the 1950s. You might as well change your name from Earl to Strom Thurmond.
Maybe you missed the part where I said I don't agree with Trump or Trumpy Republicans. I believe the Republican party is bigger than Trump or MAGA, and hold out hope it will return to something more sane than what it is today.
There is a world of nuance between full-MAGA madness and a Democratic party that's embracing self-proclaimed socialists and who insists I'm a racist by definition because I'm white. And your concluding paragraph basically says "if you don't agree with Democrats, you're evil." What is that if it's not cult-like behavior?
I agree with you that Trump and MAGA are cult-like - but I suspect you don't see the cult-like nature of much of the Democratic party, because you're busy drinking the koolaid.
No no, you don't understand what I'm saying. What I'm saying is if you cannot bring yourself to vote for the only people opposing the absolute corruption and cruelty of this administration then support that administration. It's winner-take-all system and those are your two choices. You can support fascists or you can support the people who oppose the fascists. There is no middle ground with this.
16% or 26% flippers is also enough to flip a number of elections, and that’s before gas prices and food prices suffer from additional inflation between now and the election.
I'd love to see how my demo is captured: Trump disapprovers who ID as conservative/liberatrian and didn't vote for Trump in 2016, 2020, or 2024, but also dislike Democrats in general more than Republicans. I conisistently vote for GOP in Congress (though to be fair my state and Congressional district tend to be liberal).
Another direct consequence of the two-party system. They might disapprove of Trump, but with only two parties, they don't have a way to "protest vote".
I read (and no longer can find the cite) that a big cause of Democratically partisan voters voting Republican is caused by gerrymander. That people who don't have strong party identification slowly drift to voting for the party who controls their region. It's simple herd mentality. All their officials are Republican, all their media is Republican, all the local influencers are Republican. So as a result they see Republican all over the place and start voting that way. I would assume that if it becomes a democratic gerrymander that these voters would drift into the Democratic Camp after 3 to 5 years if not sooner.
By the way, I would be interested on your take on my substack pages. I'm amateur at this. I'm also writing today an article on why you do not trust any poll.
I think some Republicans can be flipped. My wife's family are Orange County Republicans. My wife stayed Republican for years after she stopped voting solely based on party. Trump finished here as a Republican in 2015. Only 2 of the nine siblings still vote Republican.
Didn’t expect my question in the Discord to inspire a whole article! Glad to have provided the spark for another great data piece.
Does that translate to not voting at all if the choice is a Democrat vs someone they disapprove of?
I think devotees of both parties are probably pretty locked in at this point. Every election becomes a turnout contest—which is why political ads these days seem to specialize in “rage farming.” Let’s face it, Kamala Harris lost less to Republicans than she did to “none of the above.” Lots of folks on our side sat the 2024 election out, and we got Trump as a result. Let’s hope the same game works in reverse when 2028 rolls around. If a high percentage of Elliott’s “closet Republicans”are too dispirited to bother to vote, that could still easily sway the results.
According to the Pew validated voter data, the non-voters actually leaned more toward Trump.
Of course higher Democratic turnout could have swayed the election, but that isn't the same as some silent majority that was anti-Trump.
We only needed about 150k more votes, strategically placed in the swing states to carry the 2024 Presidential election. Just how close that election turned out to be certainly got lost in all the noise afterward.
As I noted below, Elliott’s insightful research on the electorate has demonstrated that the bulk of “independents” are mostly apolitical folks who don’t actually vote all that often unless they get animated by a particular issue and see that one of the parties is offering what looks like a solution.
I’ve seen several post-mortems on 2024 and they all posit different reasons our loss. For me, the most convincing one is probably that the aftermath of the post-pandemic inflation spike turned out to be lethal for the Harris campaign. The best support for that view is probably the natural experiment that’s happened subsequently. As we’ve all seen, many of the voters who put Trump into office in 2024 turned on him very quickly when he also failed to address the basket of issues we lump into “the economy.”
When the election is as close as it was, there are many perfectly feasible explanations.
The Pew validated voter data is interesting. Harris carried as much of the white vote as Biden. Fewer men, but enough women to balance it out. Of course sampling error is always an issue for crosstabs, even for an 8k total sample.
I think you are right about inflation, and the population over indexing on inflation, for example compared to 1984.
I think sexism was also a thing. The studies that show voters are mostly past that are all about lower offices. There is serious hesitancy in some areas about the idea of a woman as Commander in Chief, especially among ex-military.
That said, there are probably a half dozen other items that could have flipped enough voters to change the election. Biden, Harris's selection, the campus protests, etc etc.
I live in one of the infamous “swing states” so I saw pretty much the full gamut during 2024. There certainly was a toxic stew of stuff to deal with. Despite that, I still had fairly high hopes for Kamala going into the election. I consider myself a realist when it comes to public policy (been doing this stuff for a long time), but Trump 2.0 has been much worse than my low expectations. Peace…
Yes there are large segments of registered voters who are locked in to one party. But there are plenty of voters who swing from one party to the other. A halfway step to defecting to the other party is to stay home. It's emotionally safer than going all the way to voting for the other side.
I think what Elliott’s previous research has demonstrated is that those generally are his “low information” voters who are just too busy trying to stay afloat to spend much time on politics. The solid phalanx of strongly engaged supporters are about equally divided between the Democrats and the Republicans at roughly a quarter of the electorate each. 35%-40% of the electorate that we label as “independents” would be better referred to a “apolitical.” Voting isn’t the central focus of their lives but they’ll turn out if there’s both a pressing issue and party to seems to be speaking to it, but they’re not reviewing detailed policy white papers to make up their minds.
Not sure how you'd go about this, but I'd love to see you dissect a similar phenomenon among those who persistently vote Democratic, even though many, perhaps most of those voters will say they disapprove of the Democratic Party. I think our ability to understand this is impeded by focusing on "progressive" vs "centrist," while Dems (and left-leaning Unaffiliated voters) actually are more focused on "DO things to fix real problems" vs "do nothing/support status quo/don't offend donors." If we elect a Democratic majority to Congress in 2026, and Dems in Congress STILL don't get it together to DO things, frustration with that will be a huge factor in 2028.
A major lesson I've taken away from analyses of the 2024 election is the importance of those who voted against the party in power because they are angry that the American economy is not working for themselves or close friends. That dynamic helped swing the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections.
That points to a message that's not just the common kitchen table top conversation about the price of groceries or gas but a broader class based message about the failure of coddling "investors" to fulfill its promise of raising all boats.
Why did so much of the wealth America creates end up in the hands of a tiny number of billionaires? The system is rigged to give them a free ride while forcing working people to pay most of the taxes to support our common needs. We need to take power back from greedy billionaires. Return to the tax rates of the golden 1950s. Make them pay their fair share so the money helps all of us thrive.
Except that the reasons aren't the same (and not what you stated). In 2016 (and 2024 to an extent), it was backlash against immigration, wokeness, and a changing America. In 2024, it was mostly inflation. In 2020 (and why Trump is underwater now), it was against Trump/MAGA ineptitude/cruelty (also inflation now).
So a President that can take credit for low inflation, fights immigration and wokeness, and is moderate and competent would do well. In other words, Obama. Obama would have won each of those elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024 if he could have ran even though inequality was just as high under him.
Good question...could be they might be anti-abortion, white Christian evangelical, or otherwise anti-'woke' so would never vote Dem no matter how bad the Republican...
Debunking the Framing via "Democracy for Realists"
While Morris provides valid empirical microdata, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s framework in Democracy for Realists challenges the theoretical assumptions underlying how this data is framed and analyzed. From their perspective, Morris accurately measures a phenomenon but misinterprets the underlying mechanics of voter psychology by granting too much agency to the electorate.
1. The Illusion of the "Cross-Pressured" Voter
Morris frames these disapprovers as "cross-pressured" voters navigating a tension between their distaste for Trump and their conservative/GOP anchors. Achen and Bartels argue that genuine ideological cross-pressure is rare. In their view, voting is an expression of social identity, akin to religious affiliation or sports fandom, not an arithmetic calculation of candidate approval versus policy preference. A voter expressing "disapproval" of Trump to a pollster is engaging in cheap talk; their eventual vote for the GOP is not a reluctant, cross-pressured compromise, but a standard expression of tribal loyalty.
2. Ideology as a Post-Hoc Construct
Morris treats "conservative self-ID," "Republican ID," and "2024 Trump vote" as distinct, parallel anchors. Democracy for Realists demonstrates empirically that ideology is usually downstream of partisanship. Voters do not choose the Republican party because they are principled conservatives; they adopt the "conservative" label because they are socially socialized as Republicans. Treating conservative ideology as an independent variable overcomplicates the data. The reason the "Republican" label does the heavy lifting in Morris’s charts is because it is the root social identity; the others are merely post-hoc rationalizations.
3. The Trap of the "Folk Theory of Democracy"
Morris’s piece serves as a corrective to pundits who expect Trump disapprovers to vote Democratic. However, Achen and Bartels would argue that by treating "candidate approval" as a primary metric that ought to influence voting, Morris is still implicitly validating the "folk theory of democracy"—the flawed idea that voters rationally evaluate candidate performance and vote accordingly. Democracy for Realists posits that approval ratings are highly endogenous to partisan identity. A Republican disapproving of Trump is essentially a statistical noise artifact; it does not indicate a rational reassessment of the party, which is why their generic ballot vote remains unchanged.
Consensus and Conclusion
Pro: Morris is empirically correct that polling analysis must look beyond topline candidate approval. His microdata successfully isolates the exact point at which voters defect (the shedding of the specific party label), providing a highly granular view of voter behavior.
Con: The analytical framing grants too much theoretical weight to stated ideology and candidate disapproval. It treats voters as independent agents weighing competing anchors, rather than members of a social group responding to deeply ingrained tribal cues.
Consensus: The empirical data in the article and the political science theory of Achen and Bartels ultimately point to the same structural reality: partisan identity completely overwhelms rational candidate evaluation. Morris’s "closet Republicans" are not an anomaly requiring complex anchor-based explanation; they are the standard baseline of an electorate where social identity dictates political behavior.
The second break down makes it clear that there is variance based on the party ID.
It may be that this is noise (10% of half of 2% of a 8k sample set has a pretty big MoE).
But the trend line across the various marker results are pretty consistent.
The other critical point is that this isn't actually party ID. It is what people tell pollsters. The number of self identified Republicans has dropped substantially since Jan 2024. These people turn into R-leaning independents in the data, which puts them in a different slice of the marker based analysis.
This leaves open the question of how people gain or change their partisan identity. True persuasion, which change people's minds about a particular issue or more broadly a party, can be successful but takes time and concious strategy.
There is often an assumption that voters' opinions spring from their personal experience or that of close friends. That assumption is a mistake and ignores the power of media to persuade and especially media pushing a particular bias. Fox News is the classic example of news media with a loyal captive audience where Fox moved from traditional spin of events a couple decades ago to inventing events entirely and now present a bizarre delusional worldview that hooks their audience with threats and villains and defenders. Propaganda works when done well.
Democrats and the broader left have nothing comparable to the right wing messaging effort. I'm not suggesting they match the right wing with lies and distortions but the left doesn't have a basic coordinated strategy for messaging at all. They seem to think that they can go dark between major elections and dump all their money into ads two months before a general election and change minds stewed in four years of rightwing messaging.
My point is the assumption that voters' opinions come from the lived experience of those around them is wrong and completely missed the impact of the media and messaging around them. That belief set can be changed but takes time. And Democrats don't seem to understand that but just stand surprised at the low favorability of the Democratic brand after years of daily attacks with no effective response.
I was about to write essentially what Ed just wrote in the adjacent comment. Lest we forget, Trump's 2024 win was very narrow, and those folks who now regret voting for him appear to be many. If only 15 or 20 percent vote Dem, they will undergird an already "blue wave" scenario....
Not specifically about the post but....I suggest you switch to a san-serif font for the body of your articles, easier to read. And serif fonts for headers. Compare your article with these comments, and you can see the difference. Also suggest increasing your font size a bit.
I live in the suburbs where there are a lot of old-fashioned Republicans. Some of them are "never Trump" voters who will still support GOP candidates down ballot. It's one reason I am fairly pessimistic about Iowa's U.S. Senate race--I think these Trump disapproving Republicans will find Ashley Hinson palatable.
Brilliant! So the next question is what "anchors" Republican identity? The two obvious options are whiteness or greed.
It's whiteness that drives Stephen Miller's mass deportation agenda, which is described in the corporate media as "appealing to Trump's base" - the sanitized version of the KKK.
Greed seems harder to sustain for Trump, because the only people who've gotten rich under Trump are Trump, his family, and his cronies. Trump supporters who bought Trump's memecoin or stock thinking they would get rich all got poor.
They are cultists. Anyone who will put aside their values and morals just to stay with their party are cultists plain and simple.
It's not that simple. My values and morals fit the Republican party before Trump. They don't fit Trump, and they don't fit the Democratic party. In a sense, I'm politically homeless.
So who should I vote for if I don't agree with most Democrats and I don't agree with Trumpy Republicans? The leader of the party I've called myself a member of for decades would call me a RINO - but that doesn't make me a Democrat.
So I look for the best candidate who has some indication he or she has real principles I might agree with. That's unlikely to be a Democrat, even if it's increasingly less likely to be a modern Republican, either.
Do you agree with lawless thugs killing people in the streets? Do you agree with warehousing people in inhumane conditions? Do you agree with gutting public health to the point where child mortality is greater than most developing countries, measles, which had been eradicated, spreading unchecked, and our food supply riddled with pathogens?
Do you agree that Haitians are eating dogs and cats? Do you agree that the entirety of the country of Iran is nothing but scum? Do you support genocide? Do you love paying $4 a gallon for gas? Do you really really really want more inflation?
Are you okay with half the country being disenfranchised? Do you agree that women should not be able to own property vote, access any kind of health care without the permission of their husbands, and have no access to any kind of relief in the form of divorce?
Are you good with the United States being a pariah state? Do you just love that no one trusts us and that our allies are moving on without us and we have no access to any kind of intelligence anymore? Are you good with bombing children? Do you think that bombing desalinization plants, which are the only access to any kind of water most of the Middle East has, is an excellent idea? Do you think the only criteria for being in charge of hundreds of troops is that your loyal to one man is a good idea?
If you answer no to any these then you are not a Republican. You're an actual human being who isn't a member of the cult and okay with all of that and even more.
Your choice is clear because Democrats don't do any of that. Yes we do have a questionable relationship with APAC and Israel, I will not deny that, but we're not doing all of that other stuff and we are trying our best to stop it. And the fact that you can't make that choice tells me that in your heart of hearts you are a cultist too. You love that Republicans have been gutting public education in order to subsidize private schools with state taxpayer funds for decades. You love that Republicans give tax breaks to people who will then take that money out of the country so they don't even have to pay any taxes on it. You love that businesses get to buy politicians and you love that those politicians get to pick their voters instead of the voters picking them. Because Republicans have been doing that since the 1950s. You might as well change your name from Earl to Strom Thurmond.
Maybe you missed the part where I said I don't agree with Trump or Trumpy Republicans. I believe the Republican party is bigger than Trump or MAGA, and hold out hope it will return to something more sane than what it is today.
There is a world of nuance between full-MAGA madness and a Democratic party that's embracing self-proclaimed socialists and who insists I'm a racist by definition because I'm white. And your concluding paragraph basically says "if you don't agree with Democrats, you're evil." What is that if it's not cult-like behavior?
I agree with you that Trump and MAGA are cult-like - but I suspect you don't see the cult-like nature of much of the Democratic party, because you're busy drinking the koolaid.
No no, you don't understand what I'm saying. What I'm saying is if you cannot bring yourself to vote for the only people opposing the absolute corruption and cruelty of this administration then support that administration. It's winner-take-all system and those are your two choices. You can support fascists or you can support the people who oppose the fascists. There is no middle ground with this.
The analyses of the career of Lindsay Graham give us a good example of one of these cultists.
Yes but why did they join the cult? Trump didn't lobotomize them. He fights for what their hearts crave - whiteness and greed.
16% or 26% flippers is also enough to flip a number of elections, and that’s before gas prices and food prices suffer from additional inflation between now and the election.