A whole swath of GOP voters appears firmly committed to not voting for Trump in November.
Donald Trump has a problem no matter what happens in New Hampshire on Tuesday night: There’s a whole swath of the Republican electorate and a good chunk of independents who appear firmly committed to not voting for him in November if he becomes the nominee.
It’s an issue that became starkly apparent in polling ahead of the Iowa caucuses, when an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of voters in that state found that fully 43 percent of Nikki Haley supporters said they would back President Joe Biden over Trump. And it’s a dynamic that has been on vivid display as the campaign shifted this week to New Hampshire.
“I can’t vote for Trump. He’s a crook. He’s too corrupt,” said Scott Simeone, 64, an independent voter from Amherst, who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. “I voted for him, and I didn’t realize he’s as corrupt as he is.”
That stance only works if the foundations of the government are strong enough to ensure an eventual return to the status quo. We used to be able to safely assume that the pendulum would always swing back.
However we have learned that our foundations are not quite as stable as we all thought. We have learned that it’s based on a series of “gentleman agreements” that can just be ignored with no repurcussion.
And the next time the conservatives get to the white house – at least under the current political climate – it just might be the spark that launches the US into full-blown fascism. And we’re not coming back from that.
And it always has been. For some reason people don’t seem to get this out of the stories of our founding fathers. Democracy has always been based on good faith at some level.
The founding fathers looked at monarchy and saw that it was eventually bad for everyone. Just ask Charles I or Richard III or Louis XVI (a little late) or James II.
Their aim was to spread power in order to make something more stable that would serve everyone better. But all the rules they made up relied heavily on good faith.
Politicians used to be aware of this and respect it. They’d hold differing opinions, but they both played by most of the rules, and would still meet at the DC bars at the end of the day. This is the main source of the idea that “they’re all the same”.
Newt Gingrich was the beginning of the end of bipartisanship in Washington. CSpam had starting airing Congress on television. Newt used this as a platform to win the game. He disregarded much of the Washington political etiquette in favor of using effectively propaganda to win elections for Republicans. He was Fox News before it was formalized into a news corporation.
We’ve broken enough of the good faith rules that it’s hard to get back. Obama made a real attempt at bipartisanship, and look where that got him. Dems are tired of getting run over by clinging to the old ideas of good faith, and Republicans abandoned it long ago.
In the old days this would eventually be resolved by the King’s army of 8000 men going against a rebellious army of 5000 men, and then having a large portion of the King’s army turn against the king whose head would soon roll.
We’ve forgotten how painful having family members die over politicial fights used to be, and we’re looking to repeat that history. It’s a coin flip whether we come back from this and establish good faith and mutual respect or we effectively end the era of the United States of America.
Forward progress in the world is a very recent thing. We’re not entitled to it. We’re about a month of empty grocery store shelves from going back to an agrarian society and feudalism.
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