Most Republican voters were Trumpists before Trump, and most of the rest have converted since 2016

They already do that.

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The GOP does get a fair share of the Catholic vote that way but as a group Catholics still lean Democratic (44% D vs. 37% R). The Church tends to have pretty big differences with the Republican party on issues like the death penalty and immigration and climate change.

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isn’t Trump just the final product of the tea-party?

what scares me most about the sheer number of his supporters is that if people think it’s perfectly okay to lie, cheat, steal, sleep around while married (and just had a child), assault women - what are these people doing with their lives that they want that “get away with it” outcome?

basically they just want someone who is going to flip the supreme-court so they can tell women what to do with their bodies, it really does come down to that simple desire, he can do anything as long as they get what they want

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like Trump’s appointees, each and every one.

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I think the Chomsky video a few posts down has it pegged better: the GOP isn’t the party of paranoid vicious racists, it’s the party of the rich and powerful. To that end, they court the mouth breathers for votes, but the core raison d’etre is to funnel wealth and power to those that already have it. And thanks to tax cuts and insane levels of deregulation, that’s all moving along nicely, thankyewverymuch. The “hollow victories” are irrelevant. The real GOP couldn’t give a shit that Trump is failing on social issues like repealing equal marriage, etc. In fact, if it motivates the mouth breathers to vote when they can get all het up over being stymied by the libhrul establishment in spite of having the great Trump in power, all the better.

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have no doubt, the only reason the republics didn’t pack the court already is that when they had all three chambers ( necessary to increase the number of sitting judges ) they didn’t need to: they already were able to swing the court away from the middle with the two seats they had.

they have shown no regard for the traditions of the process at all. highly controversial nominees, completely ignoring the previously required blessings of state senators for circuit courts, blocking nominees during obama’s era and ramming them through under trump.

point being, if they need to they will. regardless of what the democrats do.

in my view now, until the democrats force the other party to cry uncle and everyone agrees to restore power sharing norms - with serious consequences if those norms are broken - all bets can and should be off the table.

when bob plays fair, and sue plays dirty, and the refs are were appointed by sue - guess who’s going to win?

no it’s not right. but it’s not sports ball. actual lives are in the balance.

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see, i think i disagree with this.

i know that i have bias filters here, but to me
it seems “liberal activisim” on the supreme court is mostly a case of reality having its well known liberal bias.

so yes, conservatives scream about activism. but it doesn’t make their rants true.

in my view, the whole thing is framed as wild swings from left to right because undermining the legitimacy of the courts benefits the right. the reality is, the court swings from slightly liberal to fairly conservative. where the goal should be slight swings around the middle.

differing views on the law are fine, just not conservative interpretative dance.

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I was mainly thinking about how the conservative side of the SCOTUS always votes in perfect lockstep with the republican agenda, while the “swing” voter is just a conservative who is less bound to their party.

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You mean their mistresses? Or, in Trump’s case, both?

Pack the court then lock the door behind them by passing a law requiring 60 votes in Senate to confirm a new SCOTUS nominee.

Actually the “intellectual” roots of Trumpism go back at least as far as Newt Gingrich, and the racism to Nixon’s southern strategy. That’s why it’s so amusing to see the sudden pearl-clutching over Trump by people like David Brooks.

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Where’s the “why not both” gif when you need it…

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I ask and ask and ask, still haven’t gotten an answer. Help!
Trump, outvoted by ~3m votes, is in office because of a number of tailwinds in 2016: The Times’ obsession with Clinton’s emails, Comey’s cowardice and resulting irresponsibility (the FBI NYC office had him by his balls), fluke EC wins in a couple of states under GOP control (which aren’t now) and, maybe most significantly, voters who saw Donnie as a source of hope or a harmless flipping of the bird to the establishment.
All that’s gone, that Donnie is an awful POTUS is documented (North Korea; a tax cut that managed to be unpopular; and so much more), his life as a piece of shit will be in the forefront between now and Election Day.
So, again, given all that: How does he get reelected? I know the media fantasies, but really, how does he do it?

I think it used to be the latter, but it’s increasingly the former, to the dismay of more than a few of the rich and the powerful.

He quite likely won’t. I know American leftists love to wallow in pessimism, but things really aren’t looking too good for Trump’s re-election. Now, he certainly can be elected, and a Dem win is not foreordained or anything, but the idea that Trump’s going to easily coast into a second term is scaremongering.

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It’d do much worse than neutralize a talking point and the old guard well knew it. On one hand it’d mean a return to unsafe abortions among the poor and desperate. On the other hand, it’s much harder these days to conceal the real purposes of those “semesters abroad” for daughters of the wealthy, and a mistress scorned these days is far more likely to talk, name names and produce DNA paternity tests. The “secret shame” discussed only in whispered rumors is a thing of a rapidly fading past.

Actually repealing Roe would be an absolute nightmare for the right. But the trend in Republicans, accelerated greatly under Trump, is towards ideologues too stupid not to cut their own throats, with saner heads dwindling in number and influence, and less able to keep the idiots in check, resulting in the current local minimum of mostly chaotic, ineffectual runs at outlawing abortion.

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He enjoys an insanely high approval rating of something in the neighborhood of 90% among likely Republican voters. I realize that’s still less than 1/3 of all voters, but it doesn’t give him a very big hill to climb, especially when you consider the “if Bernie doesn’t get the Dem nomination, I won’t vote for whoever does” combined with the “I won’t vote for Bernie if he is the Dem nominee” group. One thing Trump has been right about is that, whether the nominee in 2016 was Bernie or Hillary, he (Trump) should not have won. The Democratic strategy in 2016 was shit. If that’s true again in 2020, Trump will be re-elected.

That’s ambitious, and even if Bernie or Warren gets in I’m not sure we’ll get enough ppl to control the Senate like that.

That’s like saying that all the sudden pearl-clutching about global warming is amusing since it had its start at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

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Hmm… better put in a hard limit at some point, other wise we will just see 2 or more added per year until we have like 301 judges… or is this how the world of Judge Dredd starts? It gets so big they become the law…

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Umm… Ok? Not sure I follow… What are you referring to exactly?

It was plain for anyone to see this trend in the GoP for the last decade at least, more if you are old enough to remember the Clinton impeachment; while people like Brooks act like Trump came out of nowhere and “changed” the GoP. He didn’t though, like the previous commenter said, the tea party was saying the same things a decade ago, and before them you had Sarah Palin nominated to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.