I’m more obsessed with the idea of being a republican this long, and only now changing your mind about 45. The list of things about him which are twice as bad alone is stultifying.
A lot of people still have trust in the courts. They hear conservative media saying “these are just left wing accusations,” and don’t think he has done anything wrong.
However, now that he has a conviction, a growing number of people are leaving him because they courts are infallible (to them).
I know it’s wishful thinking to think he will get jail time in July, or that he will get any other conviction before November.
But once you’re a felon, you’re a felon. And he’s a felon 34 times.
It’s so baffling though. Sincerely believing “these are just left wing accusations” and maga/swamp slogans, maps onto “the judge had a conflict of interest, this was a witch hunt” etc., by the exact same route of illusion.
The only way I can make sense of this, is to assume that we’re not really dealing with sincere belief. It’s hard to imagine a rational Republican that stood behind the former president through everything since the birth certificate thing, and are now somehow chastened. Maybe they simply think it’ll be a bad look for their guy to be wearing an ankle bracelet on inauguration day / in the first 100 days in office, and it will compromise their party’s future election chances. A question of ‘ick’ factor, and not some extension of actual values and beliefs, like we might hope. “Convicted felon” is a soft Dean scream, maybe.
I know a registered Republican who has never voted for the Republican candidate in the general election.
She says she agrees with the concept of fiscal conservativism, but every candidate she votes for in the primaries always loses to some intolerable asshat. Except she did like McCain, but she liked Obama even better.
Trump pushed her so far as to donate to the Democrats, but she is still registered Republican.
I know another registered Republican who did vote Republican back in the 80s, but at least says he hasn’t recently, similar reasons. He stays Republican mainly because he doesn’t see any point in bothering to change. Where he lives is die hard red so he knows the Republican primaries are his only chance to influence any candidate as even if he likes a Democrat, they will automatically lose. He votes Democrat in the general, but considers participating in the Republican primaries his best shot at mitigating the bad of the modern Republican party.
The first one is just delusional. The Dems are the fiscal conservatives. Repubs want to sell off the country to billionaires, foreign or domestic is fine.
The second one, registering for the one primary that matters in a shithole district is the only sane option IMO. The primary is the real election for places like that. It would be foolish to throw a vote away to make a statement the party will never listen to.
Yeah… I’ve heard a lot of voters in deep red districts do what the second one does. Granted, never met any myself so this is hearsay, but it does make sense. If your only realistic influence is to bolster the least bad candidate in local/state/federal elections, you’re practicing harm reduction by doing so.
I’m registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries. In general, I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, I may not love them, they may not be my first, second, or even third choice of candidates, but they’re OK enough. They kind of mostly fall on a spectrum from “meh” to “pretty good.”
Republicans, on the other hand, fall on a spectrum from “outright evil fascist psychopaths” to “meh,” and I’d like to try to head off the worst of them before they get to the general election.
With the way Republicans have been going for the last few decades (fielding very few “meh” candidates in the first place and electing even fewer while skewing further and further into crazytown) it’s going to be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election, but I’ll try to pick the least bad one in the primary so hopefully it comes down to a contest of “meh#1” vs “meh#2” (or, dare I dream, “meh1” vs “pretty good”) since roughly half the country is going to vote for whoever has an “R” next to their name, might as well try to leave them with the least offensive R possible.
Ideally I’d like to push the Republicans to occupy pretty much the same space the Democrats do currently and have the Democrats move further left. In pretty much any other halfway functional democracy, our Dems would be considered a conservative party.
There’s a handful of Republican talking points I could kind of get behind if they weren’t using them as covers for their personal greed, racism, religious fundamentalism, etc. but at best the things I would otherwise tend to agree with them on over the Democrats are only paid lip service at best, more often they outright work against them, and very often they take the absolute craziest possible interpretation of one of their supposed ideals and run straight off the deep end with it.
If we want to get a bit weird with it, I’m a Republican because of Trump, not because I like him, but because I want to vote against him at every chance I get. Before this I bounced around between being registered independent and various 3rd parties.
Overall I do tend to consider myself to be somewhat conservative but the Republican party always manages to go off the rails in a direction that is totally against my personal understanding of what conservatism should be. Pretty classic example is gay marriage. When I look at marriage through the ideas of small government, the constitutional separation of church and state, etc. my position is more that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage full-stop. The idea of marriage is between you, your partner(s,) and whatever god or gods you do or don’t believe in, want to say you’re married, go for it, as far as the government should be concerned “marriage” shouldn’t have any more legal standing than being best friends. And as for all of the stuff with taxes, inheritance, etc. that the government does kind of need to concern itself with, that doesn’t need to have anything to do with marriage, if you want to share your benefits of file your taxes jointly with your friend, cousin, spouse, neighbor, barber, or have them designated to be the one who can make medical decisions, or to inherit your belongings after you die, that’s between you and them and the government is just there to make sure the paperwork is in order.
So when the options are the party that is open to more people getting married, and the ones who only want very narrow definitions of marriage, neither really fits my views, the “conservative” narrow definition of marriage is arguably technically closer in some senses to my ideal “the government doesn’t concern itself with marriage” situation, but in spirit the “liberal” system is closer to what I want.
I’m more obsessed with the idea of being a republican this long, and only now changing your mind about 45. The list of things about him which are twice as bad alone is stultifying.
A lot of people still have trust in the courts. They hear conservative media saying “these are just left wing accusations,” and don’t think he has done anything wrong.
However, now that he has a conviction, a growing number of people are leaving him because they courts are infallible (to them).
I know it’s wishful thinking to think he will get jail time in July, or that he will get any other conviction before November.
But once you’re a felon, you’re a felon. And he’s a felon 34 times.
It’s so baffling though. Sincerely believing “these are just left wing accusations” and maga/swamp slogans, maps onto “the judge had a conflict of interest, this was a witch hunt” etc., by the exact same route of illusion.
The only way I can make sense of this, is to assume that we’re not really dealing with sincere belief. It’s hard to imagine a rational Republican that stood behind the former president through everything since the birth certificate thing, and are now somehow chastened. Maybe they simply think it’ll be a bad look for their guy to be wearing an ankle bracelet on inauguration day / in the first 100 days in office, and it will compromise their party’s future election chances. A question of ‘ick’ factor, and not some extension of actual values and beliefs, like we might hope. “Convicted felon” is a soft Dean scream, maybe.
You’re looking for rationality from irrational people.
He lost one. And, there has only been one president in US history to server two nonconsecutive terms. Grover Cleveland (1885–1889 and 1893–1897).
The only other I can think of who ran again after they lost after their first term is Teddy Roosevelt. The rest retired gracefully?
Dean had already lost Iowa by that time, it was pretty certain he wasn’t going to win. The scream was awkward but more coincidental than cause IMO.
But yeah, anything that drops Donald out of the race would be nice.
I know a registered Republican who has never voted for the Republican candidate in the general election.
She says she agrees with the concept of fiscal conservativism, but every candidate she votes for in the primaries always loses to some intolerable asshat. Except she did like McCain, but she liked Obama even better.
Trump pushed her so far as to donate to the Democrats, but she is still registered Republican.
I know another registered Republican who did vote Republican back in the 80s, but at least says he hasn’t recently, similar reasons. He stays Republican mainly because he doesn’t see any point in bothering to change. Where he lives is die hard red so he knows the Republican primaries are his only chance to influence any candidate as even if he likes a Democrat, they will automatically lose. He votes Democrat in the general, but considers participating in the Republican primaries his best shot at mitigating the bad of the modern Republican party.
That’s at least within kicking distance of sanity
The first one is just delusional. The Dems are the fiscal conservatives. Repubs want to sell off the country to billionaires, foreign or domestic is fine.
The second one, registering for the one primary that matters in a shithole district is the only sane option IMO. The primary is the real election for places like that. It would be foolish to throw a vote away to make a statement the party will never listen to.
Yeah… I’ve heard a lot of voters in deep red districts do what the second one does. Granted, never met any myself so this is hearsay, but it does make sense. If your only realistic influence is to bolster the least bad candidate in local/state/federal elections, you’re practicing harm reduction by doing so.
I’m registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries. In general, I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, I may not love them, they may not be my first, second, or even third choice of candidates, but they’re OK enough. They kind of mostly fall on a spectrum from “meh” to “pretty good.”
Republicans, on the other hand, fall on a spectrum from “outright evil fascist psychopaths” to “meh,” and I’d like to try to head off the worst of them before they get to the general election.
With the way Republicans have been going for the last few decades (fielding very few “meh” candidates in the first place and electing even fewer while skewing further and further into crazytown) it’s going to be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election, but I’ll try to pick the least bad one in the primary so hopefully it comes down to a contest of “meh#1” vs “meh#2” (or, dare I dream, “meh1” vs “pretty good”) since roughly half the country is going to vote for whoever has an “R” next to their name, might as well try to leave them with the least offensive R possible.
Ideally I’d like to push the Republicans to occupy pretty much the same space the Democrats do currently and have the Democrats move further left. In pretty much any other halfway functional democracy, our Dems would be considered a conservative party.
There’s a handful of Republican talking points I could kind of get behind if they weren’t using them as covers for their personal greed, racism, religious fundamentalism, etc. but at best the things I would otherwise tend to agree with them on over the Democrats are only paid lip service at best, more often they outright work against them, and very often they take the absolute craziest possible interpretation of one of their supposed ideals and run straight off the deep end with it.
Okay, now I have a type specimen for “actually sane registered Republican”. Cheers
If we want to get a bit weird with it, I’m a Republican because of Trump, not because I like him, but because I want to vote against him at every chance I get. Before this I bounced around between being registered independent and various 3rd parties.
Overall I do tend to consider myself to be somewhat conservative but the Republican party always manages to go off the rails in a direction that is totally against my personal understanding of what conservatism should be. Pretty classic example is gay marriage. When I look at marriage through the ideas of small government, the constitutional separation of church and state, etc. my position is more that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage full-stop. The idea of marriage is between you, your partner(s,) and whatever god or gods you do or don’t believe in, want to say you’re married, go for it, as far as the government should be concerned “marriage” shouldn’t have any more legal standing than being best friends. And as for all of the stuff with taxes, inheritance, etc. that the government does kind of need to concern itself with, that doesn’t need to have anything to do with marriage, if you want to share your benefits of file your taxes jointly with your friend, cousin, spouse, neighbor, barber, or have them designated to be the one who can make medical decisions, or to inherit your belongings after you die, that’s between you and them and the government is just there to make sure the paperwork is in order.
So when the options are the party that is open to more people getting married, and the ones who only want very narrow definitions of marriage, neither really fits my views, the “conservative” narrow definition of marriage is arguably technically closer in some senses to my ideal “the government doesn’t concern itself with marriage” situation, but in spirit the “liberal” system is closer to what I want.
I think we would all gladly trade a million proto-fascists for just one more like you. Thanks for the breakdown, it all checks out.