Saturday, October 08, 2016

Calls by some Republicans for Trump to withdraw --- not consequential yet

Donald Trump's candidacy keeps getting more and more tarnished.  The number of Republican candidates and insiders calling for him to withdraw grew in the last few days after his 2005 comments on women became public.  He is, by most standards of normalcy, a repulsive person.  If most people don't already know that, then they just don't want to know.  The real leaders of the GOP will stay with Trump until the end.  Simply because Mike Pence was able to work his way through a debate with some steadiness, if not answers, does not make him any kind of attractive substitute. Looking at his record and his beliefs, he is far too right wing to be a viable candidate.  Trump is the standard bearer, one whose views on most issues are fluid, and mainly geared to startling attention getting.

What is yet to come is more trash, manufactured or real, on both candidates, but especially by the Bannon led Trump campaign.  Negative campaigning about Clinton and Trump will continue over the next four weeks until voters are overwhelmed.  With Trump, his core voters will stay with him no matter what.  Are they possibly 30% of the American electorate, could it be as high as 40%.  That seems hard to believe, but where we are today would have been unthinkable a year ago.  As a "New Yorker" article this week described some Trump voters, they just want to put a middle finger up to the so-called "elites" in this country.  No information needed.  How they could possibly have made a billionaire sociopath the recipient of their support is "supernatural", to use a word from a book read and referenced here recently.

Not fully understanding that, one could wonder about the existence of closet Trump voters. Remember the closing races of the Republican primary.  There were some where the Trump percentage of the vote was far greater than any poll projected.  At times he crushed the other candidates.  Where did that come from?  Even realizing that those were solely conservatives voting, how could the momentum have become so strong.

There can be a thought that there is some strange brew of nostalgia, resentment, nihilism, and serendipity that leads to Trump voters who have never been public, will never be known.  There could be a certain personal power in that, a chance to do something different, to take a chance behind the curtain.  There is no such phenomenon likely on the Clinton side. She is the establishment, and the well known.

And on and on it goes.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home